Unhappiness

“ But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere. ”

“ You can't tell why you feel this; you only know that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness. You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just the same. ”

“ Such suppositions are inconceivable. The happiness of futurity lies in the ecstasy of the soul in feeling freed from the trammels of matter, and unhappiness is the doom of a soul which was full of remorse at the moment it left the body. ”

“ I am like a fallen creature who cannot forget what he has lost, and who has not the force to recover it. That absolute lack of illusion, and hence of enthusiasm, is the cause of my unhappiness in a thousand ways. ”

“ Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness. ”

“ There is unhappiness so great that the very fear of it is an alloy to happiness. I had then lost my father, and sister, and brother,—have since lost another sister and my mother;—but I have never as yet lost a wife or a child. ”

“ I have felt my heart ache more than once in the contemplation of your unhappiness, for though you have never spoken of it, I knew without the episode of last night—I have known almost from the first—how profoundly you have suffered and will continue to suffer. Ah, my dear friend, it is only those who have suffered in that way who can truly sympathize with you. To have found a completer isolation in the search for companionship—that is the tragedy of many souls. ”

“ What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they take away? ”

“ As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you? ”

“ And to this end one is, first of all, helped by considering what unhappiness implies, and by living consistently above the sway of momentary feeling. For unhappiness does us good in no less than three ways,—ways which are cumulative in their effect. ”

“ But if we stick to our colors and refuse to add to whatever depression masters us by brooding upon it and giving it right of way; if we remember the conditions of happiness stated above, and thrust resolutely from us all thoughts and words incompatible with living according to them, the unhappiness will be gone before we know it. ”

“ But to refuse to answer you would confirm some impression in you even now much too strong. Any ‘trouble’—if you mean any unhappiness—that one can sit comfortably talking about is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. ”

“ At length I turned to study the matter more deeply, and came to the conclusion that man's unhappiness is one of the innate errors of the mind, and that the refutation of this idea, through the demonstration of the happiness of life, is one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century. ”

“ As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow. ”

“ She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease—of suffering as opposed to doing. To “do”—it hardly mattered what—would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy. ”

“ So when we are unhappy we feel the unhappiness of others more; ”

“ Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. ”

“ It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. ”

“ For the latter, in decreeing for us an existence full of unhappiness, has left us the means of escaping from it when we please. Indeed, unhappiness cannot be called extreme, when we have in our hands the power to shorten it at will. ”

“ I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched. ”

“ Besides, unhappiness being in itself the natural object of compassion, the unhappiness which people bring upon themselves, though it be wilfully, excites in us some pity for them; and this of course lessens our displeasure against them. ”

“ They may have been even gladder than they now seem, because the incidents which embody happiness had then the novelty which such incidents lose from their recurrence; while the facts of unhappiness, no matter how often they repeat themselves, seem throughout life an unprecedented experience and impress themselves as vividly the last time as the first. ”

“ At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. ”

“ And thus our expectation of unhappiness is happy, but of happiness unhappy. And therefore, as we here suffer present ills, and hereafter fear ills that are imminent, it were truer to say that we shall always be miserable, than that we can some time be happy. ”

“ It is not, my friend, that I wish for ultimate unhappiness, but that I am anxious to suffer present sorrow, in order to secure future felicity: an improvement, you will own, on the system of other girls, who, to enjoy the passing moment, run the risk of being wretched for ever after. ”

“ I refer to the loss of youthful animation and a waning of the vital forces. These difficulties have caused untold unhappiness—failures, shattered romances, mysterious divorces. True happiness does not depend on wealth, position or fame. ”

“ Unhappiness is, secondly, a cleansing process, waking us to greater seriousness and greater receptivity to truth. Thirdly, unhappiness recalls us to self-examination and fortifies us by disclosing what is our own [121] strength, and what is God’s strength. By no other experience does one attain that spiritual courage which is far removed from self-confidence and very near to humility. ”

“ Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations, or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a poet,—“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.” The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not happy which has no unhappiness. ”

“ A perverse temper and fretful disposition will, wherever they prevail render any state of life whatsoever unhappy.—Cicero.
What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.—Goethe. ”

“ I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. ”

“ Pg 252 Unhappiness is sometimes only a bad habit. Weeping eyes are quick to tears, and grief is a guest that stays on slight urging.
Ill-fortune and plenty of it is the very stimulus some natures need to bring out the best that is in them. There is a dead weight about them, and bad luck is the only lever that will lift it. ”

“ Shall I ever feel joy? Do all suffer like me; or am I framed so as to be particularly susceptible of misery? It is true, I have experienced the most rapturous emotions—short-lived delight!—ethereal beam, which only serves to shew my present misery—yet lie still, my throbbing heart, or burst; and my brain—why dost thou whirl about at such a terrifying rate? why do thoughts so rapidly rush into my mind, and yet when they disappear leave such deep traces? I could almost wish for the madman's happiness, and in a strong imagination lose a sense of woe. ”

“ What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals. Who was better framed than this highly-gifted youth to love and be beloved, and to reap unalienable joy from an unblamed passion? If his heart had slept but a few years longer, he might have been saved ”

“ But, indeed, nothing is so touching as the people's pleasure, however it may express itself. So much sadness lies concealed behind this joy; all the labour of dull, dreary days, all the struggle to make life bearable for themselves, so much external want, and many an internal grief, which affects them doubly painfully in that want. What, in comparison, is the delusive happiness of a joyous moment? ”

“ These are the charming agonies of love,
Whose misery delights. But thro' the heart
Should jealousy its venom once diffuse,
'Tis then delightful misery no more,
But agony unmix'd, incessant gall,1075
Corroding every thought, and blasting all
Love's paradise. Ye fairy prospects, then,
Ye beds of roses, and ye bowers of joy,
Farewel! ”

“ She closed her eyes, yielding for one breathless instant to the passion of his embrace. Her dream and her longing melted swiftly into realisation, and she told herself that the agony of joy was sharper than that of grief. This was like nothing that she had imagined, and she felt an impulse to fly back into the uncertainty that she had left—to gain time in which to prepare for the happiness which she told herself was hers. ”

“ Oh agony insupportable!—Oh misery scarcely to be endured! Where will the devoted heart meet with fidelity? Where will the loving one, who feels and thinks and acts with no other desire than for the happiness of the loved, meet with a like regard? ”

“ She observed his backwardness, and commanded him to attend her. "You are not," said she, "to confound impatience with resentment, or to suppose, that I charge you with negligence, because I repine at your unsuccessfulness. I do not much wonder at your absence; I know that the unhappy are never pleasing, and that all naturally avoid the contagion of misery. To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy; for who would cloud, by adventitious grief, the short gleams of gaiety which life allows us? ”

“ To go without joy here, is to be without grief also: and to be without grief here, is to go without pleasure too. And in truth these are the things which produce real joy, since the others have the name only of joy, but they altogether consist of pain. What misery the arrogant man endures! ”

“ They could not, indeed, be otherwise than brief, for the agony of joy is like that of pain, and exhausted nature would sink under its continued excess. Precious moments, indeed! to none can they be known more than once in life; to very many, they can never be known at all. ”

“ With him you can never be supremely happy or supremely miserable,—which seems to me a lot so wretched that my heart, though heavy with the anguish of its own sorrow, is wrung more with pity than with pain. ”

“ Do disappointment and despair gnaw at your love of life so that nothing seems worth while,—some bottled "essence of sunshine" will give new, fresh value to existence. Are you a victim of strange, uncaused fluctuations of mood so that periodically you descend to a bottomless pit of melancholy, —well, then, why suffer, when over the bar a man will furnish you a release from agony? ”

“ But how chilled is the happiness that comes dashed with the misfortune of another! What a terrible deal it detracts from our joy to know that every throb of pleasure to ourselves has cost a pang of misery elsewhere! ”

“ I am anxious that you should not imagine me unhappy even in my most melancholy moods, for I hold all indulgence of sadness that has the slightest tincture of discontent to be a grave delinquency. I think there can be few who more truly feel than I that this is a world of bliss and beauty—that is, that bliss and beauty are the end, the tendency of creation; and evils are the shadows that are the only conditions of light in the picture, and I live in much, much enjoyment. ”

“ But of her far keener suffering, for the loss she had sustained, little shew was made; for real misery delights not in reproaches and complaints. It is like charity and love—silent, long suffering and mild. ”