Misery

Misery is a feeling of great unhappiness, suffering and/or pain.

Quotes

• The worst of misery
  Is when a nature framed for noblest things
  Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
  And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
  Gasping from out the shallows.
  • George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book III.

• Grim-visaged, comfortless despair.
  • Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742).

• There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), III.

• But O yet more miserable!
  Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave.
  • John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 101.

• And bear about the mockery of woe
  To midnight dances and the public show.
  • Alexander Pope, To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717), line 57.

• Grim and comfortless despair.
  • William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592-1594), V. I. 80.

• Misery makes sport to mock itself.
  • William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act II, scene 1, line 85.

• Meagre were his looks,
  Sharp misery had worn him to the bones.
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act V, scene 1, line 40.

• Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-1612), Act II, scene 2, line 40.

• Quæque ipse misserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui.
  • All of which misery I saw, part of which I was.
  • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), line 5.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 517-18.

• Levis est consolatio ex miseria aliorum.
  • The comfort derived from the misery of others is slight.
  • Cicero, Epistles, VI. 3.

• Horatio looked handsomely miserable, like Hamlet slipping on a piece of orange-peel.
  • Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Horatio Sparkins (omitted in some editions).

• This, this is misery! the last, the worst,
  That man can feel.
  • Homer, The Iliad, Book XXII, line 106. Pope's translation.

• That to live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery.
  • Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, Chapter X. 5.

• Il ne se faut jamais moquer des misérables,
  Car qui peut s'assurer d'être toujours heureux?
  • We ought never to scoff at the wretched, for who can be sure of continued happiness?
  • Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, V. 17.

• The child of misery, baptized in tears!
  • J. Langhorne, The Country Justice, Part I, line 166.

• Frei geht das Unglück durch die ganze Erde!
  • Misery travels free through the whole world!
  • Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein's Tod, IV. 11. 31.

• Ignis aurum probat, misera fortes viros.
  • Fire tries gold, misery tries brave men.
  • Seneca the Younger, De Providentia, V.

• Miserias properant suas
  Audire miseri.
  • The wretched hasten to hear of their own miseries.
  • Seneca the Younger, Hercules Œtæus, 754.