“She realised that she hadn’t tired to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 215)
Misery Quotes
“Bliss is the only criterion of whether you are arriving closer to truth or not. The closer you come to truth, the more blissful you become; the farther away from truth, the more miserable. Misery is nothing but distance from truth; bliss is closeness, intimacy.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 176)
“Misery has no outer cause; the cause is inner. You go on throwing the responsibility outside yourself, but that is just an excuse. Yes, misery is triggered from the outside, but the outside does not create it. When somebody insults you, the insult comes from the outside, but the anger is inside you. The anger is not caused by the insult, it is not the effect of the insult, If there were no anger energy in you, the insult would have remained impotent. It would have simply passed, and you would not have been disturbed by it.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 175)
“Our misery is that we have forgotten the language of love. The reason we have forgotten the language of love is that we have become too identified with reason. Nothing is wrong with reason, but it has a tendency to monopolize. It clings to the whole of your being. Then feeling suffers—feeling is starved—and by and by you forget about feeling completely. So it goes on shrinking and shrinking, and that dead feeling becomes a dead weight; that feeling becomes a dead heart. Then one can go on pulling oneself along somehow—it will always be ‘somehow.’ There will be no charm, no magic, because without love there is no magic in life. And there will be no poetry either; life will be all prose, flat. Yes, it will have grammar, but it will not have a song in it. It will have a structure, but it will not have substance.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 102)
“Whenever you see that something is creating misery, drop it then and there—don’t hold it for a single moment. This is courage: courage to live, courage to risk, courage to adventure. And only those who are courageous are one day rewarded by the whole, by light, by love, bliss, and benediction.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 42)
“All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj, via Sunbeams (Page 138)
“It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest—by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things.”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 250)
“Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable I had to work in a most intense fashion, and that it was absurd. I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong. ‘The trick is in what one emphasizes,’ he said. ‘We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.'”
Carlos Casaneda, Journey To Ixtlan, via Sunbeams (Page 60) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“You are here to aid in the great expansion of consciousness. You are not here to cry about the miseries of the human condition but to change them when you do not find them to your liking through the joy, strength, and vitality that is within you; to create the spirit as faithfully and beautifully as you can in flesh.”
Jane Roberts, The Nature Of Personal Reality, via Sunbeams (Page 52)
Russell Brand Quote on Self-Image and How What We Justify Is What We Recommit To
“In justifying our misery we recommit to it.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 101)
Beyond the Quote (Day 407)
There’s an expression in the performance world that nobody can outperform his/her own self-image. Meaning, how a person thinks they’ll end up performing is how they’ll most likely end up performing. Self-image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Read More »Russell Brand Quote on Self-Image and How What We Justify Is What We Recommit ToOsho Quote on Bliss and How Effort is Required for Higher States of Mind
“To me, to be blissful is the greatest courage. To be miserable is very cowardly. In fact to be miserable, nothing is needed. Any coward can do it, any fool can do it. Everybody is capable of being miserable, but to be blissful, great courage is needed—it is an uphill task.”
Osho, Courage (Page 60)
Beyond the Quote (319/365)
In our entire history we have never been more comfortable, more connected, and more safe than we are today and yet, happiness seems to be as far away as it ever has been. Why is that? Shouldn’t the technological advances, ease of access, and revolutions in connection increase our levels of happiness exponentially—or at least place it significantly closer? Intuitively speaking, it feels like they should, right? What gives?
Read More »Osho Quote on Bliss and How Effort is Required for Higher States of Mind“You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is one word: accept.”
Naval Ravikant, Medium
“Is it true that money cannot buy happiness? Yes, it is true. Money cannot buy happiness—but it makes misery more comfortable. That’s why I am not against money—I am all for it. It is better to be comfortably miserable than uncomfortably miserable. I have lived in poverty and I have lived in richness, and believe me: Richness is far better than poverty. I want you to be rich in every possible way—material, psychological, spiritual. I want you to live the richest life that has ever been lived on the earth.” ~ Osho, Fame, Fortune, and Ambition
“The misery that oppresses you lies not in your profession but in yourself! What man in the world would not find his situation intolerable if he chooses a craft, an art, indeed any form of life, without experiencing an inner calling? Whoever is born with a talent, or to a talent, must surely find in that the most pleasing of occupations! Everything on this earth has its difficult sides! Only some inner drive—pleasure, love—can help us overcome obstacles, prepare a path, and lift us out of the narrow circle in which others tread out their anguished, miserable existences!” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, via Mastery
“You have to create the atmosphere of happiness around you. If everybody is miserable, how can you be happy? You will be affected. You are not a stone, you are a very delicate being, very sensitive. If everybody is miserable around you, their misery will affect you. Misery is as infectious as any disease. Blissfulness is also infectious as any disease. If you help others to be happy, in the end you help yourself to be happy.” ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships
“In my years of traveling the world, I’ve heard hundreds of tear-filled stories. I’ve hugged complete strangers as they’ve sobbed in my arms. I always whisper the same thing to them: ‘Look for the gift in your pain.’ If you look for that gift, believe me, you will find it. If you don’t look, it’s all too easy to become enslaved by your misery.” ~ Sean Stephenson, Get Off Your “But”
“Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, ‘Misery likes company,’ and people who are suffering in hell don’t want to be all alone.” ~ Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements