Echoes

There is not love of life without despair about life.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, And the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning.

It is good for us that we sometimes have sorrows and adversities, for they often make a man lay to heart that he is only a stranger and sojourner, and may not put his trust in any worldly thing. It is good that we sometimes endure contradictions, and are hardly and unfairly judged, when we do and mean what is good. For these things help us to be humble, and shield us from vain-glory.

Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

There is no man in the world free from trouble or anguish, though he were King or Pope.

Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Through endurance we conquer.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.