Being So Unhappy Quotes & Sayings

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being
and a normal one, at that? — Elizabeth Gilbert

I learned in the last few years that it's really unhappy and really unsustainable to try and base your well being on something as arbitrary as record sale and critical acclaim and the interests of the public. All of those things are so fickle. So my approach now to music is I want to make records that I love, and I hope that other people love them, then that's OK. — Moby

Are people so unhappy when they love?"
"Yes, Christine, when they love and are not sure of being loved. — Gaston Leroux

Being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth - that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the — Leo Tolstoy

I'm sure it's wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see you've been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

You have told yourself that you have found your knight in shining armor, my brother Rick. Isn't that the truth? You met him and he fit the bill, so you have told yourself a wonderful story and, stubborn brat that you are, you have been clinging to it ever since. After all, what could be more appropriate than for Francesca Cahill, reformer extraordinaire, to fall in love with my reform-minded Republican brother? But wait! Being as this is a love story, there has to be an unhappy middle and the perfect hero isn't quite so perfect after all. For he is married. Oh, wait! It isn't that bad, after all, for as it turns out he is a man of virtue, and he really loves you, while he despises his wife! And did I forget to mention that she is vile and evil? So the story can limp along, and true love might survive after all! Does this sound at all familiar, Francesca?"
"I almost hate you," she whispered. And she felt a tear sliding down her cheek. — Brenda Joyce

He could not bear to see pain, or sorrow, or misery of any kind; and, if it came under his notice, he was never easy till he had relieved it, for the time, at any rate. But he was afraid of being made uncomfortable; so, if he possibly could, he would avoid seeing any one who was ill or unhappy; and he did not thank any one for telling him about them. — Elizabeth Gaskell

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. — Sylvia Plath

Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius. — Thomas Love Peacock

I thought women enjoyed affairs. I thought they got sparks of pleasure at the buzz of their phone, thought they ran around with a glow, their world suddenly on fire with new love. I thought they were women with terrible husbands and unhappy lives, an affair the first step in an eventual ending of their marriage. I thought that they were horrible, selfish women. I never thought that I would be one of them. I never thought that I'd be so weak. It turned out being the perfect wife was only easy when there was no temptation, no mistake haunting and overshadowing your marriage. — Alessandra Torre

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it, and she would die. — Vladimir Nabokov

It's not going to be that hard to be in Heaven, or the Heavenly City or the Millennium, but you're going to have something to do and something to keep you busy, and you'd be unhappy if you didn't. Wouldn't it be ridiculous after being so busy here if you wound up in Heaven with nothing to do but sit on a cloud playing a harp for a thousand years?-Much less all eternity! I think you'd really get bored. — David Berg

Children who have the freedom to explore a variety of things and discard them when they no longer make sense do not feel like failures when they choose to drop something. Instead they see it as another experience from which to learn a bit about something and a lot about themselves. This is a much better attitude than the child who is forced to stay, being told to suck it up and stick it out, who begins to feel powerless and resentful. As an adult this child is more likely, for example, to stay in an unhappy career so as not to look or feel like a failure, though he will definitely feel trapped. — Pam Laricchia

When Sam's having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it's like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there's a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float. This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so — Anne Lamott

I worked with someone who told me they'd never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy. — Ariana Grande

My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. — Nick Hornby

The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy. — Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness, she would explain, was when a person felt good, light, creative, content, loving and loved, and free. An unhappy person felt as if there were barriers crushing her desires and the talents she had inside. A happy woman was one who could exercise all kinds of rights, from the right to move to the right to create, compete, and challenge, and at the same time could be loved for doing so. Part of happiness was to be loved by a man who enjoyed your strength and was proud of your talents. Happiness was also about the right to privacy, the right to retreat from the company of others and plunge into contemplative solitude. Or sit by yourself doing nothing for a whole day, and not give excuses or feel guilty about it either. Happiness was to be with loved ones, and yet still feel that you existed as a separate being, that ou were not just there to make them happy. Happiness was when there was a balance between what you gave and what you took. — Fatema Mernissi

You don't belong here if you are unhappy," she continued. "Your mother makes you hateful, and you make her hateful. It doesn't matter if she's your mother. It's an accident of birth. It doesn't have to mean so much." ... "You belong where you have the best chance of being happy ... — Laura Moriarty

Being born as an Indigo, the most difficult mission is to be strong enough to retain your true "self" while living in human stereotype society. Having to pretend, to act "the same as others," can only make you so deeply unhappy and hurt - feeling as though your "wings" have been cut off. — Sahara Sanders

So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive. — Barry Schwartz

Maybe you like being unhappy so much, you wouldn't do anything to change it. — Kurt Vonnegut

Chris Cornell: I think Pearl Jam was the band that set the perfect example. Their big video, "Jeremy," propelled them into becoming TV stars and one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, so they stopped making videos, which was proof positive that that wasn't where they wanted to be. And that made a lot of sense to me.

Nirvana doing an Unplugged at the same time that they did it and making a video for "Heart-Shaped Box," that didn't make a lot of sense to me, because it seemed clear to me that Kurt was pretty disillusioned by the situation that he was being put in. It felt like, If he's so unhappy, he shouldn't be doing this kind of stuff. — Mark Yarm

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus. — Marcel Proust

I might really have gone round the bend. I mean people who get visions and see a gigantic light descend on them from the sky can't be all there but if so I feel mighty happy. If one is happy and cracked it's much better than being unhappy and sane. — Bessie Head

you, and have no little girls' clothes to mend." "Yes," said Maggie. "It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a bad habit of being unhappy." "But I shall put you under a discipline of pleasure that will make you lose that bad habit," said Lucy, sticking the black butterfly absently in her own collar, while her eyes met Maggie's affectionately. "You dear, tiny thing," said Maggie, in one of her bursts of loving admiration, "you enjoy other people's happiness so much, I believe you would do without any of your own. I wish I were like you." "I've never been tried in that way," said Lucy. "I've always — George Eliot

Do you remember the books from our childhood? Those were you could decide yourself what the character should do next?
I always loved those books, getting to decide what will happen, being responsible for it.
But did you ever decided for something, flipped to the page, read it and then thought: "No, I don't want this to happen!" And then you went back to where it all went wrong and just took a different path.
It was always so easy with those books, if you didn't like what was happening you just chose a different path, like pressing rewind till it makes sense again and then hit play.
It's not like I am always unhappy with my words, actions or decisions in a situation, but I can't stop wondering how everything would be right now if I had said something different at some point.
I guess I will never know but it makes me question my words, decisions and actions right now, because what if I chose wrong and then I don't get what I wish for because of one word or one step? — Lena Goetz

There were the studies, beginning in 2007, which found that the suicide rate among women who had received breast implants were twice the suicide rate of the general population. So there's an alarming relationship between being deeply unhappy, being unhappy with your body, and having liquid-filled plastic bags surgically inserted into your body that kind of contradicts the whole "boost your self-esteem" line about the real reasons to have cosmetic surgery. — Susan J. Douglas

In adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair - if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. Anything that excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically. — Christopher Hitchens

What's the benefit of dragging up sufferings that are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then? There is good in doing this. We must not flinch when we look at the past. We must strive to learn from our mistakes. So we must learn to bear and endure. The sorrow will one day prove to be for your good. — Jeff Wheeler

I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you — Jean Rhys

Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom? ... It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. "Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind." These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza. (Proust writes) A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us. — Alain De Botton

But the reasons why Hector was unhappy were quite complex. He didn't really want to think about it, perhaps because those reasons weren't so easy to accept. It even made him feel a little afraid. He knew this fear too well, it was what stopped his patients from being able to really think about their problems, and it was his job to help them overcome this fear and understand what was happening to them. — Francois Lelord

I've explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You'd feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. — Scott Adams

The Joy of Victimhood There are some clear rules about happiness. One is that you cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one. There are a number of reasons: People who regard themselves as victims do not see themselves as in control of their lives. Whatever happens in their lives happens to them, not by them. People who primarily regard themselves as victims see the world as unfair to them in particular. Just as the young student who always sees himself as "being picked on" is an unhappy soul, so is the person who carries that attitude into adulthood. People who regard themselves primarily as victims are angry people, and an angry disposition renders happiness impossible. People who have chosen to regard themselves as victims cannot allow themselves to enjoy life, because enjoying life would challenge their perception of themselves as victims. — Dennis Prager

It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoil: by anything so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably desire - on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your neighbour's soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability being that he hasn't got one. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling. — Grace Bridges

-no matter what we do, we'll never succeed in attaining the 'perfect' body or the 'perfect' face. This isn't just because perfection is an unattainable goal; it's because capitalism relies on people being constantly unhappy so it can keep selling us the promise that consumerism will make our lives better. — Clementine Ford

I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you. — Bertrand Russell

Unhappy: People look around and think, why are there so many people that are unhappy? We have progressed so far, yet people are still unhappy. Why isn't this world the wonderful place it could be? Changing the world doesn't change us.

It does not matter how much we progress materially; it will not change anything. Only learning and seeing the truth will change us, and thus change everything.

The truth transforms a mortal man into an immortal spiritual being.
It does this because the truth just shows you what you truly are, and that changes everything. The truth does the same thing for the way we see the world and for the same reason. It shows you life clearly; it shows you true life for the first time. — Michael Smith

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them ... — Donna Tartt

The other thing is that I'm a pretty moody guy, but no one really wants to see a normal-looking guy complain about things or talk about being unhappy. That's hard. Most people are like, 'Well, you have all your hair and you're tall, so why are you unhappy?' That can be limiting. — Gary Gulman

There are times when we can be so annoyed at each other, Elliot, and we yell at each other. But when push comes to shove, we let it go, and we're back to our normal selves, because being unhappy is part of being happy. When two people get married, they say two people become one. No, I don't agree. Two people should remain two people but walk side by side. I've not become Elliot. Elliot has not become Hunny. We remain Hunny and Elliot. And to me, that's important. — Dave Isay

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul. — Soren Kierkegaard

I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating. — Emma Forrest

Every comedian is furious. Age makes me angry. I'm unhappy at not being able to open packages anymore. I'm angry that libraries have gone. I hate children on planes. I'm very shallow, so they tend to be little things. To be honest, I think I was probably angry the day I was born, you know, about diapers or something. — Joan Rivers

She's not happy in her marriage. Not unhappy exactly, but not happy. He doesn't want kids, so that's nothing to look forward to. Her life is chock-full of quiet tedium. Suddenly, she falls in love. And sure, there's the excitement of being with her lover, but there's also the excitement of not being with him. Of waiting and going on with her ordinary life. And all that dullness now becomes part of the drama. Because that's her cover story. All the dreary anguish and monotony that fills ninety-eight percent of her life is electrified with meaning, since it now serves as the perfect camouflage to hide the two percent of passion. And, yes, she felt guilt and, yes, she felt shame. But those are powerful emotions too, and were all part of the glorious transformation of a featureless bland life into an adventure. — Phoef Sutton

So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. — Victor Hugo

Never compromise and sell yourself short. I've been in the music business, a girl group ... I've been through so many different things in my career, and when you compromise and try to let go of who you are, you wind up being unhappy, and what is success without happiness. You have to have both, and that is important to me. — Naturi Naughton

Hermes had said, the giant was about ten feet tall, which made him small compared to some other giants I'd seen. But Cacus made up for it by being bright and gaudy. He had curly orange hair, pale skin, and orange freckles. His face was smeared upward with a permanent pout, upturned nose, wide eyes, and arched eyebrows, so he appeared both startled and unhappy. He wore a red velour housecoat with matching slippers. The housecoat was open, revealing silky Valentine-patterned boxer shorts and luxurious chest hair of a red/pink/orange color not found in nature. Annabeth made a small gagging sound. It's the ginger giant. — Rick Riordan

Loneliness is treated like the ultimate taboo; at the same time, it's regarded as a trifle. That to be a thirty-seven-year-old who has spent a decade without someone to hold her hand at the doctor's office is akin to being a thirteen-year-old sighing over a boy band.

Again, I know - 'single' is not a synonym for 'lonely.' I know there are many lonely married people, as well as lots of single people who have a rich network of deep social connections - friends, sisters, daughters, nephews, etc. - whose lives are as far from Heller's unhappy narrator as can be.

But for many of us, living alone in a society that is so rigorously constructed around couples and nuclear families is hard on the soul. — Sara Eckel

I just realized one day that I was so unhappy. And not only that, but I didn't even like the person that I was. I didn't even know who I was. And so 'Shatter Me' is about first discovering what was under the shell and then learning to love that person that was under it. And then not being afraid to break free. — Lindsey Stirling

I think it must be awful not to work. My only point in being idle is to rest so that I can work more ... I'm only unhappy when I'm not working. — Betty Field

With the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus. — Marcel Proust

Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? — Donna Tartt