Unpleasant Things Quotes & Sayings

All objects whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, are mere appearances to the mind just like things experienced in a dream — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

I don't shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that. — Peter Straub

Life is an ever-flowing process and somewhere on the path some unpleasant things will pop up - it might leave a scar, but then life is flowing, and like running water, when it stops it grows stale. Go bravely on, my friend, because each experience teaches us a lesson. Keep blasting because life is such that sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not. — Bruce Lee

Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to do, every time. If it sometimes pains them to make a choice - if the choice turns out to look like a 'noble sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is in no wise nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness ... the unpleasant necessity of having to decide between two things both of which you would like to do when you can't do both. The ordinary bloke suffers that discomfort every day, every time he makes a choice between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up when he's tired or spending the day in his warm bed and losing his job. No matter which he does he always chooses what seems to hurt least or pleasures most. The average chump spends his life harried by these small decisions. — Robert A. Heinlein

Do you know what separates adults from children? Self-discipline. We don't want to go to work, we don't want to do our chores, and we don't want to make unpleasant decisions, but we do all those things because we're aware of the consequences which will follow if we don't. — Ilona Andrews

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way - by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. — W.E.B. Du Bois

There is no man," [the painter Elstir] began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. . . We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."
Marcel Proust
Within a Budding Grove (translated by C. Scott Moncrieff) — Marcel Proust

you often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as to not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each other's jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes - maybe they mean it, often they do not. When — Robert Greene

The tranquility or agitation of our temper does not depend so much on the big things which happen to us in life, as on the pleasant or unpleasant arrangements of the little things which happen daily. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

If you were going to give a gold medal tot he least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn't give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway. Carmelita Spats was rude, she was violent, and she was filthy, and it is really a shame that I must describe her to you, because there are enough ghastly and distressing things in this story without even mentioning such an unpleasant person. — Lemony Snicket

If the enemy is to be coerced, you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not be merely transient - at least not in appearance. Otherwise, the enemy would not give in, but would wait for things to improve. — Carl Von Clausewitz

When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes ... But when the job is a labor of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker
strange as it may seem
in the guise of enjoyment. Moralists, looking on at this, will always judge that the former kind of sacrifice is more admirable than the later, because the moralist, whatever he may pretend, has far more respect for pride than for love ... I do not mean that there is no nobility in doing unpleasant things from a sense of duty, but only that there is more nobility in doing them gladly out of sheer love of the job. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It's not easy to kill; it's not supposed to be. If it is, then there's something wrong with you. But sometimes good people have to do unpleasant things just so we can come home at night to our kids. — Skip Coryell

Only to often on meeting scientific men, even those of genuine distiction, one finds that they are dull fellows and very stupid. They know one thing to excess; they know nothing else. Pursuing facts too doggedly and unimaginatively, they miss all the charming things that are not facts ... Too much learning, like too little learning, is an unpleasant and dangerous thing. — H.L. Mencken

Dogs understand your moods and your thoughts, and if you are thinking unpleasant things about your dog, he will pick it up and be downhearted. — Barbara Woodhouse

Sometimes when you are with an enlightened teacher, you will feel both pleasant and unpleasant things magnified. That happens when you meditate with someone who goes into very strong states of altered consciousness. — Frederick Lenz

Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you
these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones. — Sergei Lukyanenko

The greatest miracle is to be alive. We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for! How many people kill themselves because of rage or despair? In that moment, they do not see the vast happiness that is available. Mindfulness puts an end to such a limited perspective. The Buddha faced his own suffering directly and discovered the path of liberation. Don't run away from things that are unpleasant in order to embrace things that are pleasant. Put your hands in the earth. Face the difficulties and grow new happiness. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The only real, true, permanent way to destroy your mind control is to work through the memories. It's unfortunate because it's unpleasant. It hurts to work through your memories; they have pain. Memories are not just made up of ideas, and thoughts and storylines, they are also made up of physical pain and emotional pain and sadness and distress and despair and all of those things are part of memories. — Alison Miller

Gautama found that there was a way to exit this vicious circle. If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understand things as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind. — Yuval Noah Harari

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

psychology - that life is an array of constantly changing sensations, some of them pleasant, some of them unpleasant, and some of them neutral. Our unconscious response is to grasp after the pleasant and to try to resist the unpleasant, so that we are always at war with the basic transience of our experience. We cannot really come to rest with things as they arise and depart. — Jack Kornfield

The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem. It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again. — E.H. Gombrich

There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. — Joseph Brodsky

What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum. — Vincent Van Gogh

At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul - where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions. — William Styron

In this large and fierce world of ours, there are many, many unpleasant places to be. You can be in a river swarming with angry electric eels, or in a supermarket filled with vicious long-distance runners. You can be in a hotel that has no room service, or you can be lost in a forest that is slowly filling up with water. You can be in a hornet's nest or in an abandoned airport or in the office of a pediatric surgeon, but one of the most unpleasant things that can happen is to find yourself in a quandary. Which is where the Baudelaire orphans found themselves that night. Finding yourself in a quandary means that everything seems confusing and dangerous and you don't know what in the world to do about it, and it is one of the worst unpleasantries you can encounter. — Lemony Snicket

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good. — Oscar Wilde

But to be the best, to reach the pinnacle, requires self-denial, sacrifice, discipline, humility, and preparation. You have to hurt yourself, scold yourself, analyze yourself, recognize your weaknesses at the same time try to eliminate them. And those weaknesses you can't eliminate must be minimized. You must create a plan that highlights your strengths and hides your flaws. You have to do more than simply want to win. Everybody wants to win, for goodness' sake. But precious few of us are willing to prepare to win. You must do things that are difficult, unpleasant, painful. — James Patterson

Many people put up with things that are unpleasant but tolerable, rather than changing them; their situation needs to become unbearable before they take action — Brendan Brazier

As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece. — Margaret Eleanor Leigh

I said, "I don't think I can give you that kind of emotion." And he [Hitchcock] sat there and said, "Ingrid, fake it!" Well, that was the best advice I've had in my whole life, because in all the years to come there were many directors who gave me what I thought were quite impossible instructions and many difficult things to do, and just when I was on the verge of starting to argue with them, I heard his voice coming to me through the air saying, "Ingrid, fake it!" It saved a lot of unpleasant situations and waste of time. — Ingrid Bergman

We have all examined our past critically and are very much aware of even the unpleasant things. Now, we need to look at what we plan to do with the lessons we have learned from the past. — Heinz Fischer

Always, it seemed, men would overlook unpleasant things for the sake of those that went well. The statues' eyes for the melodious sounds of the fountain. The deaths of their daughters for the bounty of their trade.
There was great beauty in this qasr, but there was also great ugliness and fear. I would not be like those men who turned their eyes from one to see the other. I would remember what those things cost. — E.K. Johnston

Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness ... is an emergency exit. — Alan Moore

Welcome the view that the things which you think are wrecking your life - like your thoughts and emotions, or illness and death - are actually gifts for your transformation... Whether life presents us with a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound, a pleasant smell or an unpleasant smell, a pleasant thought or an unpleasant thought, it's sheer delight because instead of identifying with the experience, we simply touch it and let it go. — Dilgo Khyentse

Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty? At least there was no doubt that I was alone in regarding the duty as a heavy burden. — Yukio Mishima

He suggested several unpleasant, unsanitary things I could do to myself at my earliest convenience. — Patrick Rothfuss

Modern novels. So difficult - all about such unpleasant people, doing such very odd things and not, apparently, even enjoying them. "Sex" as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple's young days; but there had been plenty of it - not talked about so much - but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her. Though usually labelled Sin, she couldn't help feeling that that was preferable to what it seemed to be nowadays - a kind of Duty. — Agatha Christie

The truth is that God is to be found in all things - even and most especially in the painful, tragic and unpleasant things. — David Brenner

Do pleasant things yourself, but unpleasant things through others. — Baltasar Gracian

My relationship with brick-and-mortar shopping is, in general, unpleasant. I can't remember a time in my life when I could go to a physical store and find a variety of things in my size that excited me and fit my personal style. As a plus-size shopper at a typical mall, you're limited to at most five stores out of maybe 50 clothing retailers. That leaves us with very few options and, for people on a tight budget, pretty much no chance of comparison shopping. You take what you can get. — Lindy West

Unpleasant things are like the rain: sometimes they visit us, but there is no point in worrying about them while the sun shines. — Andrus Kivirahk

I can tolerate amazing amounts of stress and ridicule. By God's grace, it still doesn't require any effort to shake off unpleasant, irritating things. God has helped me to conquer my terrible temper, once and forever. During those hours in the bathroom I also came to realize that if people could make me angry they could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life? Over the years I've chuckled at people who deliberately did things they thought would make me angry. I'm no better than anyone else, but I laugh inside at how foolish people can be, trying to make me angry. — Ben Carson

As I'm sure you know, whenever you are examine someone else's belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware. You might examine some letters you sister received recently, for instance, and learn that she was planning on running away with an archduke. You might examine the suitcase of another passenger on a train you are taking, and learn that he had been secretly photographing you for the past six months. I recently looked in the refrigerator of one of my enemies and learned she was a vegetarian, or at least pretending to be one, or had a vegetarian visiting her for a few days. And as the Baudelaire orphans examined some of the objets in Olaf's trunk, they learned a great deal of unpleasant things. — Lemony Snicket

Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific? — Lemony Snicket

Isn't that the way of the world? We want the sweet things, but we need the unpleasant ones. — Patrick Rothfuss

Whenever I was called a gourmet, I suspected I was being accused of something at least slightly unpleasant. But that was before I heard the term "foodie." I am still not sure that a gourmet is a good thing to be, but it must be better than a foodie. — Mark Kurlansky

Mundanes who involve themselves in things they know nothing about are likely to meet unpleasant endings. — Cassandra Clare

When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant - so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else's strange, almost hateful body. — Gaito Gazdanov

With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. If you see an attractive person, you will find that self-restraint is the ability you have against your desire. If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them. — Epictetus

Procedures. Like "incident," this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things. — Lauren DeStefano

Then in the darkness and purity of the meadows he began to feel that the world had many secrets, that they were shattering even to glimpse or sense, and that they were not necessarily unpleasant. In certain states of light he could see, he could begin to sense, things most miraculous indeed. Although it seemed self-serving, he concluded nonetheless, after a lifetime of adhering to the diffuse principles of a science he did not know, that there was life after death, that the dead rose into a mischievous world of pure light, that something most mysterious lay beyond the the enfolding darkness, something wonderful. — Mark Helprin

Obviously it won't do to love somebody and enjoy that person's company but then, when things between you get difficult, to abandon the person. No, it is clear that as pleasant as love is, it must also be unpleasant, because people are sometimes unpleasant or go through unpleasant things, and if we abandon them at those times and run away from them because they or their situation has become unpleasant, we would have to conclude that there wasn't much to our loving in the first place. — Norman Fischer

It's a mistake to try to avoid the unpleasant things in life ... But I'm beginning to consider it ... — Charles M. Schulz

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that
he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible. — Marcel Proust

People knew that Murdoch's media estate in the UK was too powerful and it was doing very unpleasant things. — Meredith Whitney

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them. — H.L. Mencken

Gautama's insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. — Yuval Noah Harari

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I don't usually think about things that are filthy, or unpleasant. I think about the good things, because I know they exist. And I want to believe in those good things. — Kamijo Yuuji

Nothing is in reality either pleasant or unpleasant by nature but all things become so through habit — Epictetus

Of course I'm troubled by huge consumer debt levels - we've pushed consumer credit very hard in the US. Eventually, if it keeps growing, it will stop growing. As Herb Stein said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." When it stops, it may be unpleasant. Other than Herb Stein's quote, I have no comment. But the things that trouble you are troubling me. — Charlie Munger

poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker — Lewis Carroll

Principles are things which one calls upon to avoid something unpleasant. — Multatuli

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again. — Anne Lamott

It is always disagreeable to take stands. It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes. We cannot even be of real service in the coming campaign and speak as a united body of women unless we have the respect of men and show that when we express a wish, we are willing to stand by it. — Eleanor Roosevelt

There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more. — Lucy Maud Montgomery

IF YOUR OVERALL SITUATION IS UNSATISFACTORY or unpleasant, separate out this instant and surrender to what is. That's the flashlight cutting through the fog. Your state of consciousness then ceases to be controlled by external conditions. You are no longer coming from reaction and resistance. Then look at the specifics of the situation. Ask yourself, "Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it, or remove myself from it?" If so, take appropriate action. Focus not on the hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. This doesn't mean you should not do any planning. It may well be that planning is the one thing you can do now. But make sure you don't keep running "mental movies" that continually project yourself into the future, and so lose the Now. Any action you take may not bear fruit immediately. Until it does - do not resist what is. — Eckhart Tolle

Do you know how a pearl comes to be?"
"Oysters make them, from a bit of sand."
"Aiyah. From a bit of sand." He rolled the pearl between his fingers. "All pearls begin as something unpleasant that the oysters cannot expel from themselves, even though they may want to. So they embrace these things that will not leave them, shaping them and smoothing away the sharp edges, until over time, they make of these unwanted things great treasures. — C.L. Wilson

Such an error, one finds, to do things for the best. They usually seem to be such unpleasant things. — Gladys Mitchell

Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant venomous things that are said but, on the whole, we would rather lump them than do away with them. — Winston Churchill

He always had some experiment or another on the go, usually involving boiling liquids and unpleasant smells. Always something bubbling in the cauldron or cooking in the small stone oven. One wall was hidden behind rows of metal cages, set one upon the other; containing animals and birds and reptiles and a few other things not so easily identified. Because you never knew when you'd need a subject to try something out on. And of course there were shelves and shelves of glass jars, holding herbs and insect parts, mandrake root and other disturbing things. Some of the things in the jars were still moving. Because alchemy's like that. — Simon R. Green

Author and screenwriter Neil Gaiman, in a 2012 commencement address at the University of the Arts, said that excellence in business can be boiled down to three simple things: 1. Be Efficient: Turn in work on time. 2. Be Effective: Do great work. 3. Be Congenial: Be a pleasure to work with.1 Gaiman added that even mastering two of the three will take you far. If you do great work and are a pleasure to work with, most people will forgive you for missing a deadline. If you're always on time and a pleasure to work with, most people put up with less than perfect work. If you turn in great work on time, most people will put up with you being unpleasant. — Brad Lomenick

We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life. — C.S. Lewis

the things we generally value most in life bring with them a whole range of feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant. For example, in an intimate long-term relationship, although you will experience wonderful feelings such as love and joy, you will also inevitably experience disappointment and frustration. There is no such thing as the perfect partner and sooner or later conflicts of interest will happen. — Russ Harris

All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets, and a woman forgives but never forgets. That's how it is. That's why women aren't allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant. — Tove Jansson

Develop the habit of doing unpleasant things quickly and without hesitation. If you are going to jump in the cold water, jump in the cold water. If you need to get up, get your ass out of bed. Do the dishes that need doing. Finish the hard jobs at work while everyone else is coming up with excuses to get out of them. — Rory Miller

Things are drawing towards the end now, unless I am mistaken. There is an unpleasant time just in front of you; but keep your heart up! — J.R.R. Tolkien

... one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there ... . So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many ... . — Alexander McCall Smith

I realised from quite early on in my childhood that I saw things differently from other people,' he wrote. 'But, more than not, it's helped me in my life. Psychopathy(if that's what you call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren't up to the job of protecting us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects. — Kevin Dutton

Overproduction of gas is not a pleasant thing - it bloats the gut, making us feel uncomfortable - but passing a bit of wind is not only necessary, it is healthy, too. We are living creatures with a miniature world living inside us, working away and producing many things. Just as we release exhaust fumes into the Earth's atmosphere, so must our microbes, too. It may make a funny sound and it may smell a bit, but not necessarily. Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, for instance, do not produce any unpleasant odors. People who never need to break wind are starving their gut bacteria and are not good hosts for their microbe guests. Pure prebiotics can be bought at — Giulia Enders

So who's perfect? ... Washington had false teeth. Franklin was nearsighted. Mussolini had syphilis. Unpleasant things have been said about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde. Tchaikovsky had his problems, too. And Lincoln was constipated. — John O'Hara

I didn't mean that I'm a nonpareil now. But I'm different, yes. I've found out that I can do quite difficult things if I keep trying very hard, and at least I've discovered that if I don't keep myself occupied I'm unhappy and unpleasant. — Madeleine Brent

Do it now! can affect every phase of your life. It can help you do the things you should do but don't feel like doing. It can keep you from procrastinating when an unpleasant duty faces you. But it can also help you do those things that you want to do. It helps you seize those precious moments that, if lost, may never be retrieved. — Napoleon Hill

Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history — Adam Gopnik

I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. — Banana Yoshimoto

One need not put up with unpleasant things. There are remedies after all. -- A Book of Dreams — Christina Pantoja Hidalgo

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them. — Chuck Palahniuk

That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals
their affection from her. — George Bernard Shaw

There is a bit [in Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?] where I talk about 'keeping the heart awake to love and beauty.' That's very difficult in our world, even when things are going well. It's not a world with much room for love and beauty. The daily news is [filled with] everything that goes wrong in our world, and everything horrible and unpleasant. I think that saturates your mind with negativity. I really think we need something to counteract that. I don't think it's Pollyanna or sentimental to focus on the ways we support one another on the micro level.
(from "It is the Imagination that Counts") — Jeanette Winterson

Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. — Bertrand Russell

Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things. — Barney Frank

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved. — Patrick White

The truth only comes if you are willing to face some really unpleasant things about yourself. — Bryant McGill

In a way, I'd rather go into an interview and be disliked, and have unpleasant things written about me, than to have a wonderful, glowing article written that is in no way a reflection of who I am. — Romola Garai

I've a habit of placing a happy-face or a frowny-face on my calendar, depending on what kind of day I've had. Often I slap a droopy circle in the box, discouraged by the things I failed to accomplish and the unpleasant encounters endured. But then, invariably, a wise muse stops to ask me these three questions:
Did your children let you hug them today? Yes.
Did you do a kind deed for someone? Anyone? Yes.
Did God forsake you today? No.
Then, my dear, despite your challenges, it was a good day after all.
Standing corrected, I twist that frowny-face upside down and smile. — Richelle E. Goodrich

There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death. — Hippocrates