#ness

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness. ↗

— Robertson Davies

#pessimism #unhappiness #life

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone. ↗

— Louis L'Amour

#mindfulness #present #life

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves. ↗

— Ethel Percy Andrus

#besides #direct #drives #happiness #inner

.. she believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by. ↗

— Gyula Krúdy

#life #life

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#metaphor #life

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure. ↗

— Sebastian Faulks

#depression #panic #life

Loneliness seems to have become the great American disease. ↗

— John Corry

#become #disease #great #great american #loneliness

I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#sadness #life

The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#life

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#longfellow #poetry #sadness #life