And then he felt the misery of his life.

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.

I am absolutely sickened with and demoralized by this life, I've been leading for so long. When you get to my age, there is nothing more to look forward to. Unhappy we are, unhappy we'll stay. Each day brings its tribulations and each day difficulties arise.. .So I'm giving up the struggle once and for all, abandoning all hope of success.. .I hear my friends are preparing another exhibition this year [the Impressionists, in Paris, 1880] but I'm ruling out the possibility of participating in it, as I just don't have anything worth showing.

He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.

He felt misery, loneliness, a terrible need for love.

He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.

He knew that loneliness was poisoning him, so that he grew viler as well as more unhappy.

Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.

He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.

Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

Though old himself, he disliked old men.

He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...

"I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived."