Only supreme in misery!

The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else.

There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true.

In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

Maybe your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank. Maybe your misery is your attempt to prove the world's injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and live. Maybe your willingness to suffer in failure is inexhaustible, given what you use that suffering to prove. Maybe it's your revenge on Being. How exactly should I befriend you when you're in such a place? How could I?

Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.

-->* They can expect nothing but their labour for their pains.