34 Misfortune Quotes

It's been a rough day. I got up this morning, put on a shirt and a button fell off. I picked up my briefcase, and the handle came off. I'm afraid to go to the bathroom...

Should a person on returning from the city discover his house to be in flames, let him examine well the change which he has received from the chair-carrier before it is too late; for evil never travels alone.

I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary. It wasn't that I was jinxed, I just seemed to bring ill fortune to anybody I was close to.

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. [p.193]

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

But death, fires, and burglary, make all men equals...

'Hey, there's something falling down in there,' said the chief clerk. Gregor tried to suppose to himself that what had happened to him might some day also happen to the chief clerk. There was no denying that anything was possible.

Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.

There is, properly speaking, no Misfortune in the world. Happiness and Misfortune stand in continual balance. Every Misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force.

Dr Slade went in to lunch in a state of desperate boredom tempered with resentment; it had shaken him a little to see how bad luck could be prolonged to such unlikely lengths.

The chapter of knowledge is a very short, but the chapter of accidents is a very long one.

O Miss Bailey! Unfortunate Miss Bailey!

now and then there is a person born who is so unlucky that he runs into accidents which started out to happen to somebody else

Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.

In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.

Verdadeiramente ha so uma desgraca: e nao nascer.

'I puked in Greece, what have you done?'

If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune; and if anybody pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity.

Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.

The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

Hairbreadth missings of happiness look like the insults of Fortune.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime.'

Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.