Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises.

The darkest hour of our struggle had become the hour of victory. Disappointment, sorrow, and despair are born at midnight, but morning follows. I

God] seeks us in dark places and suffers with us in our tragic prodigality.

Dark yesterday can be transformed into bright tomorrow.

optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.

we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.

If you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.

the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.