This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate." - Agnes Repplier
"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing." -
"Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortune, but its fears." - A.C. Benson, fully Arthur Christopher “A.C.” Benson
"It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody; scarcely less to be of use to everybody." - Baltasar Gracián
"The constant man does not lose his courage in misfortune. A torch may point toward the ground, but its flame will soar upwards." - Bhartrihari NULL
"To have sinned means that you are convinced that, in some mysterious way, what you have done will bring misfortune on you in the future; that it has broken some mysterious law of harmony, and is a link in a chain of past and future discords." - Cesare Pavese
"The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison; they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow." - Dorothy Thompson
"In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We all have the strength enough to endure the misfortune of others." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool." - Epicurus NULL
"They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor." - Eric Hoffer
"What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another, though he were your enemy." - George Washington
"Misfortune does not always come to injure." - Italian Proverbs
"Fortune and misfortune are like the twisted strands of a rope." - Japanese Proverbs
"Fear of misfortune is worse than misfortune." - Jewish Proverbs
"It is stupid to complain about misfortune that is your own fault." - Latin Proverbs
"Life is growth - a challenge of environment. If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then this splendid balance of cosmic forces which we call life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction. Therefore, health is the most precious of all things." - Luther Burbank
"When I was happy I thought I knew man, but it was fated that I should know them only in misfortune." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat." - Napoleon Hill
"That which brings misfortune is not big." - Nigerian Proverbs
"Better be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of misfortune." - Plato NULL
"For ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune." - Plato NULL
"Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune." - Socrates NULL
"A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of the life and the duty of life." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"People don’t ever seem to realize that doing what’s right’s no guarantee against misfortune." - William McFee
"Those who have had no share in the good fortune of the mighty often have a share in their misfortune." - Bertolt Brecht
"Do not laugh at a person in misfortune." - Chilon of Lacedemon NULL
"The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice. " - Harry Browne, fully Harry Edson Browne
"The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence. " - Herodotus NULL
"This great misfortune - to be incapable of solitude." - Jean de La Bruyère
"It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
"But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil--that is moral guilt." - Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers
"The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair... The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. " - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"So now, from this mad passion Which made me take art for an idol and a king I have learnt the burden of error that it bore And what misfortune springs from man's desire... The world's frivolities have robbed me of the time That I was given for reflecting upon God." - Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL
"It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Prudence replaces strength by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas