For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.
Interpretation
True misery lies in losing happiness after having experienced it.
This quote suggests that the deepest form of suffering comes from the understanding of what happiness feels like, especially after experiencing it and then losing it due to unfavorable circumstances. It highlights the contrast between joy and sorrow, emphasizing how past happiness can intensify feelings of misery when one faces adversity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience and overcoming hardship.
And no renown can render you well-known:_x000D_ For if you think that fame can lengthen life _x000D_ By mortal famousness immortalized,_x000D_ The day will come that takes your fame as well,_x000D_ And there a second death for you awaits.
Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.
He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered.
Every man must be content with that glory which he may have at home.
I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.
Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things.
As you recognize that you already own the wholeness you seek, and no one outside you can give you more than you already are, dysfunctional situations will evaporate like bad dreams exposed to the morning sun.
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience.
Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. . . .
Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.
ANYONE may become a revealer of Truth who lives in close contact with the indwelling God.
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