What a miserable thing life is: you're in clover; only the clover isn't good enough.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the dissatisfaction with life's pleasures, even when they seem abundant.
Bertolt Brecht's quote suggests that despite having seemingly good circumstances ('in clover'), there is often a sense of dissatisfaction or longing for something better. It speaks to the human condition where even in times of plenty, we may still find ourselves unhappy or unfulfilled because our expectations and desires are not met. This quote encourages reflection on the nature of contentment and the tendency to overlook the good in our lives in pursuit of an ideal that remains just out of reach.
In practice
In a discussion about life dissatisfaction during a philosophy class.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
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