My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.
Allen Toussaint

My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years.
Paul Merton

My tears will keep no channel, know no laws to guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause, run with disturbance till they swallow me as a description of his misery.
John Cleveland

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.
John Ruskin

Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.
Duke of Wellington

Not to discontinue our allegiance, in this case, would be to join with the sovereign in promoting the slavery and misery of that society, the welfare of which, we ourselves, as well as our sovereign, are indispensably obliged to secure and promote, as far as in us lies.
Jonathan Mayhew

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
Desiderius Erasmus

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Cesare Pavese

Our principles are the springs of our actions. Our actions, the springs of our happiness or misery. Too much care, therefore, cannot be taken in forming our principles.
Red Skelton

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
Edward Gibbon

Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.
Joseph Butler

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
Mikhail Bakunin

People in misery is what most important in art.
Zhang Yimou

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Graham Greene

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.
Anthony Trollope

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.
Beatrice Potter Webb

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold

So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.
Emily Mortimer