“Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.”
Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) Italian writer
Tanto è miser l'uom quant' ei si riputa.
Ecloga Octava; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Mind".
“Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.”
Source: Pensées and Other Writings
Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History
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Blaise Pascal144
French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Chri… 1623–1662Related quotes
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
Letter to Harrison Blake (20 May 1860); published in Familiar Letters (1865)
Context: Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him … he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is!
“A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer
15
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Context: Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.
“What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.”
Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged
Source: Atlas Shrugged
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher
Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik" (1984), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0253004381, p. 7)
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.
“A man never knows what a fool he is until he hears himself imitated by one.”
Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) English actor and theatre manager
Quoted by Max Beerbohm in Hebert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art Collected by Max Beerbohm http://books.google.com/books?id=wM08AAAAIAAJ&q="A+man+never+knows+what+a+fool+he+is+until+he+hears+himself+imitated+by+one"&pg=PA312#v=onepage (1920).