
“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
Summer (1954), Return to Tipasa
Context: There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer.”
No. 3. (Zachi writing to Usbek)
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)
4 August
Without Dogma (1891)
Context: If it be a great misfortune to love another man's wife, be she ever so commonplace, it is an infinitely greater misfortune to love a virtuous woman. There is something in my relations to Aniela of which I never heard or read; there is no getting out of it, no end. A solution, whether it be a calamity or the fulfilment of desire, is something, but this is only an enchanted circle. If she remain immovable and I do not cease loving her, it will be an everlasting torment, and nothing else. And I have the despairing conviction that neither of us will give way.
“Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrows good luck.”
Source: Death Kit (1967), p.149
“Such are the vicissitudes of our mortal lot: misfortune is born of prosperity, and good fortune of ill-luck.”
Habet has vices conditio mortalium, ut adversa ex secundis, ex adversis secunda nascantur.
V.
Panegyricus