Unhappy Work Quotes

1. "....Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…"
Author: Alice Munro

2. "She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is."
Author: Ann Marie MacDonald

3. "Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound -- after all, it validates my professional status -- therefore the problem must be with you."
Author: Charles Eisenstein

4. "It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You thought you were unhappy because this or that was off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being in unsure."
Author: Christian Wiman

5. "I wish to lead a life free from care, and I see that I shall be unhappy if I cannot always work at my art."
Author: Clara Schumann

6. "In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:"'From far, from eve and morning,And yon twelve-winded sky,The stuff of life to knit meBlew hither: here am I'George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow."
Author: E.M. Forster

7. "I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is."And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.The old trouble; things won't fit."What things?"The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't."Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?"In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said: "'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I."George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow."
Author: E.M. Forster

8. "When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?"
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

9. "He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy."
Author: George Eliot

10. "The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them."
Author: J. Cornell Michel

11. "I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

12. "I understand why creative people like dark, but American audiences don't like dark. They like story. They do not respond to nervous breakdowns and unhappy episodes that lead nowhere. They like their characters to be a part of the action. They like strength, not weakness, a chance to work out any dilemma."
Author: Leslie Moonves

13. "You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing."
Author: Mikhail Baryshnikov

14. "Dying is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is Something else. So many of the people who came to visit me are unhappy.. Why?...For one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it. They're more unhappy than me-even in my current condition. I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving caring souls. How many people can say that?"
Author: Mitch Albom

15. "I know I was very unstable and unhappy all through my life. I lost my mother and then my father. Losing Dad was like losing the bearings of my life. My sisters took it badly, but I took it worse. Throughout my lean phases, Dad was like a solid rock, supporting me, whether it was work, or my jail term."
Author: Sanjay Dutt

16. "My aunt made me an offer I had to refuse," said Jared. He looked forbidding.Kami knew that expression, and remembered the feeling that used to go with it: he was unhappy. "So you ran away from home," she said. "To become a tavern wench.""I'm not a tavern wench," said Jared. "That's not a job." His voice was slightly less stern than before, as if he was taken aback."It sounds like you're a tavern wench," Kami told him. "Fleeing persecution, you have to take up a menial occupation to keep your body and soul together. But at least its honest work, though as you labor, many predatory customers make advances and offer indignities.""One can only hope," Jared responded."
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan

17. "Steve got that pinched, unhappy look on his face that Tony never knew how to deal with. Most of the time he either threw something more broken than himself in Steve's path and ran, or just offered to buy the Dodgers again. Neither of the gambits worked well, but Tony was out of ideas."
Author: Scifigrl47

18. "Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother."
Author: Susan Douglas

19. "When I Asked God for StrengthHe Gave Me Difficult Situations to FaceWhen I Asked God for Brain & BrawnHe Gave Me Puzzles in Life to SolveWhen I Asked God for HappinessHe Showed Me Some Unhappy PeopleWhen I Asked God for WealthHe Showed Me How to Work HardWhen I Asked God for FavorsHe Showed Me Opportunities to Work HardWhen I Asked God for PeaceHe Showed Me How to Help OthersGod Gave Me Nothing I WantedHe Gave Me Everything I Needed."
Author: Swami Vivekananda

20. "We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think."
Author: Tina Weymouth

21. "Sometimes you could be in an unhappy relationship; you are very much in love with someone, but it's making you unhappy and you think things can change and you can work it out."
Author: Vanessa Paradis

22. "We were quite naturally unhappy; feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied. But that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us. All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead; unfortunately it did not quicken our feeling for the living; but hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom."
Author: Virginia Woolf

23. "Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual."
Author: W. P. Kinsella

24. "Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace."
Author: Winifred Gallagher

Unhappy Work Quotes Pictures