To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.
Never find your delight in another's misfortune.
Love is an attachment to another self. Humor is a form of self-detachment -- a way of looking at one's existence, one's misfortune, or one's discomfort. If you really love, if you really know how to laugh, the result is the same: you forget yourself.
Men are slower to recognize blessings than misfortunes.
Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary [monetary] matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.