33 Quotes About Unhappiness

In the journey of life, we often encounter moments of joy and times of trial, with unhappiness being a natural part of the human experience. While it may seem daunting, understanding and reflecting on unhappiness can lead to profound personal growth and resilience. To shed light on this complex emotion, we've gathered a thoughtful selection of quotes that delve into the nuances of unhappiness. These insights from renowned thinkers, writers, and philosophers offer comfort and clarity, reminding us that in acknowledging and embracing our struggles, we pave the way toward healing and new beginnings.

1. “When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.” - Nick Hornby

2. “Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” - Ayn Rand

3. “Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.” - Virginia Woolf

4. “He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.” - Graham Greene

5. “But 'tis a sad thing that all one's happiness is only that the world does not know you are miserable.” - Dorothy Osborne

6. “I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.” - Cormac McCarthy

7. “I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special? Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.” - Lev Grossman

8. “What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.” - John Green

9. “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.” - Alice Munro

10. “You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".” - Lauren Oliver

11. “Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.” - Fulton J. Sheen

12. “After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.” - Lisi Harrison

13. “...unhappiness was something you got used to or something that passed.” - Dalene Matthee

14. “He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.” - John Fowles

15. “Nesreća nesrećnih ljudi i jeste u tome što za njih stvari koje su inače zabranjene postanu, za trenutak dostižne i lake, ili bar tako izgledaju, a kada se jednom trajno usele u njihove želje, one se pokažu opet kao ono što jesu: nedostupne i zabranjene, sa svim posledicama koje to ima po one koji za njima ipak posegnu.” - Ivo Andrić

16. “I'm not unhappy," he said. "Only people with no purpose are unhappy. I've got a purpose.” - Cassandra Clare

17. “The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.” - C. JoyBell C.

18. “Unhappiness slowly creeps up on you, like a shape-shifting monster waiting in the darkness of your hallway, his bulging eyes watching your every move. The breath on his slimy tongue makes the hairs on your neck stand up.” - Kate Rockland

19. “John,” she said, “does it make every one—unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?”He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said.“And, John, are you glad you studied?”“Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, “I wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms about his neck, “I think I am, a little, John.” - W.E.B. DuBois

20. “We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.” - Charles Bukowski

21. “Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don't smell it, you don't taste it, it's formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating.” - Bella Pollen

22. “You know, happiness isn't a permanent state. Neither is unhappiness. There's a flow, back and forth” - Carole Glickfeld

23. “And since he was seeing more and more people who were unhappy for no apparent reason, he was becoming more and more tired, and even a little happy himself. He began to wonder whether he was in the right profession, whether he was happy with his life, whether he wasn't missing out on something. And then he felt very afraid because he wondered whether these unhappy people were contagious.” - Francois Lelord

24. “What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon.History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow.It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.'He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.''What?'He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said.'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.'Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him.'That information is classified, I'm afraid.'1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.'Is it open to the public?' I said.'Not generally, no.'I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.'Are you happy here?' I said at last.He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said.'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.'He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.” - Donna Tartt

25. “All of us are in the manufacturing industry - manufacturing either our own happiness or unhappiness.” - Ogwo David Emenike

26. “For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.” - Herman Melville

27. “There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.” - P.D. James

28. “Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.” - Osamu Dazai

29. “What I know of love is satisfaction,Contentment, pleasure, and vivaciousness.But all my envisions were all fictions.'Cause there's no such thing as pure happiness.” - Eli Emmanuel N. Libuit

30. “The only thing that feels worse than being stuck in a situation that makes you unhappy is realizing that you are not ready or willing to change whatever it is.” - Ashly Lorenzana

31. “My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

32. “...Emma still had a joyless look, and, habitually, at the corners of her mouth, she had that tightness that crumples the faces of old maids and bankrupts.” - Gustave Flaubert

33. “To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.” - Thomas Hardy