Pastoral Resources

Prosperity is the measure or touchstone of virtue, for it is less difficult to bear misfortune than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Myself acquainted with misfortune, I learn to help the unfortunate.

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.

In the same proportion Russia is the misfortune of Europe and the Israelites.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Unless some misfortune has made it impossible, everyone can have good posture.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.

Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.