Leo Rosten Quotes

Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? … The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

My misery is reaching epidemic proportions.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

Passion and strife bow down the mind.

Nothing is ever cut-and-dried. There's anguish behind everything.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

For 30 years, I lived in pure hell.

Everybody has their pain.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.

Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

This Life is More than Just a read through.

Is enjoyment the goal of life? Were it so, it would be a tremendous mistake to become a man at all. What man can enjoy a meal with more gusto than the dog or the cat ? Go to a menagerie and see the [wild animals] tearing the flesh from the bone. Go back and become a bird! . . . What a mistake then to become a man! Vain have been my years - hundreds of years - of struggle only to become the man of sense-enjoyments.

You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please, With too much spirit to be e'er at ease, With too much quickness ever to be taught, With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.

A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; But were we burdened with light weight of pain, As much or more we should ourselves complain.