John Green Quotes

I think that hurting gives us a way to measure being happy. How can you know one without knowing the other.

You can only recognize your happiness against the background of suffering.

We must feel the pain before the pleasure, only then can we tell them apart.

Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.

If we never felt sorrow, we'd never recognize bliss.

The flip side of happiness is suffering.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.

I do believe that if you haven't learnt about sadness, you cannot appreciate happiness.

How delicious is pleasure after torment!

In our lives, we have good things and bad things, happiness and pain.

In the scriptures, we are told you can't really understand happiness unless you understand sadness. You don't know pleasure if you don't know pain. It's part of life. So can you learn something from somebody who has gone from success to success to success? I don't think so.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

I have been blessed with a good, fun, and wonderful life, but I've also seen a whole lot of pain.

I found more joy in sorrow than you could find in joy.

Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.

I'm not a big proponent of happiness. I think it's highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There's so much value in that. You can't have one without the other.

Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.