43 quotes about wretched follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorites!

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

Aristotle

I have known sorrow and learned to aid the wretched.

Virgil

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

William Shakespeare

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Leonardo da Vinci

Love, love, love -- all the wretched can't of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

Germaine Greer

It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.

Publilius Syrus

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This dance was the dance of death. [The clowns] danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness.

Angela Carter

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

Anthony Burgess

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

W. Somerset Maugham

Most wretched men are cradled to poetry by wrong: they learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Catullus

Wretched excess is an unfortunate human trait that turns a perfectly good idea such as Christmas into a frenzy of last-minute shopping.

Jon Anderson

Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head. What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.

Augusto Roa Bastos

War: a wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Omar Bradley

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Jack Kerouac

Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.

Titus Maccius Plautus

Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals: that they live in grief while they themselves are without cares; for two jars stand on the floor of Zeus of the gifts which he gives, one of evils and another of blessings.

Homer

Larry Brown in the luckiest man in the league. He puts a wretched product on the floor night after night, watches it unravel...and then reads and hears how his record is everyone's fault but his own.

Brian O'connor

If you are a good property owner, you are at a disadvantage if someone down the road is wretched. There is an economic side as well as moral and legal.

Greg Kirschner

In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts which He also gave us. A man who has not learned to say, ''No'' -who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in spite of every silvery choice that woos him aside-will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.

Alexander Maclaren

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Alec Guinness

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

John Mccain

Never stop because you are afraid - you are never so likely to be wrong. Never keep a line of retreat: it is a wretched invention. The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.

Fridtjof Nansen

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Plato

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

Isaac Disraeli

There is no individual on this Earth more determined than I am to end this country's wretched and mindless bloodshed and destruction.

Chandrika Kumaratunga

They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.

Lester Bangs

He has selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.

Brian Nelson

How sick one gets of being ''good,'' how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

Alice James

KING'S EVIL, n. A malady that was formerly cured by the touch of the sovereign, but has now to be treated by the physicians. Thus 'the most pious Edward' of England used to lay his royal hand upon the ailing subjects and make them whole -- a crowd of wretched souls That stay his cure: their malady convinces The great essay of art; but at his touch, Such sanctity hath H.

Ambrose Bierce

If happy I and wretched he, Perhaps the king would change with me.

Charles Mackay

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals.

Homer

Is demum miser est, cuius nobilitas miserias nobilitat. (Indeed, wretched the man whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.)

Lucius Accius

We cannot let the wretched murderers kill our peace process.

Yossi Beilin

It is here that the masses that Frantz Fanon correctly called the wretched of the earth turn against one another not in rage, but in despair.

Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki

Friendship's the privilege of private men; for wretched greatness knows no blessing so substantial.

Nahum Tate

That's why we've been so measured in our approach. Our interest is in what value we bring to market. We need to make it simple. It has to be like the phone. These connected homes have to work like that, otherwise they become somebody's wretched nightmare.

Paul Carter

We grew up with them. Two summers ago it was like the most wretched thing you could smell on a hot summer's day.

Daniel Harris

We have a wretched motley Crew, in the Fleet; the Marines the Refuse of every Regiment, and the Seamen, few of them, ever wet with salt Water.

Benedict Arnold

The U.S. negotiation practices have been wretched.

Enrique Lacs

Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose beliefs about the gods are dark.

Empedocles

These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.

Elizabeth, The Queen Mother