The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids.
There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.
You have not yet suffered enough! For you suffer only from yourselves, you have not yet suffered from man.
Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbours.
People have to go through what they have to go through. I think in some cases you sort of bring things on yourself and that's what you want it to be than that's the way it is.
Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.
Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.
No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.
I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?
He that wounds himself, even though he has not the right, is not culpable; but if others have wounded him, they are culpable.
It makes sense that no one else can cause you pain. That's your job.
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Sometimes the greatest wounds are the ones we try the hardest not to inflict.
