Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
--
Summer Bird-Cage (1963; New York: William Morrow, 1964) p. 120Margaret Drabble
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The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.
Brian Aldiss
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
Cesare Pavese
Triumphed ...the concert was a rare pleasure.
Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else.
Max Frisch
Drabble, Margaret
Draiman, David
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