Wretchedness
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 4 anchored passages
misery · wretched · wretchedness · shaqāʼ · the kinds of wretchedness · أشقياء · أصناف الشقاء · الشقاء
in the texts
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The contrary of happiness, deliberately left unexpounded on the principle that opposites are known together, and invoked in the reductio against a single happiness and in the reversal of satiated pleasure.
For when the man of delight has had his fill of his delight and is then required to increase what he had supposed to be happiness, that becomes a great wretchedness and a heavy affliction to him, and he too calls happiness wretchedness.
It belongs to wretchedness in the present life that a man should strive with earnestness and exertion after a certificate (shahādah) that will bring him to an immediate post, or to a rank that raises his standing among his associates, joining night to day and spending himself utterly in it, and yet not strive after the testimony by which he passes the obstacles of the abiding abode and in virtue o …
And each of us complains of life and its misery and what he endures;
Tusculan Disputations
The condition of being miserable, logically examined as to whether it can apply to the non-existent dead.
For if you called only those wretched who must die, you would except no one of the living — since all must die — yet there would be an end of misery in death.
— Come, I now grant that those who are dead are not wretched, since you have wrung from me the admission that those who do not exist at all cannot even be wretched.
For when you say he is wretched, you say that one who does not exist exists.