Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so.”
- Date
- c. 524
- English wording
- H. R. James — Translator · from Latin
Meaning of “Nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so.”
Misfortune and judgment are separated: external circumstances can be painful, but the interpretation attached to them strongly influences whether a life is experienced as wholly ruined.
Where does it come from?
The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, Chapter IV, H. R. James translation (Elliot Stock, 1897), printed page 60 in Project Gutenberg #14328. The retained catalog wording ‘Nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so.’ is a frozen clause extract from James’s longer sentence beginning ‘So true is it that...’ in Lady Philosophy’s argument about Fortune, judgment and the instability of external circumstances. It remains late-antique philosophical consolation mediated by translation, not modern cognitive-science or clinical mental-health evidence.
