The Count of Monte Cristo

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"Alas," said Monte Cristo, "it is the infirmity of our nature always to
believe ourselves much more unhappy than those who groan by our sides!"

"What can be more wretched than the man who has lost all he loved and
desired in the world?"

"Listen, Morrel, and pay attention to what I am about to tell you. I
knew a man who like you had fixed all his hopes of happiness upon a
woman. He was young, he had an old father whom he loved, a betrothed
bride whom he adored. He was about to marry her, when one of the
caprices of fate,--which would almost make us doubt the goodness of
providence, if that providence did not afterwards reveal itself by
proving that all is but a means of conducting to an end,--one of those
caprices deprived him of his mistress, of the future of which he had
dreamed (for in his blindness he forgot he could only read the present),
and cast him into a dungeon."