On my way home last night I caught Eric Weiner, author of
The Geography of Bliss on NPR. Anyway, Weiner claimed that all languages had many
more words for negative emotional states than positive ones
that this was some sort Sapir-Whorf thing). I'm not sure that this is really true—there
are actually quite a few words for positive states— but of course
Tolstoy said it first:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
And of course along the same lines, here's Richard Dawkins:
True, there are many different ways of being alive - at least ten million different ways if we count the number of distinct species alive today - but, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead!
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.