One of the great ironies of having cancer is that if it’s caught relatively early, you really don’t feel sick until after you start receiving treatment. So there you are in your pre-diagnosis ignorance, probably the closest you’ve ever been to death … and you feel just fine.

On the other hand, you could have an everyday, run-of-the-mill flu—coughing, fever, runny nose, sore throat—and feel absolutely miserable … like I have for the last week.

Though I’ve always prided myself on smiling my way through life’s big battles, when it comes to the flu, I can be as whiny and irritable as any hacking, feverish, snot-nosed six-year-old. So it’s best to leave me alone with some hot tea and a nice selection of DVDs. In my case, misery does not love company. But we all know misery is a choice, even though the flu isn’t. Here are some thoughts to keep in mind when you’re mad at the world:

“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.”

—Martha Washington, First Lady

“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery by doubling our joys and dividing our grief.”

—Joseph Addison, essayist, poet, statesman

“Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.”

—Bertrand Russell, philosopher and mathematician

“We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.”

—Thomas H. Huxley, biologist and educator

“The mind is a matter over every kind of fortune; itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery.”

—Seneca, Roman statesman and philosopher

“It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.”

—William Cobbett, journalist

“It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”

—George Eliot, novelist

“He who doesn’t have the spirit of his time, has all its misery.”

—Voltaire, historian and writer