Still Happy

Rav Shach ztz"l had a very difficult life. He was beyond poor and barely had enough to eat and drink. During the first World War he was separated from his parents and lived in a beis medrash and had only one shirt to wear [he would wash it and hang it until it dried while he was shirtless - in the freeeeeezing Russian winters]. When he was a young man his daughter died. He said that if he would write down all of the pain he experienced in his life it would be more than all he wrote in his huge multi-volume magnum opus "Avi Ezri".

But he insisted that he was the happiest man around because he learned Torah.