Painful Quotes - Page 5

• The record-breaking extreme weather events causing chaos across the globe should be a wake-up call. The transition to a low-carbon economy will be much more painful if we wait until there is a climate crisis before recognising that more than half of the world's fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground.

  Christiana Figueres

  Business, Weather, Records Breaking

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• The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life.

  Edward Gibbon

  Opportunity, History, Giving

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, with notes by Milman and Guizot. Ed. by W. Smith”, p.363

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• Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Sweet, Pain, Communication

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• There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. Now in respect of all these the good man is likely to go right and the bad to go wrong, but especially in respect of pleasure; for pleasure is common to man with the lower animals, and also it is a concomitant of all the objects of choice, since both the noble and the expedient appear to us pleasant.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Men, Opposites

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• In the human species at all events there is a great diversity of pleasures. The same things delight some men and annoy others, and things painful and disgusting to some are pleasant and attractive to others.

  Aristotle

  Men, Diversity, Events

  Aristotle (1934). “The Nicomachean ethics”

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• But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

  Pablo Picasso

  Artist, Vanity, Greed

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• Humor enables us to deal with and overcome many of the most painful and difficult situations in our lives.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Difficult Situations, Overcoming

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• The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

  Abraham Maslow

  Loss, Discovery, Identity

  Abraham H. Maslow (2013). “Toward a Psychology of Being”, p.26, Simon and Schuster

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• Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.

  Plutarch

  Memories, May, Wells

  Plutarch (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Plutarch (Illustrated)”, p.2910, Delphi Classics

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• The downsides of globalization are indeed painful, ... But taking the bigger pills against its ills is superior to living inside a sterile bubble.

  Joseph Estrada

  Pills, Globalization, Bigger

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• At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.

  Huston Smith

  Religious, Joy, Promise

  Huston Smith, Phil Cousineau (2003). “The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life”, p.24, Univ of California Press

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• When I get into a bad mood, I do sports and then everythings OK. And then I go and make decisions, however painful they may be.

  Dmitry Medvedev

  Sports, Decision, Bad Mood

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• If I want to realize totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity.

  Georges Bataille

  Humanity, Want, Realizing

  Georges Bataille (2004). “On Nietzsche”, p.26, A&C Black

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• It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Soul

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• Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary -- and are entirely replaceable-- must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception, whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and that its destruction is very painful.

  Charles le Gai Eaton

  Spiritual, Real, Rain

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• The light is too painful for someone who wants to remain in darkness.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Light, Darkness, Want

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.164, New World Library

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• Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you're sitting in your home and you're just trying to cover what you don't want people to know. It's painful. And then you want more just so that you don't let anybody see you cry. Or anybody to see we're not happy.

  Whitney Houston

  Home, People, Trying

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

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• You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

  Trent Reznor

  Song, Wall, Writing

  "Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails". Interview with Kyle Ryan, www.avclub.com. September 16, 2009.

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• The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new truths, to grow, to overcome pressures--these are the painful portion of the independent thinker. Almost his sole reward is the satisfaction of integrity.

  Howard Mumford Jones

  Integrity, Struggle, Independent

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• If I hadn't gone through some of the painful experiences in my life, I would not be me.

  Beyonce Knowles

  Painful Experiences, Gone, Ifs

  "8 Celebrities On Dealing With Their ‘Awkward Phase’" By Amanda Scherker, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 16, 2015.

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• And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

  Adam Hochschild

  Silence, Trying, Events

  Adam Hochschild (2011). “King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa”, p.356, Pan Macmillan

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• I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.

  Nicole Krauss

  Vitality, Would Be, Alive

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• I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.

  Denise Mina

  Shoes, Laughing, Way

  "Probing The Psyche Of Glasgow's Mean Streets". "Morning Edition" with Vicki Barker, www.npr.org. August 11, 2008.

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• Because we men have been physically stronger and more arrogant, weve influenced much of the cool stuff of the world, like basing the definition of courage on what we do on battlefields rather than on the patience or endurance or tolerance necessary for a sometimes painful daily grind that includes small children.

  Clyde Edgerton

  Children, Men, Tolerance

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• Everyone wants to learn the same thing from painful situations: how to avoid repeating them.

  Gary Zukav

  Want, Painful Situations, Situation

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