Pitiful Quotes - Page 4

• I’m not a good faster. My friends have visions of God, I have visions of hamburgers. The only time I watch the Food Channel is when I’m fasting. It’s pitiful. We did a 40 day fast. I bought 29 cookbooks. I don’t cook, but the pictures! I bought a deep-fryer and we don’t eat deep-fried food!

  Bill Johnson

  Vision, Fasting, Watches

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• All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  World, Helping, Comic

  "Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 54), 2006.

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• When a man or a woman holds fast to youth, even if successfully, there is something of the pitiful and the tragic involved. It is the everlasting struggle of the soul to retain the joy of earth, whose fleeing distinguishes it from heaven, and whose retention is not accomplished without an inner knowledge of its futility.

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

  Struggle, Men, Joy

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• There is another serious thing to which many young men become addicted. This is anger. With the least provocation they explode into tantrums of uncontrolled rage. It is pitiful to see someone so weak. But even worse, they are prone to lose all sense of reason and do things which bring later regret.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Regret, Anger, Men

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• Tax time approaches, and Americans are as always paying H & R Block billions to help them save some of their wealth from their ravenous government. Pitiful, in a way: it underlines the grim but
  unacknowledged fact that the government is their enemy and they have to hire protection from it. But don't we enjoy 'self-government'? Well, if we have it, I'd hardly say we enjoy it. True, we aren't being taxed by the monarch of Great Britain, but our American-born rulers claim far more of our wealth than the British monarchs ever did.

  Joseph Sobran

  Block, Government, Self

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• Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way yet - never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man. Ay, there lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellignton or an Uncle Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Hurt, Morning, Uncles

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• Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

  Joe Hill

  Another Chance, Intense, Humans

  Joe Hill (2013). “NOS4R2”, p.222, Hachette UK

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• I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am afraid is pitiful.

  Jane Austen

  Wish, Might, Compliment

  Jane Austen (2016). “Pride and Prejudice (Fourth Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.26, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is a natural virtue incident to our sex to be pitiful of those that are afflicted.

  Elizabeth I

  Sex, Virtue, Natural

  Elizabeth I, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, Mary Beth Rose (2000). “Elizabeth I: Collected Works”, p.223, University of Chicago Press

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• I manage because I have to. Because I've no other way out. Because I've overcome the vanity and pride of being different, I've understood that they are a pitiful defense against being different. Because I've understood that the sun shines differently when something changes. The sun shines differently, but it will continue to shine, and jumping at it with a hoe isn't going to do anything.

  Andrzej Sapkowski

  Pride, Vanity, Jumping

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• How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.

  Christiaan Huygens

  Kings, War, Ambition

  Christiaan Huygens (1722). “The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets”, p.142

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• The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

  Joanne Harris

  Evil, Chocolate, Battle

  Joanne Harris (2000). “Chocolat”, p.26, Penguin

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• There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.

  Paul Washer

  Men, Weak, Man Of God

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• Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon cycle. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackaged and special delivery, molded by hands not our own.

  Camille Paglia

  Drama, Mirrors, Cells

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• Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all...It was pitiful...I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mr. President,' and then I felt ashamed.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Jesus, Sorry, Brain

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• And lips say “God be pitiful,” Who ne'er said “God be praised.”

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  God, Lips, Said

  "Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning".

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• It is a pitiful fortune that is not without enemies.

  Publilius Syrus

  Enemy, Fortune

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• Chose? If you believe that I chose any part of the pitiful shadow of a life you see before you, you are very much mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.

  Joe Abercrombie

  Believe, Shadow, Glory

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• Who can calculate the wounds inflicted, their depth and pain, by harsh and mean words spoken in anger? How pitiful a sight is a man who is strong in many ways but who loses all control of himself when some little thing, usually of no significant consequence, disturbs his equanimity.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Strong, Pain, Anger

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• The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Laughter, Angel

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• The man who has allowed his body to deteriorate cuts a pitiful figure - chest collapsed, stomach protruding.

  Gene Tunney

  Sports, Cutting, Men

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• There is nothing more pitiful than a ready and willing mind but an incapable body.

  Jim Rohn

  Mind, Body, Ready

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• It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Lying, Mean, Vices

  Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey (2008). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.81, Courier Corporation

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• I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It had only one fault - you could not hit anything with it.

  Mark Twain

  Faults, Adults, Teeth

  Mark Twain (1913). “Roughing it”

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• Among these things, one thing seems certain - that nothing certain exists and that there is nothing more pitiful or more presumptuous than man.

  Pliny the Elder

  Men, Certain, Seems

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