Precarious Quotes - Page 6

• As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Believe, Thinking, Humanity

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• My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Past, Order, Would Be

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.404, Psychology Press

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• The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Art, Quality, Rewards

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• The reticent volcano keeps
  His never slumbering plan -
  Confided are his projects pink
  To no precarious man.

  Emily Dickinson

  Men, Volcanoes, Projects

  Emily Dickinson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated)”, p.2030, Delphi Classics

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• Overcome your guilt. Care, but not too much. Take responsibility, but don't blame yourself. Protect, save, help- but know when to give up. They're precarious ledges to walk. How do I do it?

  Brandon Sanderson

  Giving Up, Responsibility, Guilt

  Brandon Sanderson (2010). “The Way of Kings”, p.875, Macmillan

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• Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

  Susan Neiman

  Self, Order, Justice

  Susan Neiman (2009). “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists”, p.430, Princeton University Press

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• I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan. I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Men, Errors, Perfect

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2003). “The Federalist Papers”, p.523, Penguin

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• With no chance to take off, I had to play my role, searching for the rendezvous spot, which gave me the excuse to look for an escape opportunity. Maybe a hole in the wall too small for Tori’s mom to follow me through or a precarious stack of boxes I could topple onto her head or an abandoned hammer I could brain her with. I’d never “brained” anyone in my life, but with Tori’s mom, I was willing to try.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Mom, Wall, Opportunity

  Kelley Armstrong (2009). “The Awakening”, p.56, Penguin Group

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• Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

  Alain de Botton

  Falling In Love, Elude Us, Self

  Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.14, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Live Life, Safe, Helping

  Jeanette Winterson (2011). “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”, p.63, Random House

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• My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Matter, Painful, Difficult

  Madeleine L'Engle (2007). “An Acceptable Time”, p.224, Macmillan

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• The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Artist, Paradoxical, Instant

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• Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Sex, Ideas, Giving

  Maurice Maeterlinck (2015). “The Life of the Bee: Works of Maeterlinck”, p.97, 谷月社

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• Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Country, Reality, Impact

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.

  Roger Scruton

  Order, Voice, Achievement

  "A Political Philosophy". Book by Roger Scruton, 2006.

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• The Gauls were endowed with all the advantages of art and nature; but as they wanted courage to defend them, they were justly condemned to obey, and even to flatter, the victorious Barbarians, by whose clemency they held their precarious fortunes and their lives.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Barbarians, Advantage

  Edward Gibbon, M. Guizot (François) (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.157

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• You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

  Joseph Conrad

  Sleep, Literature, Waking

  Joseph Conrad (2012). “Heart of Darkness: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.53, Penguin

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• Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.

  Roger Caillois

  Expectations, Challenges, Secret

  Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr

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• Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction--to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.

  Cary Fowler

  Loss, Agriculture, Diversity

  Cary Fowler, Patrick R. Mooney (1990). “Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity”, p.9, University of Arizona Press

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• No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

  James Bryce

  Men, Careers, Political

  James Bryce (1889). “The American Commonwealth”

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• A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

  William Hazlitt

  Pain, Giving, Bears

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1360, Delphi Classics

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• The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Friends, Eye, Fate

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2014). “Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)”, p.566, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos.

  Eric Voegelin

  Lying, Balance, Cosmos

  Eric Voegelin, Michael Franz (2000). “Order and History”, p.123, University of Missouri Press

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• When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, Home, Night

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• In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

  Ian Mcewan

  War, Self, Order

  "The day of judgment, part two" by Ian McEwan, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2008.

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