Wretched Quotes - Page 4

• Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

  Karl Jaspers

  Giving Up, Ideas, Community

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.61, JHU Press

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• The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Rags, Useless, Want

  "A Treatise On Political Economy". Book by Jean-Baptiste Say, p. I, 1932.

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• Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

  Aristotle

  Children, Race, Would Be

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• I was about 12 or 13 years old. I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend ,just as if it were a novel, very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Sex, Weekend, Years

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• Call not that man wretched, who whatever else he suffers as to pain inflicted, or pleasure denied, has a child for whom he hopes and on whom he doats.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Children, Pain, Men

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• One has followed the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that as man's insight increases so he finds both wretchedness and greatness within himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.

  Blaise Pascal

  Greatness, Men, Circles

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals: that they live in grief while they themselves are without cares; for two jars stand on the floor of Zeus of the gifts which he gives, one of evils and another of blessings.

  Homer

  Grief, Blessing, Two

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• We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Passion, Heart, Intellectual Arrogance

  "The Reaction in Germany" by Mikhail Bakunin (October 1842), signed "Jules Elysard"; as quoted in Mikhail Bakunin "Bakunin on Anarchism" edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff, www.marxists.org. 1971.

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• Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the word are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Country, Ice, People

  Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.175, Simon and Schuster

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• Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, Fighting, Scum Of The Earth

  Simon Cottee, Thomas Cushman, Christopher Hitchens (2008). “Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left”, p.5064, NYU Press

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• It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.

  D. A. Carson

  Jesus, Father, Unqualified

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• In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

  Jane Jacobs

  Devil, Details, Outcomes

  "Dark Age Ahead". Book by Jane Jacobs, Chapter Seven, Unwinding Vicious Spirals, p. 153, 2004.

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• Streets teemed with hell's wretched souls. New dead with their gadgets and old dead from antiquity. Demons roamed the avenues and alleyways, tormenting hapless damned at random with branding irons, flaming pitchforks, and razor-wire whips. -From the story Remember, Remember, Hell in November, in the anthology, Lawyers in Hell.

  Larry Atchley Jr.

  Iron, Soul, Wire

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• The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Heart, Men, Inspire

  Anna Julia Cooper (1990). “A Voice From the South”, p.70, Oxford University Press

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• An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.

  Isaac Barrow

  Science, Accomplished, Mathematician

  Isaac Barrow (1734). “The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning Explained and Demonstrated: Being Mathematical Lectures Read in the Publick Schools at the University of Cambridge”, p.32

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• Faith is the consolation of the wretched and the terror of the happy.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Faith, Terror, Consolation

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• Wretched excess is an unfortunate human trait that turns a perfectly good idea such as Christmas into a frenzy of last-minute shopping.

  Jon Anderson

  Christmas, Perfectly Good, Shopping

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• And sometimes when the night is slow The wretched and the meek We gather up our hearts and go A Thousand Kisses Deep.

  Leonard Cohen

  Heart, Kissing, Night

  Song: A Thousand Kisses Deep, Album: Ten New Songs, 2001

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• You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

  Gregory Benford

  Pain, Ignorance, Everyday

  "Timescape". Book by Gregory Benford, 1980.

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• How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings.
  [Lat., O miseras hominum menteis! oh, pectora caeca!]

  Lucretius

  Men, Understanding, Mind

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• O blessed Health! thou art above all gold and treasure; 'tis thou who enlargest the soul, and openest all its powers to receive instruction, and to relish virtue. He that has thee has little more to wish for, and he that is so wretched as to want thee, wants everything with thee.

  Laurence Sterne

  Art, Blessed, Health

  Laurence Sterne (1840). “The Works ...: With a Life of the Author”, p.166

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• The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

  James A. Baldwin

  Children, Rain, Taken

  "The Devil Finds Work". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1976, reprinted in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.

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• All good men wish the entire abolition of slavery, as soon as it can take place with safety to the public, and for the lasting good of the present wretched race of slaves. The only possible step that could be taken towards it by the convention was to fix a period after which they should not be imported.

  Oliver Ellsworth

  Taken, Men, Race

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• No matter how tired or wretched I am, a pussycat sitting in a doorway can divert my mind.

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

  Tired, Cat, Mind

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• Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.

  James Russell Lowell

  Truth, Men, Bravery

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “The poetical works of James Russell Lowell”, p.66

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