Wretched Quotes - Page 7

• The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Happiness, Matter, Complacency

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• Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

  Samuel Butler

  People, Religion, Band

  Samuel Butler, Hans-Peter Breuer (1984). “The Note-books of Samuel Butler: 1874-1883”, Univ Pr of Amer

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• Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

  Francis Bacon

  Character, Men, Mind

  Francis Bacon (1778). “The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England: In Five Volumes”, p.462

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• It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Lying, Excellence, Mediocrity

  'Curiosities of Literature' (9th ed., 1834) 'On Quotation'

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• Can anything be imagined so ridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

  Michel de Montaigne

  World, Ridiculous, Miserable

  Michel de Montaigne, William Hazlitt (1860). “The Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Letters, and Journey Through Germany and Italy”, p.231

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• One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Love, Life, Ifs

  "Of The Heart". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Know How, Knows

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• Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

  Anthony Burgess

  Life, Friday, Sunday

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• Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God's kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Jesus, Kindness, Men

  Aiden Wilson Tozer (1975). “The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life”

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• Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.

  William S. Burroughs

  Fate, Water, Suffering

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• I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Education, Boots, University

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• The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow; and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.

  Seneca the Younger

  Grief, Men, Sorrow

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• Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Men, Way, Study

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• We see many who are struggling against adversity who are happy, and more although abounding in wealth, who are wretched.

  Tacitus

  Struggle, Adversity, Wealth

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• That is a most wretched fortune which is without an enemy.

  Publilius Syrus

  Enemy, Fortune

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• Ere man's corruptions made him wretched, he Was born most noble that was born most free; Each of himself was lord; and unconfin'd Obey'd the dictates of his godlike mind.

  Thomas Otway

  Men, Mind, Noble

  1676 Don Carlos, act 2.

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• We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone.

  Blaise Pascal

  Men, Solitude, Fellow Man

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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• The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

  James L. Brooks

  Writing, Omnipotence, Feelings

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• Where there are two, one cannot be wretched, and one not.

  Euripides

  Two, Unhappiness

  Euripides (2013). “Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes”, p.47, University of Chicago Press

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• When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.

  George Eliot

  Strong, Thinking, Soul

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot's Life, Complete: Top Novelist Focus”, p.48, 谷月社

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• What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Real, Years, Two

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• If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them.

  Dorothy Parker

  Hurt, Attitude, Unnecessary

  Dorothy Parker (2002). “Complete Stories”, p.264, Penguin

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• ...nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.

  Seneca the Younger

  Men, Bravery, Admirable

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• The wretched reflect either too much or too little.

  Publilius Syrus

  Littles, Too Much, Unhappiness

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• In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.

  Vladimir Lenin

  People, Democracy, Minorities

  "The State and Revolution". Book by Vladimir Lenin, 1917.

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