Agony Quotes - Page 10

• All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode.

  Kate Braverman

  Artist, Used, Collectives

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• Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

  Arthur Miller

  Men, Knowing, Names

  1964 Leduc. Incident at Vichy, act1.

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• There is no burden of the spirit but is lightened by kneeling under it. Little by little, the bitterest feelings are sweetened by the mention of them in prayer. And agony itself stops swelling, if we can only cry sincerely, "My God, my God!"

  William Mountford

  Prayer, Feelings, Littles

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 466), 1895.

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• There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Moon, Opposites, Tree

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1967). “The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Volume I-II: 1814-1843”, p.469, Harvard University Press

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• Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
  Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
  Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
  Creations and destroyings, all at once
  Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
  And deify me, as if some blithe wine
  Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
  And so become immortal.

  John Keats

  Wine, Names, Voice

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.307, e-artnow

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• Part of what we seek in Buddhism is the sense of quiet observation. We don't get so involved in a state of mind that we forget that it's just another transient state of mind, no matter how much ecstasy or agony is involved.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Mind, Matter

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• Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.

  Henri Nouwen

  Spiritual, Joy, Parent

  Henri J. M. Nouwen (2009). “Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith”, p.2, Harper Collins

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• Love masters agony; the soul that seemed
  Forsaken feels her present God again
  And in her Father's arms
  Contented dies away.

  John Keble

  Death, Father, Soul

  John Keble (1874). “The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year”, p.82

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• Mountains are nature's testimonials of anguish. They are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation. Nature's stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Writing, Sorrow, Mountain

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854). “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands”, p.300

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• There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

  Thomas Paine

  Heart, Hatred, Resentment

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THE AMERICAN CRISIS – Revolutionary Work Which Inspired the American People to Fight for Their Independence: Including “The Life of Thomas Paine” – Extensive Biography of the Author”, p.57, e-artnow

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• I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

  Amy Lowell

  Writing, Creating, Point Break

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• Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?

  Blaise Pascal

  Death, Men, Dying

  Blaise Pascal, Henry Rogers, Victor Cousin, Charles Louandre (1859). “The Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal”, p.369

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• It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

  Margery Allingham

  Disappointment, Spring, Optimistic

  Margery Allingham (1943). “The Galantrys”

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• The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Strength, Real, Mind

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.40

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• Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.

  Carl Rogers

  Marriage, Learning, Preparation

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• The fountain of my heart dried up within me,--
  With nought that loved me, and with nought to love,
  I stood upon the desert earth alone.
  And in that deep and utter agony,
  Though then, then even most unfit to die
  I fell upon my knees and prayed for death.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Heart, Desert, Earth

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• Look, therefore, which way we will, whether at the direct Scriptural statements of death as the penalty of sin, or at the agony of the cross as a means of rescue, or at the joy of the angels of God over a rescue; we see from either that it must be a work of infinite and eternal consequence--the work of redemption.

  Herrick Johnson

  Angel, Mean, Joy

  Herrick Johnson (1881). “Christianity's Challenge and Some Phases of Christianity Submitted for Candid Consideration”

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• Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing--that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart--is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.

  Bill Vaughan

  Heart, Organization, Deceit

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• Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus...the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned...undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Art, Hero, Self

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• Most trouble is unnecessary. Between the indignity of being born and the agony of dying enough bad things must of necessity happen to people. But we can't be satisfied with that. We have to go to work and see how much additional trouble we can create. Misunderstanding, turmoil, effort put on all the wrong things, and then more misunderstanding.

  Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett

  People, Effort, Dying

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• The child who is permitted to torment, or destroy, the minutest object in creation, who will wantonly tread upon a worm, or unhumanly pass a pin through the body of a fly, will in all probabiilty, as he increases in years, feel no more compunction at tormenting a fellow-creature, than he did in witnessing the wreathing agonies of a fly.

  Laetitia Pilkington

  Bullying, Children, Years

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• ... was there no one over thirty-five who had not some secret agony, some white-faced fear? Half one's life one walked carelessly, certain that some day one would have one's heart's desire: and for the rest of it, one either goes empty, or walks carrying a full cup, afraid of every step.

  Helen Waddell

  Heart, White, Secret

  Helen Waddell (2013). “Peter Abelard”, p.88, Read Books Ltd

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• In passing, I firmly believe that research should be offset by a certain amount of teaching, if only as a change from the agony of research. The trouble, however, I freely admit, is that in practice you get either no teaching, or else far too much.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Change, Teaching, Believe

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• Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia's revolution and Spain's agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth.

  I. F. Stone

  Integrity, Artist, Russia

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• At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Girl, Cat, Dark

  Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.153, Macmillan

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