Agony Quotes - Page 12

• When I start to paint, it is real agony. I get nervous. The day before, I am already working up to it. Then I get to the studio and, once the image starts to emerge and come together, pleasure kicks in. And then you can see things that no other person can see.

  Luc Tuymans

  Real, Anxiety, Together

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• As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Mother, Father, Party

  "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy". Book by Rüdiger Safranski, trans. by Ewald Osers, 1987.

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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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• We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is the most fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in the storm of my grief and planted itself again. God is the death agony of the frog that cannot find water in the time of the drought we created. God is the scream of the rabbit caught in the fires we set. God is the One whose eyes never close and who hears everything.

  Deena Metzger

  Grief, Eye, Yellow

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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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• 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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• People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.

  Neil Kinnock

  Real, Fishing, People

  "Neil Kinnock: 'This election is about now and the future'". Interview with David Hare, www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2010.

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• What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love.

  Henri Nouwen

  Blessing, Stronger, Curse

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• The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.

  Victor Hugo

  Wall, Doors, Two

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• It's been said racing encompasses hours of agony and moments of glory.
  But moments like the 1978 Triple Crown inspire the pursuit of greatness.

  Steve Cauthen

  Greatness, Inspire, Racing

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• Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Summer, Creativity, Winter

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

  Kate Braverman

  Artist, Used, Collectives

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• Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,
  The crushing agony, and hold us still.
  And nowhere is that clearer vision given
  Which pierces a bewildering providence,
  And opens windows upon highest heaven,
  But where we see Suffering Omnipotence.

  Amy Carmichael

  Crush, Loss, Omnipotence

  Amy Carmichael (1999). “Mountain Breezes: The Collected Poems of Amy Carmichael”, p.432, CLC Publications

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• Joy requires one to be awake, Adjusting the heart's ambience to bright. Some prefer the dark, as is their right, On grounds of agony, and to forsake Not only bliss, but all that's blessed by light.

  Nick Gordon

  Blessed, Heart, Dark

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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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• As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

  Clifford Geertz

  Strength, Religious, Pain

  Clifford Geertz (2017). “The Interpretation of Cultures”, p.111, Hachette UK

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• The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

  George V. Higgins

  Baseball, Children, Passion

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• Love is the Water of Life Everything other than love for the most beautiful God is agony of the spirit, though it be sugar- eating. What is agony of the spirit? To advance toward death without seizing hold of the Water of Life.

  Rumi

  Life, Beautiful, Love Is

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• The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Life, Mother, Peace

  1938 Adventures of Ideas.

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• Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee,-air, earth, and skies! There 's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

  William Wordsworth

  Love, Men, Air

  "To Toussaint L'Ouverture" l. 8 (1807)

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• May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

  George Eliot

  Love, Sweet, Generosity

  George Eliot (1900). “Armgart: The Spanish Gypsy, and Other Poems”

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• God pity the tortured hearts that will pant through this night! And the agony of the poor wife who has heard that her husband is really killed!

  Margaret Junkin Preston

  Husband, War, Heart

  Elizabeth Randolph Preston Allan, Margaret Junkin Preston (1903). “The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston”

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• There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Israel, Holocaust, Despair

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• God is action, complete with mistakes, fumblings, persistence, agony. God is not the power that has found eternal equilibrium, but the power that is forever breaking every equilibrium, forever searching for a higher one.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  God, Mistake, Persistence

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• The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING.

  Lucy Ellmann

  Expression, Shopping, Ideas

  Lucy Ellmann (2013). “Dot in the Universe”, p.164, A&C Black

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