Bitter Quotes - Page 23

• A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Self, Rome

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• Life is like a cup of coffee or tea. No matter how bitter it may be, it is always enjoyable.

  Jason Wong

  Cute, Coffee, Tea

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• Death is fortunate for the child, bitter to the youth, too late to the old.

  Publilius Syrus

  Death, Children, Too Late

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• Say the truth even if it may be bitter.

  Muhammad

  Wisdom, Islamic, May

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• We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: It is better to be here [in Europe] ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.

  Ronald Reagan

  War, Government, Europe

  Remarks on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, delivered 6 June 1984 in Pointe Du Hoc, Normandy, France

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• It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Real, Deceit, Bitterness

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1871). “Miscellanies: The memoirs of Barry Lyndon. The history of Samuel Titmarsh and the great Hoggarty diamond. Burlesques”, p.438

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• Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. . . . Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

  Dale Carnegie

  Suicide, Giving Up, Writing

  Dale Carnegie (2016). “How to win friends & influence people”, p.21, Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd

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• In spite of everything that was done to me and my race, in spite of the adversity and the bitter moments, again we rise.

  Maya Angelou

  Adversity, Race, Survival

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• Indeed, not all attacks-especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin-are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

  Hans Selye

  Faith, Science, Purpose

  Hans Selye (1964). “From dream to discovery: on being a scientist”

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• It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the "race is for the strong" and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.

  Charles Darwin

  Strong, Race, Survival

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.10046, Delphi Classics

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• I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.

  Crescent Dragonwagon

  Eye, Cutting, Skins

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• Often, during combat, the warrior of light receives blows that he was not expecting. And he realizes that, during a war, his enemy is bound to win some of the battles. When this happens, the warrior of light weeps bitter tears and rests in order to recover his energies a little. But he immediately resumes the battle for his dreams.

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Dream, War

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• A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many battles: he goes on

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Pain, Loneliness

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• Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.

  Rex Stout

  Sweet, America, Essentials

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• It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

  Adrienne Rich

  Suffering, Nerves, Resentment

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

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• Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. But, as with Belfast it took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness, so with Dublin it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

  Louis MacNeice

  Home, Years, Cities

  "The strings are false: an unfinished autobiography".

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• Captain Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was one of a kind. I'm sure he would agree to this truth, If you continuously compete with others, you will become bitter. If you constantly compete with yourself, you can become great.

  Jack White

  Captains, Kind, Lone Wolf

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• I know that the black man's sick attitude toward the white woman is
  a revolutionary sickness: it keeps him perpetually out of harmony with the
  system that is oppressing him. Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the Negro male's
  lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an esthetic attraction,
  but nothing could be further from the truth. His motivation is often of such
  a bloody, hateful, bitter, and malignant nature that whites would really
  be hard pressed to find it flattering.

  Eldridge Cleaver

  Girl, Dream, Motivation

  Eldridge Cleaver (2015). “Target Zero: A Life in Writing”, p.49, Macmillan

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• Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Beautiful, Hands, Ritual

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• The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance.

  Vissarion Belinsky

  Laughter, Sarcasm, Discrepancies Between

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• Believe in miracles. I have seen so many of them come when every other indication would say that hope was lost. Hope is never lost. If those miracles do not come soon or fully or seemingly at all, remember the Savior's own anguished example: if the bitter cup does not pass, drink it and be strong, trusting in happier days ahead.

  Jeffrey R. Holland

  Strong, Believe, Miracle

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• Patience-the ability to put our desires on hold for a time-is a precious and rare virtue. We want what we want, and we want it now. Therefore, the very idea of patience may seem unpleasant and, at times, bitter. Nevertheless, without patience, we cannot please God; we cannot become perfect. Indeed, patience is a purifying process that refines understanding, deepens happiness, focuses action, and offers hope for peace.

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Ideas, Perfect, Understanding

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• The evil, Sir, is enormous; the inevitable suffering incalculable. Do not stain the fair fame of the country. . . . Nations of dependent Indians, against their will, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it; you cannot reason it away. . . . Our friends will view this measure with sorrow, and our enemies alone with joy. And we ourselves, Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach, and a regret as bitter as unavailing.

  Edward Everett

  Country, Regret, Passion

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• When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.

  Eudora Welty

  Music, Song, Sweet

  Eudora Welty (1974). “The Wide Net and Other Stories”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

  Ross Macdonald

  Memories, Moving, Sea

  Ross Macdonald (2012). “The Drowning Pool”, p.183, Penguin UK

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