Capricious Quotes - Page 3

• The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

  Brennan Manning

  Christian, Loss, Thinking

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• You can plan for things, work towards them for years, and yet they never materialize. Or you can just happen to be in the right place at the right moment, and everything falls into place. If you want to believe in something like Fate, she's a capricious character. Sometimes she stand there blocking the doorway you were born to pass through, and sometimes she takes you by the hand and leads you through the minute you poke your nose out. And the stars gaze down and keep their counsel.

  John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Stars, Block, Believe

  John Ajvide Lindqvist (2012). “Little Star: A Novel”, p.259, Macmillan

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• Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Kings, Character, Understanding

  Alexandre Dumas (2016). “ALEXANDRE DUMAS Premium Collection – 27 Novels in One Volume: The Three Musketeers Series, The Marie Antoinette Novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Valois Trilogy and more (Illustrated): Historical Novels & Adventure Classics: Queen Margot, Taking the Bastille, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Sicilian Bandit, The Conspirators, The Hero of the People, The Queen’s Necklace…”, p.147, e-artnow

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• Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield. There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Powerful, Yield, Public Opinion

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• We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.

  William Hazlitt

  Book, Men, Opposites

  "Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt. Chapter: "On Criticism", 1822.

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• She didn't give George any too easy a time when she was alive. She was one of those semi-invalids – I believe she had really something wrong with her, but whatever it was she played it for all it was worth. She was capricious, exacting, unreasonable. She complained from morning to night. George was expected to wait on her, hand and foot and everything he did was always wrong and he got cursed for it. Most men, I'm fully convinced, would have hit her with a hatchet long ago.

  Agatha Christie

  Morning, Believe, Men

  "The Blue Geranium: A Miss Marple Short Story".

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• April's rare capricious loveliness.

  Julia Caroline Dorr

  Spring, April, Loveliness

  Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr (1872). “Poems”, p.67

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• Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Dedication, Order

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• We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

  Max Black

  Children, Cutting, Fire

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• The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

  Gregory Maguire

  Mind, Momentum

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• But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.

  Edward Gibbon

  War, Rome, Barbarians

  Edward Gibbon (2013). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The Modern Library Collection (Complete and Unabridged)”, p.894, Modern Library

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• A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. ... his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favors of fortune.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Character, Men

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• History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Writing, Creatures, Depends

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• Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

  Nick Harkaway

  Photography, Lying, Cat

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• The concept known as bal tashchit--'Do no destroy'--has a special significance in Jewish tradition...We are constantly being warned in our faith that the capricious, thoughtless, wasteful destruction of the elements and creatures of the earth is wrong...We should remind ourselves daily of our responsibility to all aspects of creation.

  David Geffen

  Nature, Responsibility, Animal

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• Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Jobs, Lying, Humorous

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “The Bachelor Home Companion: A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig”, p.42, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Insecurity must follow the transfer of responsibility from self to others, particularly when transferred to arbitrary and capricious government. Genuine security is a matter of self-responsibility, based on the right to the fruits of one's own labor and freedom to trade.

  Leonard Read

  Responsibility, Government, Self

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• Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.

  Edward Gibbon

  Christian, Atheist, Tyrants

  Edward Gibbon (1840). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, p.100

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• I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of Nature, always kept it beautiful.

  George MacDonald

  Beautiful, Nature, Principles

  George MacDonald (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)”, p.1681, Delphi Classics

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• We are being governed by the dregs of the nation - and their brutality is so capricious that no one can feel certain that he will be safe tomorrow.

  Iris Origo

  Leadership, Women, Brutality

  Iris Origo (2011). “War in Val D'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944”, p.101, Allison & Busby

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• One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances.

  Warren Weaver

  Average, Probability Theory, Understanding

  Warren Weaver (2012). “Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability”, p.361, Courier Corporation

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• I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.

  Warren Buffett

  Teacher, Fate, Long

  "Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett and the Triumph of Competitive Philanthropy". www.washingtonpost.com. December 02, 2015.

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• Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

  Daphne Merkin

  People, Needs, Demand

  Daphne Merkin (2014). “The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags”, p.229, Macmillan

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• Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

  Karen Russell

  Loss, Evil, Spinning

  "What Author Karen Russell Knows For Sure About 7 P.M." by Karen Russell, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 19, 2012.

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• Jason settled back on the bench. 'I hate to break this to you, but as a rule, wizards are nasty people. They're powerful, capricious, ruthless, egotistical, used to getting their own way. That's being kind.

  Cinda Williams Chima

  Powerful, Hate, People

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