Capricious Quotes - Page 4

• Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Evolution, Callous, Wells

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.65, Atlantic Books Ltd

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Medicine, Tuberculosis

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.

  Sarah Fielding

  Marriage, Women, Struggle

  Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier (fl. 1753) (1754). “The cry: a new dramatic fable : in two volumes”, p.80

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Death is supposed to be the great equalizer, but that's never true. Death is random, capricious, unconcerned, a flagrant player of favorites. It keeps its own counsel, so much the better to profoundly shock by its actions.

  Kenneth Turan

  Death, Player, Action

  4 Copy quote

• O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

  Jeremy Bentham

  Math, Destiny, Pedants

  Jeremy Bentham (1842). “The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Now First Collected: Under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring ...”, p.145

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• For many people, God is a frightening idea. Asking God for help doesn't seem very comforting if we think of Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious, or judgmental. But God is love and He dwells within us. We are created in His image, or mind, which means that we are extensions of His love, or Sons and Daughters of God.

  Marianne Williamson

  Daughter, Mean, Son

  4 Copy quote

• It's not that stock prices are capricious. It's that the news is capricious.

  Burton Malkiel

  News, Investing, Stock Price

  11 Copy quote

• "...arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and as a matter of law, unsupportable."

  Luther L. Bohanon

  Dark, Law, Abuse

  4 Copy quote

• Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

  Clayton Christensen

  Government, Organization, Fuel

  Clayton Christensen (2013). “The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, p.210, Harvard Business Review Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do.

  Brennan Manning

  Father, Men, Grace

  11 Copy quote

• England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists.

  William Crookes

  Food, Science, Discovery

  21 Copy quote

• Luck is what a capricious man believes in.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Believe, Men, Luck

  11 Copy quote

• Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Design, Example

  "The Panda's Thumb". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Double Trouble", pp. 38-40, 1980.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Baseball, Commitment, Views

  4 Copy quote

• The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.

  Walter Lippmann

  Stars, Fate, Rivers

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.37, Harvard University Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The historical order is very interesting, but accidental and capricious; if we would to understand the growth of knowledge, we cannot be satisfied with accidents, we must explain how knowledge was gradually built up.

  George Sarton

  Order, Interesting, Historical

  George Sarton (1964). “A History of Science: Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

  Saint Augustine

  Lust, Atheism, Prostitution

  42 Copy quote

• The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Atheism, World, Woe

  4 Copy quote

• It's such a capricious, strange existence, basing your life on the whims of others, and basing your ebbs and flows of confidence and lack of confidence on the fact that people either choose you or don't.

  Jon Hamm

  Ebb And Flow, People, Facts

  "Jon Hamm, JB Bernstein, and Rinku Singh Talk MILLION DOLLAR ARM, the PG Rating, Seeing Their Lives Become a Movie, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. May 12, 2014.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Doe, Atoms, Transformed

  "The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography". Book by Ingmar Bergman translated by Joan Tate, 1988.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Air, House, Honor

  5 Copy quote

• the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Children, Parent, Fairy

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896). “The pearl of Orr's Island”, Houghton Mifflin Co.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

  George Sand

  Self, Intellectual, Able

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (1999). “Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand”, Harvill Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fashion is a capricious deity.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Fashion, Deities

  Mary Russell Mitford (1859). “Recollections of a literary life ... Second edition”, p.297

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Jobs, Self, Assuming

  Anthony Bourdain (2011). “Tony Bourdain boxset: Kitchen Confidential & Medium Raw”, p.276, A&C Black

  14 Copy quote

  Show source