Distress Quotes - Page 17

• My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.

  Maya Angelou

  Music, Freedom, Race

  Dr. Maya Angelou (2009). “The Heart of a Woman”, p.85, Random House

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• The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.

  June Jordan

  Law, Justice, United States

  June Jordan (1992). “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union”, Pantheon

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• How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality,--a place, a country, a local habitation! how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us! Here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beautified and canonized forever, with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places,--rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others,--where distress or death came once, and since then dwells forevermore.

  Washington Irving

  Summer, Country, Dark

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• If the soul be happily disposed, every thing becomes capable of affording entertainment, and distress will almost want a name.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Names, Soul, Entertainment

  Oliver Goldsmith (1839). “Poems and essays”, p.104

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• There is yet a silent agony in which the mind appears to disdain all external help, and broods over its distresses with gloomy reserve. This is the most dangerous state of mind; accidents or friendships may lessen the louder kinds of grief, but all remedies for this must be had from within, and there despair too often finds the most deadly enemy.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Grief, Agony, Mind

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith”, p.342

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• Pity, though it may often relieve, is but, at best, a short-lived passion, and seldom affords distress more than transitory assistance; with some it scarce lasts from the first impulse till the hand can be put into the pocket.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Passion, Hands, May

  Oliver Goldsmith (1824). “Essays, poems and plays”, p.33

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• The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Compassion, Hands, Abuse

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852). “Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly”, p.6

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• A world of little cares is continually arising, which busy or affluent life knows nothing of, to open the first door to distress. Hunger is not among the postponable wants; and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.

  Thomas Paine

  Doors, Temptation, World

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• Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Memories, Sadness, Age

  Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of Circumstance: Hard times”

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• It is a widespread and firm belief among guests that their departure is always a matter of distress to their hosts, and that in order to indicate that they have been pleasantly entertained, they must demonstrate an extreme unwillingness to allow the entertainment to conclude. This is not necessarily true.

  Judith Martin

  Order, Departure, Guests

  Judith Martin (1989). “Miss Manners' guide for the turn-of-the-millennium”

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• Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.

  Rebecca West

  War, Hands, Psychology

  Rebecca West (1952). “The meaning of treason”

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• To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Grief, Failing, Endeavor

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• Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

  John Cage

  Music, Strong, Ears

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• A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.

  Mark Twain

  Food, Long, Cooking

  Mark Twain (2015). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.85, Univ of California Press

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• Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it.

  Karyn Kusama

  Pain, Heart, Mind

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Song, Heart, Sleep

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• The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console as.

  Arsene Houssaye

  Lost, Graves, Console

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• The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

  Thomas Malthus

  Successful, Government, Evil

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1989). “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, p.129, Cambridge University Press

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• Distress is virtue's opportunity: we only live to teach us how to die.

  Thomas Southerne

  Opportunity, Affliction, Virtue

  Thomas Southerne (1713). “The maid's last prayer: or, Any, rather than fail. The fatal marriage: or, The innocent adultery. Oroonoko. The fate of Capua. [Taken from general t-p; some variations on special t-ps, e.g. Sir Antony Love”, p.295

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• Through the years, I have helped thousands of children who were ill or in distress.

  Michael Jackson

  Children, Years, Ill

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• People in distress behave in a stressful way. They aren't all sweetness and light. They don't behave well when they are unhappy. That's just what I've observed.

  Penelope Wilton

  Light, People, Unhappy

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• The thorny point
  Of bare distress hath ta'en from me the show
  Of smooth civility; yet am I inland bred
  And know some nurture.

  William Shakespeare

  Civility, Courtesy, Smooth

  William Shakespeare, Cynthia Marshall (2004). “As You Like It”, p.163, Cambridge University Press

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• I don't know about being a Catholic anymore, though I had a great romance with the Church. But its male hierarchy causes me pain and distress. So I can't really pay too much attention. When that encyclical from the Pope - the one about contraception - began 'Dear Sons and Brothers' I figured it must be private mail and had nothing to do with me. So I didn't read it.

  Joan Hackett

  Brother, Pain, Son

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• The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revivial, but finally giving up in the final collapse.

  Charles P. Kindleberger

  Giving Up, Finals, Investing

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• If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Heart, World, Want

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