Gloomy Quotes - Page 4

• I don't know about you, but I've saved cards that old high school flames wrote me as well as those that employees have written me over the years. The power of genuine, customized appreciation will never lose its value, even in a gloomy economy... in fact, it's probably what we're all thirsty for in this desert of a depression.

  Chip Conley

  Appreciation, School, Flames

  "The Best $73 I Ever Spent" by Chip Conley, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 5, 2009.

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• If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

  Ned Beauman

  Home, Tunnels, Want

  "The Teleportation Accident". Book by Ned Beauman, July 19, 2012.

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• The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, An appetite; a feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.

  William Wordsworth

  Love, Passion, Eye

  'Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey' (1798) l. 72

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• To man, that was in th' evening made,
  Stars gave the first delight;
  Admiring, in the gloomy shade,
  Those little drops of light.

  Edmund Waller

  Stars, Men, Light

  Edmund Waller (1779). “The Works of the English Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Samuel Johnson”, p.121

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• The Bible is the light of my understanding, the joy of my heart, the fullness of my hope, the clarified of my affections, the mirror of my thoughts, the consoler of my sorrows, the guide of my soul through this gloomy labyrinth of time, the telescope went from heaven to reveal to the eye of man the amazing glories of the far distant world.

  William Jones

  Bible, Christian, Eye

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• He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

  Ian Mcewan

  Fate, Law, Sky

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Saturday”, p.128, Random House

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• There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Hate, Years, Squad

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• Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flush of truth.

  Jules Michelet

  Coffee, Reality, Clouds

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• What the Londoner sees in his mind's eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow's train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street.

  John Betjeman

  Sunset, Eye, Mind

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• When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!

  Susanna Clarke

  Light, Scotland, Rose

  Susanna Clarke, Portia Rosenberg (2005). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.604, A&C Black

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• It is the nature of the Kali Yuga that most human beings are now held back from spiritual liberation due to the gravity of inertia, apathy and laziness, (known in Sankrit as the quality of tapas) that overwhelms this age. Despite this seemingly gloomy prognosis, there is a way out of this predicament for those with the will and stamina to awaken from the rampant lethargy, within and outside of themselves, to take action.

  Zeena Schreck

  Spiritual, Age, Quality

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• Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Art, Powerful, Mean

  Vincent van Gogh (1971). “Van Gogh's "diary"; the artist's life in his own words and art”

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• If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.

  Willa Cather

  Breathing, Cities, This Generation

  "Willa Cather in Europe". Book by Willa Cather, 1956.

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• Many of us were a little to early to assume that the most logical uses of the internet in authoritarian states would be to empower people. And to force them towards participation in politics. If you look at most authoritarian states, they are very grim places to live in. The only good thing about it is fast internet. That's the only way you can find some meaning in an otherwise very dark and gloomy life.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Dark, People, Empowering

  "The Tunisia Twitter Revolution That Wasn’t". Interview With Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. January 27, 2011.

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• For men know not what the nature of the soul is; whether it is engendered with us, or whether, on the contrary, it is infused into us at our birth, whether it perishes with us, dissolved by death, or whether it haunts the gloomy shades and vast pools of Orcus.

  Lucretius

  Men, Soul, Shade

  Titus Lucretius Carus (1898). “Lucretius On the Nature of Things”, p.8

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• Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Life, Happiness, Dark

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• The gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves.

  Joseph Addison

  People, Months, England

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, William Bond (1766). “The Spectator”, p.310

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• I think that we're at an alarming moment in American political development and maybe in world political development, because the United States is so influential. If the trends of the last thirty or forty years are not halted and reversed - and those trends include increasingly inequality, a crumbling public life, a disintegrating public infrastructure, an exhausted ecology, and a huge war arsenal, and more and more war making - then I'm rather gloomy about the prospects for the American future and the harm that the United States could do to the world.

  Frances Fox Piven

  War, Thinking, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Jesus, Promise, Christ

  Henry Ward Beecher (1871). “The Plymouth pulpit. Sermons preached in Plymouth church, Brooklyn”, p.512

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• If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul. When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers her people to be soldiers.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Hair, Government, Korea

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cures, Sentiments, Ten

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• Britannia's shame! There took her gloomy flight, On wing impetuous, a black sullen soul . Less base the fear of death than fear of life. O Britain! infamous for suicide.

  Edward Young

  Suicide, Wings, Soul

  Edward Young, Charles Edward DE COETLOGON (1793). “Night thoughts on life death and immortality ... to which are added the life of the author and a paraphrase on part of the Book of Job”, p.103

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• Wine, like the rising sun, possession gains,
  And drives the mist of dullness from the brains,
  The gloomy vapor from the spirit flies,
  And views of gaiety and gladness rise.

  George Crabbe

  Wine, Views, Brain

  George Crabbe (1855). “Poetical Works: Preface to the Tales”, p.383

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• Being a pessimist is just such a gloomy way of looking at things, so I have to hope for the best - life wouldn't be worth living if we didn't have hope. And I also do think that human beings often do do wonderful, correct, brilliant things. So, on balance, I'd like to be optimistic about the future.

  Bill Bryson

  Optimistic, Thinking, Balance

  "Bill Bryson answers your questions". www.theguardian.com. March 10, 2005.

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• I now have had my foggy crystal ball for quite a long time. Its predictions are invariably gloomy and usually correct, but I am quite used to that and they won't keep me from giving you a few suggestions, even if it is merely an exercise in futility whose only effect is to make you feel guilty.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Exercise, Long, Giving

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