Painful Quotes - Page 3

• sex has never been private and it never will be. We perform the act in private but we must be public about the connection. Sex is how we pass down worldly goods. It's how we create the primary unit of our society, the couple. ... This rule applies to gay people as well as straight people. ... The community absolutely must know who is straight, who is gay, who is married, and who is single. Without that information we make painful mistakes and lose time.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Sex, Couple, Mistake

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• As the most generous vine, if it is not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems, and grows at last weak and fruitless; so dote the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions. If it be painful to bleed, it is worse to wither. Let me be pruned, that I may grow, rather than be cut up to burn.

  Joseph Hall

  Running, Cutting, Men

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• The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

  Rebecca West

  Sacrifice, Race, Childhood

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• I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Writing, Ends, Found

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

  Susan Sontag

  Mean, Thinking, Interesting

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980”, p.351, Penguin UK

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• Can anybody tell me why reporters, in making mention of lady speakers, always consider it to be necessary to report, fully and firstly, the dresses worn by them? When John Jones or Senator Rouser frees his mind in public, we are left in painful ignorance of the color and fit of his pants, coat, necktie and vest - and worse still, the shape of his boots. This seems to me a great omission.

  Fanny Fern

  Ignorance, Omission, Color

  Fanny Fern (1870). “Ginger-snaps”, p.114

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• I have always believed that this idea of having a nation go through this very painful five or six years of continuous recession with high unemployment would be detrimental for the economy and the society.

  Antonis Samaras

  Years, Ideas, Six

  Source: www.slate.com

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• It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

  Neil Simon

  Writing, Dark, Giving

  Interview with Charles Flowers, bookpage.com. October 1999.

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• Poetry is like pooping. If there is a poem inside of you, it has to come out. Sometimes it can be really difficult and take longer than you'd like (it may even be painful), but other times it can be really easy and happen much faster than you expected. But either way - it is important, and it feels so much better when it's done.

  Sarah Kay

  Important, Done, May

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• Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Beauty, Nature, Pain

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• You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you.

  Pema Chodron

  Life, Learning, Energy

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• Jealousy is a painful passion; yet without some share of it, the agreeable affection of love has difficulty to subsist in its full force and violence.

  David Hume

  Jealousy, Passion, Violence

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.1298, Delphi Classics

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• There are few sensations more painful, than, in the midst of deep grief, to know that the season which we have always associated with mirth and rejoicing is at hand.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Christmas, Grief, Hands

  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1835). “Traits of American Life”, p.219

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• Affliction is a mother,
  Whose painful throes yield many sons,
  Each fairer than the other.

  Henry Vaughan

  Mother, Son, Yield

  Henry Vaughan, Henry Francis LYTE (1847). “Silex scintillans, 1650. A ... facsimile”, p.31

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• Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.

  Harriet Martineau

  Brother, Truth, Medicine

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• Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.

  Marilyn French

  Eye, Milk, Tvs

  Marilyn French (2011). “The Women's Room”, p.253, Hachette UK

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• It is resignation and contentment that are best calculated to lead us safely through life. Whoever has not sufficient power to endure privations, and even suffering, can never feel that he is armor proof against painful emotions,--nay, he must attribute to himself, or at least to the morbid sensitiveness of his nature, every disagreeable feeling he may suffer.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Feelings, Suffering, Contentment

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• Even sleep is characteristic. How beautiful are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming features! and how painful and anxious is the sleep of the guilty!

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Beautiful, Children, Sleep

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• the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

  Dervla Murphy

  Home, Loss, Occupation

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• Remember that you will never reach a higher standard than you yourself set. Then set your mark high, and step by step, even though it be by painful effort, by self-denial and sacrifice, ascend the whole length of the ladder of progress.

  Ellen G. White

  Ambition, Sacrifice, Self

  Ellen G. White (2013). “Christ's Object Lessons - Illustrated”, p.264, Lulu Press, Inc

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• African tradition deals with life as an experience to be lived. In many respects, it is much like the Eastern philosophies in that we see ourselves as a part of a life force; we are joined, for instance, to the air, to the earth. We are part of the whole-life process. We live in accordance with, in a kind of correspondence with the rest of the world as a whole. And therefore living becomes an experience, rather than a problem, no matter how bad or how painful it may be.

  Audre Lorde

  Philosophy, Oneness, Air

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.96, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

  Audre Lorde

  Writing, Breathing, Periods

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.

  Margery Allingham

  Brother, Nice, Apology

  Margery Allingham (1961). “Three Cases for Mr. Campion”

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• The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.

  Margery Allingham

  Falling In Love, Selfish, People

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only along and painful sickness.

  Jean Baptiste Massillon

  Death, Steps, Sickness

  Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1839). “Sermons”, p.129

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