Painful Quotes - Page 4

• Thus is man made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Men, Flames

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2353, Delphi Classics

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• The only thing we can depend on in life is that everything changes. The seasons, our partners, what we want and need. We hold hands with out high school friends and swear to never lose touch, and then we do.Change is the only constant. Your ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to your happiness and general well-being.

  Amy Poehler

  School, Hands, Want

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• Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

  James Earl Jones

  Laughter, Children, Fall

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• Life seems somehow less shocking, painful, and lonely - and more hopeful, agreeable, and beautiful - when our experiences are confirmed by those of others. Although each of us is unique, there are familiar responses and doubts and joys that let us know we have kin. We are not, after all, too strange to live.

  Rosalie Maggio

  Family, Friends, Beautiful

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• The record-breaking extreme weather events causing chaos across the globe should be a wake-up call. The transition to a low-carbon economy will be much more painful if we wait until there is a climate crisis before recognising that more than half of the world's fossil fuel reserves will have to remain in the ground.

  Christiana Figueres

  Business, Weather, Records Breaking

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• Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Sweet, Pain, Communication

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• I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

  Gloria Steinem

  Family, Children, Selfish

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• To most teenagers, life is a strange uncharted land filled with a mixture of new joys, intensely felt, and painful confusions for which they know no anodyne.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Teenager, Land, Confusion

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• Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Real, Shame, Mortification

  Oliver Goldsmith (1855). “The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale”, p.65

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• Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

  Blaise Pascal

  Death, Contemplation, Danger

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• I'm a terrible dancer. Terrible. Just the pits. And I had to do these cheerleading things and it was just cringe-worthy. I mean, I'm so bad, so that was painful.

  Selma Blair

  Cheerleading, Mean, Dancer

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Can any thing, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relater or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.

  Fanny Burney

  Evil, Mind, Friendly

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.24, Delphi Classics

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• I want now to be of today. It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.

  Mary Antin

  Two, World, Want

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• Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

  Paula Fox

  War, Reality, Thinking

  Paula Fox (2011). “News from the World: Stories and Essays”, p.150, W. W. Norton & Company

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• And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can't stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities.

  Amy Bloom

  Letting Go, Memories, Grief

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