Wretchedness Quotes - Page 3

• This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

  A. N. Wilson

  War, Mistake, Book

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• I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

  Langston Hughes

  Dream, Joy, Needs

  Langston Hughes (2001). “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The poems, 1941-1950”, p.259, University of Missouri Press

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• People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.

  James A. Baldwin

  Order, White, People

  "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" by James A. Baldwin, www.esquire.com. July 1960.

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• How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

  Emile Zola

  Evil, Heaven, Moral

  Emile Zola (2015). “The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete: Works Of Zola”, p.332, 谷月社

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• Anybody who's a mythology ... there's always a fear. That's why we don't like people whose skin color is different, whose eye slant is different, or whose worship is different. It makes them feel insecure. So we strike out. The thing that bothers me most about the Christian church today is that we spend our time confirming people in their own sense of wretchedness.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Eye, Insecure

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

  Blaise Pascal

  Jesus, Pride, Knowing

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.

  David Sedaris

  Writing, Airports, Typewriters

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Heart, Wish, Church

  Joris-Karl Huysmans (2015). “Against the Grain”, p.68, Booklassic

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• Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood. Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood - Mud and rain.

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Rain, Boys, Blood

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• The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.'

  Ilana Mercer

  Horse, America, Long

  "Economic Apocalypse Now". www.wnd.com. June 03, 2011.

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• Apart from the positive woes of perdition, an eternity of wretchedness grows from the want of love to Christ as naturally as the oak grows from the acorn, or the harvest from the scattered grain. It is not that love to Christ merits heaven; it does far better, it makes heaven. It is, as it were, the organ of sensation that takes note of heaven's blessedness.

  Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd

  Heaven, Doe, Want

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 401), 1895.

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• The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Labor, Humans

  Alexis De Tocqueville (2004). “Democracy in America: The Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II”, p.48, Bantam Classics

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• What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

  Mary Oliver

  Believe, Misery, Afraid Of Death

  Mary Oliver (2006). “Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays”, p.66, Beacon Press

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• Yet, ironically, it is her very wretchedness that makes me pity her so. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what to do!

  Christopher Pike

  Pity, Knows

  Christopher Pike (1994). “Black Blood”, p.184, Simon and Schuster

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• There is a degree of wretchedness and want among the lower class of people which is not anywhere so common as among the Spanish and Portuguese settlements.

  William Bligh

  Class, People, Degrees

  William Bligh (2012). “Mutiny on the Bounty”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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• An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Humble, Vocabulary

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• The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Christian, Heart, Humility

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

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• To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Ill Treatment, Profound

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• Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Fighting, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.59, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data, brought together in the full light of demonstration, and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.

  Simone Weil

  Data, Limits, Mathematics

  "The Notebooks of Simone Weil".

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• The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Horse, Team, Taxation

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• At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Clever, Fighting, Ideas

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• Strive always to confess your sins with a deep knowledge of your own wretchedness and with clarity and purity.

  John of the Cross

  Clarity, Sin, Purity

  Saint John of the Cross (1966). “The collected works”

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• Years later Magnus would return to London and Camille Belcourt's side, and find it not all that he had dreamed. Years later another desperate Herondale boy with blue, blue eyes would come to his door, shaking with the cold of the rain and his own wretchedness, and this one Magnus would be able to help.

  Cassandra Clare

  Rain, Eye, Boys

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan (2013). “Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• Nevertheless, in this sea of human wretchedness and malice there bloomed at times compassion, as a pale flower blooms in a putrid marsh.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Flower, Compassion, Sea

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1912). “In Desert and Wilderness”, p.138, Library of Alexandria

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