Wretchedness Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

  Marisha Pessl

  Feelings, Guilt, Affliction

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.166, Penguin

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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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• 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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• 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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• They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future.

  Jane Austen

  Reflection, Sorrow, Admitting

  Jane Austen (2005). “Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1”, p.4, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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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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• 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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• 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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• While it is undeniable that many have been driven to immorality and crime by the need to survive, it is equally evident that the possession of a significant surplus of material goods has never been a guarantee against covetousness, rapacity and the infinite variety of vice and pain which spring from such passions. Indeed, it could be argued that the unrelenting compulsion of those who already have much to acquire even more has generated greater injustice, immorality and wretchedness than the cumulative effect of the struggles of the severely underprivileged to better their lot.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Pain, Spring, Struggle

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• True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Humility, Suffering And Death, Religion

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• All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.

  Honore de Balzac

  Energy, Illusion, Periods

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• ... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.

  Freya Stark

  Thinking, Government, Civilization

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• What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?

  Thomas Jefferson

  Father, Civilization, Ideas

  Thomas Jefferson (1976). “Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary philosopher: a selection of writings”, Barron's Educational Series

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• I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland...In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland.

  Gustave de Beaumont

  Country, May, Saws

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• Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grind-stone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty.

  Herman Melville

  Appreciation, Acceptance, Political

  Herman Melville (2012). “The Encantadas and Other Stories”, p.83, Courier Corporation

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• The wretchedness of failure is the great attraction of success.

  Mason Cooley

  Success, Failure, Attraction

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