Agony Quotes - Page 17

• Since I only got one life to ive, God forgive me for my sins, let me make it and i'll never steal again, or deal again, my only friend is my misery. Wantin revenge for the agony they did to me.

  Tupac Shakur

  Revenge, Thug, Forgive Me

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• The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.

  H. L. Mencken

  Lonely, Truth, Honesty

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.15, Vintage

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• When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Art, Pain, Struggle

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• The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell.

  H. L. Mencken

  Lonely, Truth, Lying

  1922 Prejudices, 3rd series, ch.14.

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• Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.

  Charles Stanley

  Running, Pain, Discipline

  Charles Stanley (1991). “How to Handle Adversity”, p.89, Thomas Nelson

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• In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all, and it comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible, except with the passing of time.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Sympathy, Perfect, Mourning

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• Hope is a merciless tormentor. It's the sound of trickling water to parched lips. The prospect of love to the unlovable. A miracle cure to the parents of a dying child. It holds up victory over the inevitable and beckons us to crawl further over slicing shards, all the while pulling back, remaining just out of reach. It makes agony out of mere pain by pretending a different outcome could have been. It laughs at mankind's embrace of it after millennia of disappointment.

  Robert Liparulo

  Children, Pain, Disappointment

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• There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.

  Colleen McCullough

  Smile, God, Song

  "Fictional character: Ralph de Bricassart". "There are no ambitions noble", www.imdb.com. 1983.

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• We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Giving, Society, One Day

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• The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

  Bernard Crick

  Order, Practice, Political

  Bernard Crick (1962). “In Defence of Politics”

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• The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. No one can proxy for us a masterpiece of loving or experience for us the rapture of art or launch for us book ships freighted with sweet bread to strengthen man. As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before.

  Helen Keller

  Inspirational, Our World, Heaven

  "Let Us Have Faith".

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• There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

  Aldous Huxley

  Bereavement, Suffering, Desire

  Aldous Huxley “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

  Albert Camus

  Destiny, Giving, Suffering

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.261, Vintage

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• Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

  Ayi Kwei Armah

  Skills, People, Justice

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• You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight and a half years ago. Dare not say that a man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.

  Jane Austen

  Heart, Men, Years

  Jane Austen (2015). “Persuasion: World Classics”, p.218, World Classic

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• Love is one of the true mysteries,' he said at last. 'The truest and the deepest of all. One thing, Maerad: to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong.

  Alison Croggon

  Love Is, May, Lasts

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• I have a motto: My job is not to make up anybody's mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking.

  Fred W. Friendly

  Jobs, Thinking, Decision

  "The Power of the Media, Part I". "The Open Mind", archive.org. 1990.

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• ...History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Blood, Different, Century

  Elizabeth Kostova (2010). “The Historian”, p.50, Hachette UK

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• I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Trying, Life Is

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• When you know your work sells, then seeking a gallery or outdoor show is fine. Then, if an event or art gallery kicks sand in your face don't give up, keep moving forward. Use your brain and eliminate a lot of your personal agony. There are times when you should not take NO for an answer. But there are others when you should never put yourself in the place to be rejected to begin with. Seek the wisdom to know the difference and then go for it. Persevere in the face of disappointment.

  Jack White

  Art, Giving Up, Disappointment

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• What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Trying, Done

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• The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

  Hermann Hesse

  Thinking, Conceited, Support

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• Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.

  Orson Scott Card

  Bears, Misery, Painful

  Orson Scott Card (2016). “Seventh Son and Red Prophet”, p.187, Macmillan

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• This should be agony. I should be a mass of aching muscle - broken, spent, unable to move. And, were I an older man, I surely would ... ... but I'm a man of thirty - of twenty again. The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again.

  Frank Miller

  Moving, Rain, Men

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• Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

  Mary Karr

  Laughter, Book, Reading

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