Calamity Quotes - Page 9

Each individual`s way is going to be different. Never follow anybody. That is the greatest calamity that can happen to a man. Once you start following somebody else, you become a carbon copy. You become an imitation.

Rajneesh

Men, Different, Way

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Spring is the season of gaiety, and winter of terror; in spring the heart of tranquility dances to the melody of the groves, and the eye of benevolence sparkles at the sight of happiness and plenty: in winter, compassion melts at universal calamity, and the tear of softness starts at the wailing of hunger and the cries of the creation in distress

Samuel Johnson

Spring, Heart, Eye

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While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

Edward Jenner

Science, Discovery, Vaccines

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When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.

Jack Kemp

Government, Liberty, Libertarian

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Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

Hans Zinsser

Christian, Civilization, Earthquakes

Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.139, Transaction Publishers

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I have lived through the best years of this country's history. The next generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad I don't have to live on into them.

William Graham Sumner

Country, War, Years

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Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Real, Evil, Boredom

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The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.

Edward Gibbon

Rome, Europe, Curiosity

Edward Gibbon (1840). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”

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Calamity is a blessing when it brings one to God. --- Hadassah

Francine Rivers

Blessing

Francine Rivers (2002). “A Voice in the Wind”, p.337, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.

Fernando Pessoa

Dream, Sleep, Thinking

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I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.

Charlotte Bronte

Strong, Selfish, Evil

Charlotte Bronte (2009). “Villette”, p.80, The Floating Press

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Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Thomas Paine

Wisdom, Country, Mean

Thomas Paine (2017). “Common Sense & The Rights of Man - The Voice of the American Revolution: Words of a Visionary That Sparked the Revolution and Remained the Core of American Democratic Principles”, p.4, Madison & Adams Press

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He who worries about calamities suffers them twice over.

Og Mandino

Worry, Suffering

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And they lived happily (aside from a few normal disagreements, misunderstandings, pouts, silent treatments, and unexpected calamities) ever after.

Jean Ferris

Normal, Unexpected, Ever After

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And yet, just as our body would burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so would the arrogance of men expand, if not to the point of bursting then to that of the most unbridled folly, indeed madness, if the pressure of want, toil, calamity and frustration were removed from their life. One can even say that we require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, in order to keep on a straight course.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Frustration, Men, Order

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After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

Rohinton Mistry

Choices, Add, Events

Rohinton Mistry (2010). “A Fine Balance”, p.758, Vintage

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I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Ayn Rand

Fate, Thinking, Suffering

Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.580, Hamilton Books

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In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Book, Reading, Beer

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.93, Harvard University Press

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We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Adventure, Encounters, Flags

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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

John Irving

Best Friend, Philosophy, Good Friend

John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.269, Random House

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There are always signs that a reign is ending, and they are usually spotted not in the king himself but in his court. In the inner circle, latent jealousies between advisers spill into open conflict, as they angrily debate who is to blame for the calamity, chewing over each other's past errors and pointing the finger at old and nascent enemies.

Hanna Rosin

Kings, Past, Errors

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Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

George Will

Summer, Blue, America

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Who are benefits promised to, overwhelmingly? Well, they're promised to older people. And if you have a society like Europe that is upside down where there are a lot more older people than younger people, you have economic calamity.

Rick Santorum

Europe, People, Benefits

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We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.

C. S. Lewis

Real, War, Humility

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There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.

Henry Miller

Cancer, Hero, Despair

Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

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