Capricious Quotes - Page 4

• living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

  George Sand

  Self, Intellectual, Able

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (1999). “Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand”, Harvill Press

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• Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

  Clayton Christensen

  Government, Organization, Fuel

  Clayton Christensen (2013). “The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, p.210, Harvard Business Review Press

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• Fashion is a capricious deity.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Fashion, Deities

  Mary Russell Mitford (1859). “Recollections of a literary life ... Second edition”, p.297

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• Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

  Anthony Bourdain

  Jobs, Self, Assuming

  Anthony Bourdain (2011). “Tony Bourdain boxset: Kitchen Confidential & Medium Raw”, p.276, A&C Black

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• The complaints of contemporary writes, who deplore the increase of luxury and deprevation of manners, are commonly expressive of their peculiar temper and situation. There are few observers who possess a clear and comprehensive view of the revolutions of society, and who are capable of discovering the nice and secret springs of action which impel, in the same uniform direction, the bland and capricious passions of a multitude of individuals.

  Edward Gibbon

  Spring, Nice, Passion

  Edward Gibbon (1828). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.501

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• Real woman should be capricious.

  Christian Dior

  Real, Real Women, Should

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• A lot of people don't trust the pitch. There's this kind of reputation it has for being untrustworthy and fickle and capricious and everything else, and those are words that big league managers and general managers and organizations aren't too fond of.

  R.A. Dickey

  Organization, People, League

  "Master of the Knuckleball". Interview with Jeremy Stahl, www.slate.com. October 29,2012.

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• [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

  John Adams

  Eye, Men, Intellectual

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• I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.

  Sarah Fielding

  Marriage, Women, Struggle

  Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier (fl. 1753) (1754). “The cry: a new dramatic fable : in two volumes”, p.80

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• And what is the religion of many persons but a kind of demonism that delights in human sacrifices and causes them to look with horror on the greatest part of mankind? Plutarch, it is well known, has observed very justly that it is better not to believe in a god than to believe him to be a capricious and malevolent being.

  Richard Price

  Religious, Believe, Sacrifice

  Richard Price (1983). “The Correspondence of Richard Price: February 1786-February 1791”

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• How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

  Fanny Burney

  Real, Reading, Writing

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• The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Medicine, Tuberculosis

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

  Christopher Hitchens

  Trying, Desert, Kind

  Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.18, Da Capo Press

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• the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Children, Parent, Fairy

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896). “The pearl of Orr's Island”, Houghton Mifflin Co.

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• Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Air, House, Honor

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• I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager.

  Larry Wall

  Trying, Arbitrary, Want

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• "Death's a capricious thing, innit?" "Yes. Yes, she is."

  Neil Gaiman

  "The Sandman: The Doll's House". Comic book by Neil Gaiman, 1989-1990.

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• Ugly women may be naturally quite as capricious as pretty ones; but as they are never petted and spoiled, and as no allowances are made for them, they soon find themselves obliged either to suppress their whims or to hide them.

  Anatole France

  Women, Ugly, May

  Anatole France (2016). “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard”, p.31, Anatole France

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• "...arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and as a matter of law, unsupportable."

  Luther L. Bohanon

  Dark, Law, Abuse

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• It's not that stock prices are capricious. It's that the news is capricious.

  Burton Malkiel

  News, Investing, Stock Price

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• O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

  Jeremy Bentham

  Math, Destiny, Pedants

  Jeremy Bentham (1842). “The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Now First Collected: Under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring ...”, p.145

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• Death is supposed to be the great equalizer, but that's never true. Death is random, capricious, unconcerned, a flagrant player of favorites. It keeps its own counsel, so much the better to profoundly shock by its actions.

  Kenneth Turan

  Death, Player, Action

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• Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Memories, Wind

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.436, Wordsworth Editions

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• Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Evolution, Callous, Wells

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.65, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do.

  Brennan Manning

  Father, Men, Grace

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