Consoling Quotes - Page 2

• There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.

  Honore de Balzac

  Sympathy, Pain, Depth

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• To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

  Umberto Eco

  Reading, Mean, Games

  "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods". Book by Umberto Eco, 1994.

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• Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

  Roger Scruton

  Beauty, Voice, People

  Roger Scruton (2011). “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction”, p.11, Oxford University Press

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• There are those who are awkward in the face of sorrow, fearing to say the wrong thing; to them, I say, there is no wrong in comfort, ever. A kind word, a consoling arm ... these things are ever welcome.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Awkward, Sorrow, Faces

  Jacqueline Carey (2002). “Kushiel's Dart”, p.769, Macmillan

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• I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence.

  Cristina Garcia

  Sea, Silence, Wish

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• Painting is a matter of finding the right balance between consoling and reassuring the eye and challenging and disturbing the eye.

  Paul Kane

  Eye, Challenges, Balance

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• A cross borne in simplicity, without the interference of self-love to augment it, is only half a cross. Suffering in this simplicity of love, we are not only happy in spile of the cross, but because of it; for love is pleased in suffering for the Well Beloved, and the cross which forms us into His image is a consoling bond of love.

  Francois Fenelon

  Love Is, Self, Simplicity

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p.169, 1895.

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• What are you for? It may be, to a degree, consoling that white brothers and sisters did not vote for [Donald] Trump, and do not participate in that brand of animus, that gas-bagging of enormous bigotry.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Brother, White, Degrees

  "Michael Eric Dyson Wants White People to Step Up and Actually Do Something About Racism". Interview With Will Greenberg, www.motherjones.com. January 18, 2017.

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• We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.

  Gina Prince-Bythewood

  Country, Husband, Son

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.

  James L. Brooks

  Feelings, Film, Produce

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• A great man, who was convinced that the truths of political and moral science are capable of the same certainty as those that form the system of physical science, even in those branches like astronomy that seem to approximate mathematical certainty. He cherished this belief, for it led to the consoling hope that humanity would inevitably make progress toward a state of happiness and improved character even as it has already done in its knowledge of the truth.

  Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

  Character, Science, Men

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• When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are.

  Ken Wilber

  Girl, Spiritual, Teacher

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• Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Perfect, Awe, Ugliness

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1833). “The Works of the Late Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Collected by Thomas Moore ... A New Edition ... With a Biographical Sketch”, p.66

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• I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

  May Sarton

  God, Alive, Stills

  May Sarton (2014). “Collected Poems: 1930–1993”, p.329, Open Road Media

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• I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Thinking, Space, Feelings

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• It can be consoling to think your children are in heaven. You have got to understand that that doesn't make it true. Many people cannot understand that distinction.

  Richard Dawkins

  Children, Thinking, People

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Your agents and your managers will always say stuff to you like, "It's really important to make a good first impression on a casting director. And even though you didn't get that job, because you did well that means they'll keep bringing you back in." But when you really just need a job to pay your rent, that stops being very consoling.

  Gillian Jacobs

  Jobs, Mean, Important

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully.

  Anthony Trollope

  Heart, Men, Feelings

  Anthony Trollope (1862). “Orley farm”, p.41

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• How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

  Edmund White

  Book, Past, Sick

  "A Boy's Own Story". Book by Edmund White, 1982.

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• If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Past, Purpose

  "Art on the Edge". Book by Harold Rosenberg. Chapter: "What's New: Ritual Revolution", p. 260, 1975.

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• Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.

  Stefan Zweig

  Faith, Dream, Peace

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• There's something unnatural about a woman finding babies or, more specifically, conversation about babies, boring. They'll think she's bitter, jealous, lonely. But she's also bored of everybody telling her how lucky she is, what with all that sleep and all that freedom and spare time, the ability to go on dates or head off to Paris at a moments notice. It sounds like they're consoling her, and she resents this and feels patronized by it.

  David Nicholls

  Baby, Lonely, Jealous

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• If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.

  Simon Blackburn

  Karma, Destiny, Best Effort

  Simon Blackburn (1999). “Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy”, p.81, Oxford University Press

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• Talking about your feeling with someone who is willing to listen can be enormously consoling, especially if that person has experienced a death similar to the one you are grieving.

  Candy Lightner

  Grief, Grieving, Talking

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• The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ideas, Afterlife, Loved Ones

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