Irritants Quotes

• My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant, someone who disrupts the daily drag of life just enough to leave the victim thinking there's maybe more to it all than the mere hum-drum quality of existence.

  Elvis Costello

  Thinking, Quality, Life Is

  Interview with Nick Kent, 1978.

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• Anger is the noise of the soul; the unseen irritant of the heart; the relentless invader of silence.

  Max Lucado

  Heart, Silence, Soul

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• Patience is like good motor oil. It doesn't remove all the contaminants. It just puts them into suspension so they don't get into your works and seize them up. Patient people have, so to speak, a large crankcase. They can put a lot of irritants into suspension.

  Cornelius Plantinga

  Motor Oil, People, Patient

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• In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Art, Skills, Differences

  Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

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• Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

  Steven Pinker

  Toxins, Warfare, Want

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• There is no irritant as painful as an ace up your sleeve that you can never use; it's the kind of thing that causes oysters to produce pearls.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Oysters, Use, Pearls

  Sheila Ballantyne (1983). “Imaginary crimes”, Penguin Group USA

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• I think I have been much of my life an irritant. But some people say that something good came out of my research, something valuable that could be regarded as a pearl, and I can assure those who worked with me it was you who made the pearls and I was merely the grain of sand, the irritant to produce the pearls.

  Nicholas Kurti

  Science, Thinking, People

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• When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Quests

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• We can neither heal nor build if, on the one hand the rich in our society see the poor as hordes of irritants or if on the other hand the poor sit back, expecting charity. All of us must take responsibility for the upliftment of our conditions, prepared to give our best to the benefit of all

  Nelson Mandela

  Responsibility, Hands, Giving

  Nelson Mandela (2003). “Nelson Mandela: from freedom to the future : tributes and speeches”, Jonathan Ball Publishers

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• When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

  Charles A. Murray

  Greatness, Europe, Ideas

  Charles A. Murray (2006). “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State”, Aei Press

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• Being banned from UK will be minor irritant for [Donald] Trump, but catastrophic for local community around Turnberry.

  Corri Wilson

  Community, Trump, Banned

  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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• Take care with manufactured chemicals, certainly. Your safety and long term health are more important than anything. Yet don't forget that if you grow even a dozen different plants, you are surrounded by chemistry. Inside their cells even the most ordinary plants creates potent fungicides, insecticides, irritants, balms, hallucinogens, sedatives, nerve toxins, cell repair stimulants, lures, repellents... you name it. Treat all plants with respect!

  Janet Macunovich

  Cells, Names, Long

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• I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fun, Thinking, Littles

  Source: www.slate.com

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• You know, almost everyone is an irritant to me. I think people have forgotten what the word 'public' means. 'Public' means you're going to be irritated. It's a natural consequence of leaving one's home. You go outside, and there are people who are irritating. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, and someone berates me for smoking. I look at the person and think, but what about your shoes? How can you wear shoes like that and have the confidence to accost someone like me?

  Fran Lebowitz

  Home, Mean, Thinking

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• Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Oysters, Creative, Trying

  "Christmas Carol" by Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2005.

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• The one real irritant is that my young children - they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That's a hard, hard adaption which they didn't ask for. I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

  Julian Assange

  Mother, Children, Father

  Source: www.zerohedge.com

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• As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Taken, Long, Minorities

  Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

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• The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

  Paul Theroux

  Revenge, Party, Home

  Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Oh, brothers and sisters, families can be forever! Do not let the lures [or the irritants] of the moment draw you away from them! Divinity, eternity, and family--they go together, hand in hand, and so must we!

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Brother, Hands, Forever

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• Yes, he’s like a rash for which there’s no cure. It only goes away for a bit before returning unexpectedly to ruin every pleasurable experience. He should have been named Herpes rather than ZT. Or maybe just Herpes Z, since he’s a very special irritant. (Arik)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Should Have, Special, Ruins

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “The Dream-Hunter”, p.126, Macmillan

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• And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.

  Jhonen Vasquez

  Pain, Thinking, Long

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• Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside.

  Nikola Tesla

  Giving, Principles, Matter

  Nikola Tesla (2013). “The Nikola Tesla Treasury”, p.593, Simon and Schuster

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• It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

  Peter Bart

  Years, Tv Shows, Hollywood

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• Most people assume that a muse is a creature of perfect beauty, poise and grace. Like the creatures from Greek mythology. They're wrong. In fact, there should be a marked absence of perfection in a muse--a gaping hole between what she is and what she might be. The ideal muse is a woman whose rough edges and contradictions drive you to fill in the blanks of her character. She is the irritant to your creativity. A remarkable possibility, waiting to be formed.

  Kathleen Tessaro

  Creativity, Character, Rough Edges

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• Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

  Ken Burns

  The End Of The Day, Pearls, Layers

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