Painful Quotes - Page 32

• There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Pain, Sailing, Ships

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• Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, Chloroform, Poor

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• Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.

  John Ruskin

  Inspirational, Education, Teacher

  "The Works of John Ruskin: The crown of wild olive".

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• At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

  Jodi Picoult

  Eye, Light, Oxygen

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• It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

  Ralph Ellison

  Inspirational, Being Yourself, Men

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.40, Vintage

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• The painful things seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place.

  Anita Diament

  Beautiful, Necklaces, Beads

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• There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.

  Elizabeth Berg

  Happiness, Quilts, Laughter

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• For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

  Marcel Proust

  Love Is, Anxiety, Desire

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.3648, Delphi Classics

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• If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Life Is, Illusion, Ifs

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• The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.

  Jean-Dominique Bauby

  Memories, Regret, Past

  Jean-Dominique Bauby (2008). “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, p.94, Knopf Group E-Books

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• . . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there's always a positive to a negative.

  Barbra Streisand

  Growing Up, People, Interesting

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• There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.

  Caroline Knapp

  Simple, Thinking, Long

  Caroline Knapp (1999). “Drinking: A Love Story”, p.108, Dial Press

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• It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

  David Brooks

  Memories, Loss, Suffering

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• But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

  Thomas Pynchon

  Exotic, Affliction, Shapes

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• Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Pain, Heart, May

  Alexandre Dumas (2015). “THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO: Classic French Literature”, p.751, 谷月社

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• Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man. Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.

  Flann O'Brien

  Men, Eulogy, Toxic

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• And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.

  C. S. Lewis

  Girl, Cutting, Gentleman

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• Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Distance, Oxygen, Parent

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• One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Essays in Science”, p.11, Open Road Media

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• The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Spiritual, Honor, Tragedy

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• Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Change, Mind, Frankenstein Novel

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.302, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214

  Melody Beattie

  Simple, Despair, Trying

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• Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner. BENEDICK Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains. BEATRICE I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me: if it had been painful, I would not have come. BENEDICK You take pleasure then in the message? BEATRICE Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point ... You have no stomach, signior: fare you well. Exit BENEDICK Ha! 'Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner;' there's a double meaning in that... (Much Ado About Nothing)

  William Shakespeare

  Pain, Knives, May

  William Shakespeare (1998). “Much Ado About Nothing”, p.85, Penguin

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• Falling in love is painful on the knees.

  Jon Bon Jovi

  Falling In Love, Pain, Love Is

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• Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such

  Henry Miller

  Inspirational, Life, Moving On

  Henry Miller (1959). “The Henry Miller Reader”, p.356, New Directions Publishing

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