Pitiful Quotes - Page 3

• Compared to the spoken word, a picture is a pitiful thing, indeed.

  Charles Osgood

  Spoken Word

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• This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Thinking

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• Obviously, the intention was not to go back to images traditionally valued as worthy or holy images and shapes, but exactly the opposite; its main purpose had to be, to realise as sacred art anything which so far had been regarded as of little value and pitiful.

  Antoni Tapies

  Art, Opposites, Purpose

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 38), 2004.

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• Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.

  Mark Twain

  Ignorance, Self, Perception

  Mark Twain (1929). “Mark Twain's Letters”, p.156, Jazzybee Verlag

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• For what we don't realize today is just what the typical self of every previous stage failed likewise to comprehend: this is not the highest and greatest mode of consciousness which can be attained - there lie ahead the realms of the superconscious and the pitiful ego, by comparison, is as a speck of nothingness.

  Ken Wilber

  Lying, Self, Ego

  Ken Wilber (1999). “The Collected Works of Ken Wilber: The Atman Project ; Up from Eden”, Shambhala Publications

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• Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long.

  Shawn Colvin

  Views, Things In Life, Long

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• He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Religion, Matter

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Late President of the United States”, p.216

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• The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.

  David Mamet

  Fashion, Class, Tragedy

  David Mamet (1986). “Writing in restaurants”, Viking Adult

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• Defeats are always pitiful. Victories are always last resources.

  Indira Gandhi

  Victory, Lasts, Defeat

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• The current anger at the march of turbines and pylons across the hills of Britain is not from nimbys. Government money has lubricated most backyard owners to support wind power. It comes from those who appreciate the beauty of the countryside and who question the industrial spoliation of miles of open landscape for a pitiful net gain to climate change.

  Simon Jenkins

  Government, Wind, Appreciate

  "Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape" by Simon Jenkins, www.theguardian.com. July 16, 2009.

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• When you see fair hair Be pitiful.

  George Eliot

  Hair, Fairs

  George Eliot (2013). “The Complete Works of George Eliot”, p.3003, e-artnow

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• I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?

  Tennessee Williams

  Brother, Husband, Humility

  Tennessee Williams (1996). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.12, Heinemann

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• I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't mind being pitied. If you love me, pity me. The human state is pitiable: born to die, capable of so much, accomplishing so little; killing instead of creating, destroying instead of building, hating instead of loving. Pitiful, pitiful.

  Jessamyn West

  Hate, Creating, Mind

  Jessamyn West (1973). “Hide and Seek: A Continuing Journey”, Harcourt

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• There is a certain delicacy which in yielding conquers; and with a pitiful look makes one find cause to crave help one's self.

  Philip Sidney

  Self, Looks, Delicacy

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”

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• The afternoon of a human life must have a significance of its own, and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.

  Carl Jung

  Morning, Afternoon, Human Life

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.112, Psychology Press

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• Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Soul, Secret

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1527, Delphi Classics

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• We packed up all the worldly possessions we could carry with us and took the next flight to Hawaii from Washington. It took just about every cent my family had to our name just to pay the plane fare. When we arrived, we had about $15 left among us. We were really in pitiful shape. But we were together, and we were alive, and this was all that mattered.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Names, Together, Pay

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• Know that however ugly the parts appear
  the whole remains beautiful...
  ... the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
  of the universe. Love that, not man
  Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
  or drown in despair when his days darken.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Beautiful, Men, Divine Beauty

  Robinson Jeffers, James Karman, Una Jeffers (2009). “The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters of Una Jeffers”, p.65, Stanford University Press

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• I am truly amazed that after all this time, religious groups still need to attack entertainment and use these tragedies as a pitiful excuse for their own self-serving publicity. In response to their protests, I will provide a show where I balance my songs with a wholesome Bible reading. This way, fans will not only hear my so-called, violent point of view, but we can also examine the virtues of wonderful 'Christian' stories of disease, murder, adultery, suicide and child sacrifice. Now that seems like 'entertainment' to me.

  Marilyn Manson

  Christian, Suicide, Religious

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• To Kiyomori each stall, each soul here seemed borne under by the crushing weight of the world; everyone here was a pitiful weed, trodden underfoot -- a conglomeration of human lives putting down roots in this slime, living and letting live in the struggle to survive; and he was stirred by the fearful and magnificent courage communicated by the scene.

  Eiji Yoshikawa

  Crush, Weed, Struggle

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• A person moving in zero gravity feels a pitiful helplessness. One wrong move and you find yourself spinning wildly. Everyone becomes a baby again in outer space, laboriously learning how to walk.

  Ulrich Walter

  Baby, Zero, Moving

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

  Paul Theroux

  Men, America, Ideas

  Paul Theroux (1986). “Sunrise with Seamonsters”, p.309, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea.

  Sean O'Casey

  Literature, Way, Fleas

  Sean O'Casey (1975). “The Letters of Sean O'Casey: 1910-41”, Catholic University of America Press

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• Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,Or but as mild as she is seeming so,Then were my hopes greater than my despair,Then all the world were heaven, nothing woe.

  Robert Greene

  Heaven, Despair, World

  Robert Greene, George Peele, Alexander Dyce (1861). “The dramatic and poetical works: With memoirs of the authors and notes”, p.294

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• As a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. Today my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift - a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Today, Students, Graduates

  "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "The Validation of Continental Drift", pp. 160-161, 1977.

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