Poisonous Quotes - Page 2

• Deep is the sea, and deep is hell, but pride mineth deeper; it is coiled as a poisonous worm about the foundations of the soul.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Pride, Sea, Soul

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1871). “Proverbial philosophy: in 4 ser., now first complete”, p.41

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• In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

  Eric Hoffer

  Loyalty, Ignorance, Men

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Juice, Burning, Bitter

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• Goodness is weakness, pleasantness is poisonous, serenity is mediocrity and kindness is for losers. The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts – and let’s face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field – is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by almost anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good.

  Jasper Fforde

  Kindness, Evil, Serenity

  "The Eyre Affair". Book by Jasper Fforde, July 19, 2001.

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• The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, is that a sn--

  Bill Bryson

  Snakes, Utterance, Earth

  Bill Bryson (2001). “In a Sunburned Country”, Broadway

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• It is better to give love. Hatred is a low and degrading motion and is so poisonous that no man is strong enough to use it safely. The hatred we think we are directing against some person or thing or system has a devilish way of turning back upon us. When we seek revenge we administer slow poison to ourselves. When we administer affection it is astonishing what magical results we obtain.

  Thomas Dreier

  Love, Strong, Revenge

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• I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.

  Janet Fitch

  Thinking, Hatred, Poison

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• I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

  Dorothy Parker

  Wish, Bacteria

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

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• Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Flower, Orange, Long

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• Watch constantly against those things which are thought to be no temptations. The most poisonous serpents are found where the sweetest flowers grow. Cleopatra was poisoned by an asp that was brought to her in a basket of fair flowers. Sharp-edged tools, long handled, wound at last.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Prayer, Flower, Long

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• For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Men, Egypt, Fields

  Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “The Wisdom of Kierkegaard”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

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• Your ego is just an idea implanted in your mind. It is poisonous. Your ego keeps driving you madder and madder.

  Rajneesh

  Ideas, Ego, Mind

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• Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

  Dan Simmons

  Ideas, Cubes, Gas

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• The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

  George Eliot

  Eye, Men, Soul

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.272, Penguin

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• Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

  Henry George

  Justice, Charity, Substitutes

  Henry George (2014). “The Crime of Poverty: Speeches and Articles”, p.152, epubli

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• Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here.]

  Will Cuppy

  Country, Europe, Snakes

  "How to Become Extinct". Book by Will Cuppy, 1941.

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• The sinner's ego is crude that of the saint refined, distilled. Careful! It may be more poisonous!

  Frederick Franck

  Ego, Saint, May

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• There can be no doubt that the young of today have to be protected against certain poisonous effects inherent in present-day civilization. Five social diseases surround them, even in early childhood. There is the decline in fitness due to modern methods of locomotion; the decline in initiative due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; the decline in care and skill due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship; the decline in self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of tranquilizers and stimulants, and the decline in compassion, which William Temple called "spiritual death.

  Kurt Hahn

  Spiritual, Compassion, Self

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• Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

  H. G. Wells

  Mean, Men, Self

  H. G. Wells (2016). “H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…”, p.6600, e-artnow

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• So erst the Sage [Pythagoras] with scientific truth In Grecian temples taught the attentive youth; With ceaseless change how restless atoms pass From life to life, a transmigrating mass; How the same organs, which to-day compose The poisonous henbane, or the fragrant rose, May with to-morrow's sun new forms compile, Frown in the Hero, in the Beauty smile. Whence drew the enlighten'd Sage the moral plan, That man should ever be the friend of man; Should eye with tenderness all living forms, His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms.

  Erasmus Darwin

  Brother, Hero, Eye

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• My Romanian is pretty much limited to useful phrases like, 'Are these snakes poisonous?' and 'But you look much too young to be a police officer.

  Cassandra Clare

  Snakes, Police, Looks

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.930, Simon and Schuster

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• If there be any who nurture in their hearts the poisonous brew of enmity toward another, I plead with you to ask the Lord for strength to forgive. This expression of desire will be of the very substance of your repentance. It may not be easy, and it may not come quickly. But if you will seek it with sincerity and cultivate it, it will come. And even though he whom you have forgiven continues to pursue and threaten you, you will know you have done what you could to effect a reconciliation. There will come into your heart a peace otherwise unattainable.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Forgiveness, Heart, Expression

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• I must live in my own excrement, breathe in my own poisonous sticky fumes. Yet I am a human being! I still am. Does no one think of that?

  Egon Schiele

  Thinking, Doe, Breathe

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• Visual pollution is more poisonous than any other pollution because it kills the soul.

  Friedensreich Hundertwasser

  Soul, Pollution, Visuals

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• Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world. Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer live the majority of all the plant species, the vast majority of the insects, most of the strange ... quadrupeds, all of the great and most of the poisonous snakes and large lizards, most of the brilliantly colored sea fishes, and the strangest and most gorgeously plumaged of the birds.

  David Fairchild

  Cancer, Science, Sea

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