Precarious Quotes

• All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Decision, Progress, Faces

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2012). “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings”, p.105, Beacon Press

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• Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Inspirational, Self, Ephemeral

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• Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

  Susan Sontag

  Past, Flux, Existence

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• Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

  Doris Lessing

  Our Society, Collapse, Dependent

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• The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.

  David Levithan

  Strong, Thinking

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• Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious.

  Larry David

  Marriage, Sad Love, Bad Relationship

  "Angry Middle-Aged Man". Interview with James Kaplan, www.newyorker.com. January 19, 2004.

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• Life balances itself on a precarious ledge, we can stay safe up high or propel off the edge.

  Tarryn Fisher

  Balance, Ledges, Safe

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• At this point the theater America is in such a precarious place.

  Estelle Parsons

  America, Theater

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• A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Nature, Practice, Office

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• And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

  John Crowe Ransom

  Ransom, Position, Conditions

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• My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.

  Simon Newcomb

  Country, Teacher, Father

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

  Jane Addams

  Inspiring, Peace, Equality

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.76, Courier Corporation

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• There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

  John Negroponte

  Couple, War, Taken

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• Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?

  Justina Chen

  Teacher, Class, Speak

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• Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

  John Wyndham

  Treasure, Existence

  John Wyndham (1951). “The Day of the Triffids”, Fawcett

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• Every moment is precious. And precarious.

  Edward Abbey

  Moments

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.27, RosettaBooks

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• Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Proxy

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• The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Feet, Feelings, Everyday

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1939). “Writing is Work”

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• In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Life, Men, Soul

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1920). “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself: In English”

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• Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Men, Acquisition

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• The increasing remoteness of consanguinity is everyday diminishing the force of the family compact between France and Spain. And politicians have ever with great reason considered the ties of blood as feeble and precarious links of political connection.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Blood, Ties, Political

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.117, Coventry House Publishing

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• I stepped from plank to plank So slow and cautiously; The stars about my head I felt, About my feet the sea. I knew not but the next Would be my final inch,— This gave me that precarious gait Some call experience.

  Emily Dickinson

  Stars, Sea, Feet

  Emily Dickinson, Helen Vendler (2010). “Dickinson”, p.369, Harvard University Press

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• Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

  James Thurber

  Sex, Shadow, Lines

  1961 Of English. Lanterns and Lances,'Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dreams'.

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• Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

  Gerald Durrell

  Life, Book, Science

  Gerald Durrell (1970). “Encounters with Animals”

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• The world is fine. Our place on it is precarious.

  Eden Robinson

  World, Fine

  "The Saturday Rumpus Interview With Eden Robinson". Interview With Helga Schimkat, therumpus.net. September 24, 2016.

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