Predicaments Quotes - Page 3

• When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experiences of nearly forty years at sea, I merely say uneventful. I have never been in an accident of any sort worth speaking about....I never saw a wreck and have never been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.

  Edward Smith

  Years, Sea, Safety

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• Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one.

  Thomas Piketty

  Strong, Reality, California

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• If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Confused, Believe, Men

  "Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), 2002.

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• And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.

  Tayari Jones

  Mother, Coffee, Heart

  Tayari Jones (2012). “Silver Sparrow”, p.27, Algonquin Books

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• More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
  I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.

  Woody Allen

  Men, Healthy, Despair

  Side Effects "My Speech to the Graduates" (1980)

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• What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Expression, Faces, Single Man

  Christopher Isherwood (2013). “A Single Man: A Novel”, p.5, Macmillan

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• Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Heart, Mean, People

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• Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It's the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude.

  Richard Carlson

  Gratitude, Pain, Real

  Richard Carlson (2011). “Don't Sweat the Small Stuff”, p.5, Hachette UK

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• And at this moment in history, our core value happens to be the raw, aching truth of the human predicament. It may also be the only belief that can save us as a species. A species that will continue to find comfort and delight in the companionship of animals, the miracle of birds, the colours of the corals and the majesty of the forests. We are in it together, on this blue spinning marble in the cold and silent void. And we must act on that belief, if we are going to be able to continue to live a good life here, in this beautiful and fragile country, on this lovely planet, our only home.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Beautiful, Country, Good Life

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• I just can't imagine my life without Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. I can spin off of that and talk about Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy. I could talk about other novels, but for me it's Dostoevsky. His sheer size and grandeur, his sacramentality, his ecclesiology, and his sense of the human predicament are as powerful as it gets. Can't imagine not reading the Russians.

  Gordon T. Smith

  Brother, Powerful, Reading

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• By not paying attention to your body, you are putting it in the same predicament as a neglected child. How can a child be expected to develop normally if the parents pay no attention, if they ignore its cries for help, and remain indifferent to whether their child is happy or unhappy?

  Deepak Chopra

  Children, Parent, Unhappy

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• For example, I'm terribly proud. I'm as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I've experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I'm being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you're very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Grateful, Dwarves, Despair

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• I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Skeletons, Naked

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are many predicaments in life that one must be a bit crazy to escape from.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Crazy, Bits

  "The Moral Maxims and Reflections". Book by François de La Rochefoucauld. Maxim 310, 1678.

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• Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Pursuit Of Happiness, Misery, Attaining Happiness

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• I think the hardest thing about the part is the responsibility that you feel playing something that is so real and resonant in our times. There are people coming home right now with those stories, and I'm just an actress pretending to be that person. You hope that you can shed some light on somebody's predicament.

  Linda Cardellini

  Real, Responsibility, Home

  "Linda Cardellini’s Return". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 10, 2012.

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• An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned if the accession be sudden, and is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder, people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so.

  Richard Cecil

  Grateful, Humble, Men

  Richard Cecil, Josiah Pratt (1816). “The Works of the Rev. Richard Cecil ...: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.326

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• Modernity is the ensemble of changes - intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic - that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

  George Scialabba

  Political, Intellectual, Different

  Source: thenewinquiry.com

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• Human existence is a brutal experience to me... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it salvation is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most.

  Woody Allen

  Agony, Oasis, Agonizing

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

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• The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that's happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Acting, Needs, Looks

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• Luckily, I haven't been offered any $300 million movies that I hate. So I'm not in that predicament just yet.

  James Frecheville

  Hate, Havens, Millions

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• I do feel like all the people I meet, all the people I'm in discussions with, if I'm working with somebody, I sense the same energy that everybody is suffering from the same predicament.

  Philip Seymour Hoffman

  People, Suffering, Energy

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.

  Ogden Nash

  Lying, Mean, Acceptance

  "A Gleeful Splash of Ogden Nash" by Jonathan Yardley, www.washingtonpost.com. May 08, 2005.

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• Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true andfalse but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

  Character, Evil, Tragedy

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• If you're born in America with a black skin, you're born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

  Malcolm X

  America, People, Black

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