Refuse Quotes - Page 37

• I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.

  Freya Stark

  Self, Grace, Rich

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

  George Orwell

  Food, Oil, Cooking

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• My mother was a gypsy, and she had a lot of dark blood in her, and her hair was very, very thick - she couldn't even get a brush through it. So I have been very fortunate. And every time I go to cut it off, hairdressers refuse to do it.

  Robert Plant

  Mother, Dark, Cutting

  "The Survivors: Robert Plant". Interview with Chris Heath, www.gq.com. November 7, 2011.

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• You have to realize there is nothing more you can do to convince someone you love to turn their life around. You simply have to say, "Look. I love you, but I cannot stand by and watch you kill yourself slowly. When you want help I'm here. Until then, goodbye." That may sound cruel, but self-preservation is paramount to helping someone else. If you're a wreck, you're useless to them, anyway. And if they refuse help, despite knowing the likely outcome, they will head down that path anyway.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Goodbye, Love You, Self

  Source: monsterlibrarian.com

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• Everybody does the same mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends. You want peace and harmony in the world, but refuse to have them in yourself.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Peace, Mistake, Mean

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• The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man. And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains.

  Alice Meynell

  Moving, Eye, Men

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• ... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

  George Sand

  Thinking, Misunderstood, Able

  Gustave Flaubert, George Sand (1999). “Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand”, Harvill Press

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• Better that we should err in action than wholly refuse to perform. The storm is so much better than the calm, as it declares the presence of a living principle. Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Storm, Principles, Action

  William Gilmore Simms (1853). “Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside”, p.37

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• We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait (as we have conceived it), in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  People, Portraits, Details

  Pamela Hansford Johnson (2012). “Night and Silence, Who is Here?”, p.117, Pan Macmillan

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• Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

  Margaret Millar

  Crazy, Would Be, Culture

  Margaret Millar (2016). “A Stranger in My Grave”, p.45, Soho Press

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• Smart writers never understand why their satires on our town are never successful. What they refuse to accept is that you can't satirize a satire.

  Hedda Hopper

  Smart, Successful, Hollywood

  Hedda Hopper (1952). “From under my hat”

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• When we refuse to accept our limitations, Nature, who is a stern realist, pays us out.

  Phyllis Bottome

  Pay, Realist, Accepting

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• In the wildest anarchy of man's insurgent appetites and sins there is still a reclaiming voice,--a voice which, even when in practice disregarded, it is impossible not to own; and to which, at the very moment that we refuse our obedience, we find that we cannot refuse the homage of what ourselves do feel and acknowledge to be the best, the highest principles of our nature.

  Thomas Chalmers

  Men, Practice, Voice

  Thomas Chalmers, John Cumming (1853). “On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man by Thomas Chalmers”, p.57

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• You will do very well to refuse offices; for a man seldom fails to give offense in them. It ought to weary you simply to hear them mentioned.

  St. Catherine of Siena

  Men, Giving, Office

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• When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.

  Marilyn French

  Simple, Men, Culture

  Marilyn French (2011). “The Women's Room”, p.267, Hachette UK

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• It is high time that the American people should remember a few home truths, and that we should refuse to become partners with a militarism which is still stalking unchecked under the pretense of national needs and of international justice.

  Elisabeth Marbury

  Home, People, Justice

  Elisabeth Marbury (1924). “My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences”, New York : Boni and Liveright

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• I refuse absolutely to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. ... I obdurately insist on believing that some men are my equals.

  Brigid Brophy

  Sex, Believe, Men

  Brigid Brophy (1968). “The Burglar: Play”

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• the old ploy of the powerful: never refuse when you can confuse. Distraction and delay are always better than obstruction.

  Helen McCloy

  Powerful, Delay, Distraction

  Helen McCloy (1977). “The Impostor: A Novel of Suspense”, Dodd Mead

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• The muses crown virtue when fortune refuses to do it.

  Elizabeth Montagu

  Crowns, Muse, Virtue

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• we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Change, Confused, Ideas

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2002). “Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future”, p.37, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.

  Anzia Yezierska

  Oil, People, Age

  Anzia Yezierska (1985). “Hungry hearts and other stories”, Persea Books

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• What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.

  Mary Antin

  Bones, Nations

  Mary Antin (1914). “They who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration”

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• I believe that the only possible reason for our being here is to serve in some form or another but that the form is not always readily found or recognized. And I've noticed that those who refuse to serve often wind up as slaves.

  Hildegard Knef

  Believe, Wind, Slave

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• people who refuse to take risks live with a feeling of dread that is far more severe than what they would feel if they took the risks necessary to make them less helpless - only they don't know it!

  Susan Jeffers

  People, Feelings, Risk

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• Imagine a ship that is sinking and needs all the available power to run the pumps to drain out the rising waters. The first class passengers refuse to cooperate because they feel hot and want to use the air-conditioner and other electrical appliances. The second-class passengers spend all their time trying to be upgraded to first-class status. The boat sinks and the passengers all drown. That is where the present approach to climate change is leading.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Running, Air, Class

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