Ruined Quotes - Page 12

Avarice has ruined more souls than extravagance.

Charles Caleb Colton

Greed, Soul, Extravagance

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I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies.

Willem Dafoe

Thinking, Voice, Singing

"Sculpting Away". Interview with Simon Abrams, www.indiewire.com. March 19, 2012.

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The heavens were the grandstands and only the gods were spectators. The stake was the world, the forfeit was the player's place at the table, and the game had no recess. It was the most dangerous of all sports and the most fascinating. It got in the blood like wine. It aged men forty years in forty days. It ruined nervous systems in an hour.

Elliott White Springs

Sports, Wine, Player

Elliott White Springs, A. Roy Brown, Floyd Phillips Gibbons, Norman Shannon Hall (1929). “Pilots' Luck”

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Once in a century a man may be ruined or made insufferable by praise. But surely once in a minute something generous dies for want of it.

John Masefield

Men, Generosity, May

John Masefield (1941). “Dead Ned and Live and Kicking Ned”

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If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined.

Michael Crichton

Long, Enough, Gamble

Michael Crichton (1997). “The Lost World”, Knopf

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Nobody's safe. Health insurance? That didn't protect 1 million Americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills last year.

Elizabeth Warren

Years, Medical Bills, Safe

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For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

Virginia Woolf

Spiritual, House, World

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.365

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How I want to see the mountains, rivers, sunshine, and ruined fortresses! Let the wind course over us until we become beautiful

Mian Mian

Beautiful, Sunshine, Wind

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Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Paulo Coelho

Love, Passion, Thinking

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He who, having lost one ideal, refuses to give his heart and soul to another and nobler, is like a man who declines to build a house on the rock because the wind and rain have ruined his house on the sand.

Constance Naden

Wisdom, Rain, Heart

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Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in those miniscule genes. For a moment we protect them with our lives, then like relay runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendents. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bomes, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all those boneyards.

Jonathan Kingdon

Lying, Home, Science

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No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.

Thomas Merton

Life, Men, Long

Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

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I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Suffering And Death, Essentials, Facts

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All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

James A. Baldwin

Girl, Boys, Maturity

"The Harlem Ghetto" by James A. Baldwin in "Commentary", February 1948, republished in James A. Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son", 1955.

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Who ya gonna call?" "Ghostbusters!" "That phrase is ruined forever.

James Patterson

Forever, Phrases

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And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will request your neutrality and he who is your friend will ask you to declare yourself by taking up arms. And irresolute princes, in order to avoid present dangers, follow the neutral road most of the time, and most of the time they are ruined.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Order, Neutrality, Arms

Niccolo Machiavelli (1979). “The Portable Machiavelli”, p.108, Penguin

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That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.

Herman Melville

Character, Men, Gone

Herman Melville (2008). “Moby-Dick”, p.127, Velvet Element Books

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Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts. In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.

Laini Taylor

War, Hero, Tired

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The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

Chuck Palahniuk

Girl, Religious, Growing Up

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It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man--the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse--the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Struggle, Men, Mind

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He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.

Honore de Balzac

Winning, Men, Lasts

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I’ve never heard of a man being so eager to confess to the parent of a girl he’s just ruined

Lisa Kleypas

Girl, Men, Parent

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Don't give your sons money. Give them horses. Many a good son has been ruined through the acquisition of money but no good son has been ruined through the acquisition of horses. Unless they fell and broke their neck, which when taken at the gallop is a very good death to die.

Winston Churchill

Horse, Taken, Son

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You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

John Green

Children, Distance, Kids

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I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined.

John Green

Kissing, Too Much, Stills

John Green (2010). “Paper Towns”, p.196, Bloomsbury Publishing

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