Tendencies Quotes - Page 33

• People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but its the way you live your life that matters.

  Cassandra Clare

  Life, People, Matter

  Cassandra Clare (2011). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (4 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels”, p.1078, Simon and Schuster

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• I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  People, Worried

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• It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

  Amelie Nothomb

  Real, Evil, Gold

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• To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

  Aleister Crowley

  Hands, Plums, Verbs

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• I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Men, Winning, Risk

  Patrick O'Brian (2004). “The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If babies held the same tendency toward self-criticism as adults, they might never learn to walk or talk. Can you imagine infants stomping, 'Aarggh! Screwed up again!' Fortunately, babies are free of self-criticism. They just keep practicing.

  Dan Millman

  Baby, Self, Criticism

  Dan Millman (2010). “Body Mind Mastery: Training for Sport and Life”, p.48, New World Library

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• There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

  Bill McKibben

  Challenges, Important, Difficult

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• Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

  Rob Bell

  Hurt, Blood, Sky

  Rob Bell (2010). “Sex God”, p.76, Harper Collins

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• You're sure your new roommate won't be like the last one who wore tinfoil socks and had a tendency to occasionally urinate in the refrigerator. You're sure you'll pass Math 106 this time around. You're determined to actually join some clubs this year and not just sit around in your dorm eating spray cheese from a can and watching youtube videos about cats.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Cat, Math, Years

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• There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Men, Tragedy, Woe

  Fernando Pessoa (2005). “The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive”

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• I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said -- that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Stay Strong, Powerful, Fall

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.144, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

  Fay Weldon

  Definitions, Facts, Habit

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• Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Views, People

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “I Have a Dream: The Quotations of Martin Luther King, Jr”

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• When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.

  Terry Pratchett

  Reflection, Views, Cities

  "Small Gods". Book by ‎Terry Pratchett, 1992.

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• Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

  David Foster Wallace

  Doe, Generations, Way

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• And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

  Steven Levitt

  Reality, Thinking, Average

  Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner (2010). “SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”, p.31, Harper Collins

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• One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless.

  Hermann Hesse

  School, Two, Mind

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• The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.

  Terry Pratchett

  Cutting, Space, Woven

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• While I respect suicidal tendencies on most days, you’d do well to remember who you’re addressing and, more to the point, what I can do to you. No one says you have to go back to Tartarus in one piece. (Acheron)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Suicidal, Pieces, One Piece

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2008). “Dream Chaser”, p.94, Macmillan

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• Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters.

  George F. Kennan

  Coercion, Natural, Masters

  George F. Kennan (2013). “Encounter with Kennan: The Great Debate”, p.208, Routledge

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• Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

  Alain de Botton

  Jobs, Book, Holiday

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• That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Surprise, Ecstatic, Urges

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• It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Dark, Support, Democracy

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• I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Ideas, Mind

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.299, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• My father insisted that the boys in my life were directly responsible for my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. My mother, more accurately, assumed that I was the bad influence.

  Lisa Lutz

  Mother, Father, Boys

  Lisa Lutz (2011). “Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again”, p.31, Simon and Schuster

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