Unlucky Quotes - Page 4

• it's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.

  Christina Stead

  Money, Work, Immoral

  Christina Stead (1948). “A little tea, a little chat”

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• Then one day along come a Friday and that a unlucky star day and I playin' round de house and marster Williams come up and say, "Delis, will you 'low Jim walk down the street with me?" My mammy say, "All right, Jim, you be a good boy," and dat de las' time I ever heard her speak, or ever see her. We walks down whar de houses grows close together and pretty soon comes to de slave market. I ain't seed it 'fore, but when marster Williams says, "Git up on de block," I got a funny feelin', and I knows what has happened.

  James Green

  Friday, Stars, Block

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• There are many people who have the gift, or failing, of never understanding themselves. I have been unlucky enough, or perhaps fortunate enough to have received the opposite gift.

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  Failure, Opposites, People

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• He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Believe, Men, Evil

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• How easy it is to see your brother's faults, How hard it is to face your own. You winnow his in the wind like chaff, But yours you hide, Like a cheat covering up an unlucky throw. Dwelling on your brother's faults Multiplies your own. You are far from the end of your journey. The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. See how you love.

  Gautama Buddha

  Brother, Heart, Journey

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• A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write. The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Character, Successful

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.39

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• All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

  Berry Gordy

  Artist, People, Lucky

  Source: www.npr.org

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• But touch me, and no minister so sore.
  Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time
  Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme,
  Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
  And the sad burthen of some merry song.

  Alexander Pope

  Song, Long, Sacred

  Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson (1839). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: In 1 volume”, p.128

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• Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.

  Augustus William Hare

  Morning, Wish, Enough

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• Reconciliation with our enemies is simply a desire to better our condition, a weariness of war, or the fear of some unlucky thing from occurring.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  War, Enemy, Desire

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• [writing to Stirling in 1740]
  ... an unlucky accident happened to some of the French mathematicians in Peru. It seems that they were shewing French gallantry to the natives' wives, who have murdered their servants destroyed their instruments and burnt their papers, the Gentlemen escaping narrowly themselves. What an ugly article this will make in a journal.

  Colin Maclaurin

  Writing, Escaping, Wife

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• So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man's mouth, and a wooden one into another's, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star.

  William Mathews

  Stars, Destiny, Men

  William Mathews (1874). “Getting on in the World: Or, Hints on Success in Life”, p.23, Belford Bros.

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• There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

  Dan Simmons

  Fall, Serious Illness, Black

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.1125, Spectra

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• Tiger Woods has been unlucky with his body. I don't know whether some of it is self-induced or some of it is just unlucky. But we never know what happens with guys.

  Jack Nicklaus

  Self, Guy, Body

  Source: www.nicklaus.com

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• If in the past, after every lost war, the unlucky vanquished were divested forever of their honor and their equality of rights, the League of Nations would even now have to be satisfied with a whole series of non-equal and thus ultimately dishonorable and inferior nations.

  Adolf Hitler

  War, Past, Rights

  Source: nseuropa.wordpress.com

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• I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.

  George Saunders

  Guy, Want, Next

  "In Search For Answers, Author George Saunders Covers Trump Campaign". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. July 9, 2016.

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• What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

  Italo Calvino

  Disappointment, Believe, Book

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.4, Random House

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• The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.

  Lord Byron

  Stars, Disappointment, Discovery

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• Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  People, Facts, England

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• I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

  Mary Ruefle

  Writing, Lucky, Able

  Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.69, Wave Books

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• TV tends to be like, if you're lucky, it's like Las Vegas. You can't get out. There's always another pitch meeting. They keep you on the casino floor. If I'm unlucky, if I'm lucky enough to be unlucky, I would love to write a movie.

  Dan Harmon

  Writing, Vegas, Lucky

  "Dan Harmon Talks HARMONTOWN, Touring, the Writing Process, RICK AND MORTY, COMMUNITY Season 6, and More". Interview with Eva Dickson, collider.com. October 2, 2014.

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• When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

  Jennifer Egan

  Missing, Everyday, Alive

  "Dealing with the Dead" by Jennifer Egan, www.newyorker.com. October 11, 2010.

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• This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

  Patrick deWitt

  Character, Men, Roots

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• It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

  Voltaire

  People, Ignorant, Luck

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• I used to believe that the number eight is unlucky for me and would even avoid anything that would add up to 8 - like 17, 26 and so on. I would religiously visit astrologers and wear different stones to bring in good luck.

  Emraan Hashmi

  Believe, Good Luck, Eight

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