Quotes About Humiliation

Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?

At the opera in Milan with my daughter and me, Needleman leaned out of his box and fell into the orchestra pit. Too proud to admit it was a mistake, he attended the opera every night for a month and repeated it each time.

It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty.

Sheila had given Zoe a used tissue as a present, and then laughed in her face when the little girl unwrapped it. It was full of snot.

Now I am covered in knickers!" she complained loudly. "I can never show my face in polite society again!

You are playing Hamlet in William Shakespeare's play at school and halfway through the 'To be or not to be …' speech your Auntie rushes up from the audience, spits on a tissue and wipes your face with it? You take off your trainers after games and the smell of mouldy cheese is so bad the entire school has to be closed down for a week to be de-fumigated? At lunchtime in the dining hall you overdose on baked beans and you do a blow-off that lasts all afternoon?

Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being. Any fancy ideas we have about ourselves are shriven away by the reality of the moment. We come to earth with a thump. It may be a narrow piece of ground, but at least it is real and at least it is our own.

Work is freighted with difficulty and possibility of visible failure, failure to provide, to succeed, to make a difference, to be seen and to be seen to be seen. Work, therefore is robust vulnerability, and a good part of the time, a journey leading us through very unbeautiful private and public humiliations.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.

I'd had my heart broken, you see. Fell in love with the wrong chap and he crushed me right down to the bedrock. Nothing left but humiliation.

Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".

To be depreciated and humiliated isn't a statement of your worth but rather an evidence of your disregarded potential.

Success always hugs you in private, but failure slaps you in the public...

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

Humility can only be born out of humiliation

Oh, the shame that I suffer now . . . the shame of a vanquished King." And those were the last words of Henry Plantagenet.

turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And

during film sessions..."He would embarrass you deliberatley... run the play you messed up back and forth, back and forth for everyone in the room to see 100 times.

He held my finger over the toilet at chest-level, let it dangle for several seconds, then dropped it. It landed with a small splash. "Adios, dear finger," said Mr. Burke. He flushed the toilet and watched happily. "Going . . . going . . ." I wondered if this was payback for his being dunked in the toilet once too often by bullies in school. "Going . . ." He frowned. "Aw, shit, it's still there. Fuckin' low-flow toilets.

I knew what had caused this. It was Roger's sudden desire for children. That bastard's brain waves had infiltrated my scrotum, reconnecting my vas deferens and causing me to impregnate my wife, allowing him to vicariously experience the joys of new fatherhood. I was going to kick his ass the next time I saw him.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal with which I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of pfennings^ the humiliation of my position in regard to Fraulein Wundermacher, all, all had been in vain.

He hesitates, then turns and starts up her walk. Gives her a friendly smile, to boot. He wishes she wouldn't wear a wig, or at least not one that sits so crookedly on her head. It's a distraction. Sometimes he has to restrain himself from reaching over and giving it a little tug, then smacking her knee in a friendly way and saying, "There you go!" But why risk humiliating her?

This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.