Quotes About Wrongness

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting ... But that's not all people laugh at. Isn't it? Perhaps I don't grok all its fullness yet. But find me something that really makes you laugh sweetheart... a joke, or anything else- but something that gave you a a real belly laugh, not a smile. Then we'll see if there isn't a wrongness wasn't there. He thought. I grok when apes learn to laugh, they'll be people.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because its the only thing that'll make it stop hurting. But find me something that makes you laugh, a joke, anything--but something that gave you a belly laugh, not a smile. Then we'll see if there isn't wrongness somewhere and whether you would laugh if the wrongness wasn't there.

An air car was just landing in the garden by the pool and beings under it were complaining of injuries and indignities done them. Perhaps this was the trouble he could feel? Grasses were for walking on, flowers and bushes were not—this was a wrongness.

sin' is rarely concerned with a real wrongness but sin is what the sinner groks as sin—and when you grok with him, it can hurt. I know.

Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting.

Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city.

He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

I know she's looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they always were.

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

Christopher Nolan's 168-minute odyssey through the space-time continuum is stuffed with stuff of bewildering wrongness.

Religion, while often offering a sense of trust in something bigger than ourselves, can also transmit the message of basic wrongness, especially around thoughts, bodies, and sexuality. When children are raised with a belief system that tells them, "If you think certain thoughts (primarily around sexuality) you have sinned," it's a setup for anxiety.

Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist.

Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist... the idea that such as he could belong to anything.

Yet his feeling of wrongness now ached in his skull.

We should be so aware of sin and its wrongness that the minute we see our sin we quickly move through the process of repentance. Remember, though, that the prayer must be more than just a cry for help in time of crisis–the prayer must reflect a heart that desires to change.

I could feel my difference—my wrongness—like an itch on my skin that threatened to spread into an ugly rash for everybody to see.

Captain considered it, and shrugged. It seems right, he said. It is not precisely what El wanted; but enthroned as he is in his Palace, viewing the Land from a high seat, he does not see its complexity. This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about it new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.

People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wrongness "felt right at the time," which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

The question of the rightness or wrongness of Potts appeared to be one on which he was loth to set himself up as an authority.

Denial—usually in some form of rationalization—is the primary device that humans use to deal with their own wrongness. It was the first thing out of the mouths of Adam and Eve after they sinned, and it continues up to the latest edition of the newspaper. The prophetic witness from God must throw itself against the massive weight of group and individual denial, often institutionalized and subtly built into our customary ways of speaking and interacting.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.