Quotes About Calamity

but Love, the tyrant of men, porter of the dearest chambers of Venus, we worship not, the destroyer and visitant of men in all shapes of calamity, when he comes.

Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.

Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love.

Incessant falls teach men to reform, and distress rouses their strength. Life springs from calamity, and death from ease.

There are other things to fear, Monsieur,' Villefort said, 'apart from death, old age and madness. For example, apoplexy, that lightning bolt which strikes you down without destroying you, yet after which all is finished. You are still yourself, but you are no longer yourself: from a near-angel like Ariel you have become a dull mass which, like Caliban, is close to the beasts. As I said, in human language, this is quite simply called an apoplexy or stroke.

No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters.

MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

Probably fire and pestilence to follow, could be a plague of boils and locusts, maybe an egg and bacon shortage to top things off.

What casual monsters we are. What calamities we are capable of.

A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping.

Calamity is a blessing when it brings one to God. --- Hadassah

Calamity is blessing when it brings one to God.

the sunset. A violent calamity of color spilled over the sky as the sun dipped beneath the horizon.

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

what had destroyed the Earth was not any unforeseeable disaster at all, nor any sudden and irreversible calamity. No. Predictions were made and justified and proved to be valid, and then simply ignored for commercial reasons.

What amazed Cardinal Sandomme not a little was that all the bishops present were behaving as if there were something new and unexpected in the situation, as if some new calamity had suddenly hit mankind's spiritual fiber. Yet this was nothing but the latest step on the road of spiritual degradation mankind had taken long ago . . .

In my errant life I roamed to learn the secrets of women and men, of gods and dreams. I lived in wealth and poverty, in fame and calamity. I saw every country of our world, I lived a thousand lives. Many lives I spent, other lives I squandered, for in my life I never traveled, all I did was wander.

It was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ—God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death) for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying.

A calamity, a catastrophe- it changes everything, doesn't it? It makes you aware that you cannot be indifferent toward your life. You cannot simply give away your life.

I've heard that in the moments before an earthquake, all nature falls completely silent. Birds alight and stop chirping, squirrels stop running, rivers stop flowing. I don't know if this is true or not, but that's what the meeting felt like at that moment. An eerie, unnatural quiet before something awful.