Quotes About Ordeal

The ordeal of command consists in this: that one makes decisions of fatal consequence based on ludicrously inadequate intelligence.

The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude.

We all have ordeals we must face," Menshiki said. "It's through them that we find a new direction in our lives. The more grueling the ordeal, the more it can help us down the road.

A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.

As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer's ordeal signified that the postwar "messianic role of the scientists" was now at an end.

I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

under the long and discurtained ordeal of the morrow's dawn, that

Well, I think they're all basically the same story. Every culture in the world has them. When you strip it down and analyze it, it's the young man or girl who goes through a trial or ordeal and hits a very low ebb but manages to get guidance from a Merlin type figure.

It is evident that it is the belief of Christian people in this country and in all other enlightened portions of the world that as a nation, we have passed through a severe ordeal - that severe judgments have been poured out upon us on account of the manner in which a poor, oppressed race was treated in this country.

Rohan gave her a coaxing nod toward the food like a man trying to get a wounded wild animal to eat. Was that what she had become after her ordeal? At home on the windy moors, alone with the falcons and the wild ponies, she had never been all that tame to start with.

His insolent gaze traveled over her body. "I hear you're quite the little saint." "Compared to whom? Caro?" His cynical smirk widened to a genuine smile at her retort. "I daresay you're having a bit of an adventure, aren't you?" "An ordeal is more like it." "Well, you seem to have come through it all in fine spirit." He pressed away from the door and sauntered toward her.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

Bears?" Epaphroditus wrinkled his nose. "Everyone knows Prometheus was tormented by vultures. Every day they tore out his entrails, and every night he was miraculously healed, so that the ordeal was endlessly repeated." Martial laughed. "The trainer who can induce vultures to attack on command will be able to name any price! I suspect we'll see a lot of bears today.

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted.

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal . For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.

The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.

No, the Great Disaster had shown no predilection toward sparing the nice people, and the survivors had not been rendered pleasanter as the result of the ordeal through which they had passed.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

The Oath concerns the future, not the past. You earn its Emblem not by your success in passing exams, but by your free acceptance of the responsibility an agent must carry, your consent to the ordeal of that responsibility.

Oath concerns the future, not the past. You earn its Emblem not by your success in passing exams, but by your free acceptance of the responsibility an agent must carry, your consent to the ordeal of that responsibility." That

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Lanny thought it was just as well that F.D.R. didn't have to undergo the ordeal of another interview with that hysterical Frenchman, who called himself a successor to Joan of Arc and whose mind had come straight out of that period of history.