Quotes About Wretchedness

For the funds will fall and be the ruin of thousands, and when England is sunk into a salutary wretchedness and discontent, then our opportunity will come.

You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you.

There's a limit, Alec. You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive.

we know that every alleviation, however slight, of the wretchedness of our great cities is followed by a very considerable diminution of crime;

all charity only tends to perpetuate the wretchedness it aims to eradicate

The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness.

But how are you, metalman?' said Ford. 'Very depressed.' 'What's up?' 'I don't know,' said Marvin, 'I've never been there.' 'Why,' said Ford squatting down beside him and shivering, 'are you lying face down in the dust?' 'It's a very effective way of being wretched,' said Marvin. 'Don't pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me.

It makes me so desperately sad to witness just how unforgivably wretched our world has become.

As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God's chosen people to Rome for some coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was an insult to God. It was a blight upon the entire land. It had to be wiped away.

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

Is demum miser est, cuius nobilitas miserias nobilitat. Indeed, wretched the man whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood. Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood - Mud and rain.

A perfect equality will indeed be produced; that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the partitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above. They never raise what is below: and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest. [Thoughts and Details on Scarcity]

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.3 What do you see in your own heart?

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.

For herein Fortune shows herself more kindThan is her custom: it is still her useTo let the wretched man outlive his wealth,To view with hollow eye and wrinkled browAn age of poverty.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Poor wretch!' I thought; 'you have a heart and nerves the same as your brother men! Why should you be anxious to conceal them? Your pride cannot blind God! You tempt him to wring them, till he forces a cry of humiliation.

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. . . . Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us; the other softens us. They go together. —PEMA CHÖDRÖN