Bitter Circumstance Quotes

Abhorrence towards bitter circumstances and attachment towards sweet ones is the nature of agnan (ignorance of the self). Bitter and sweet will not exist if agnan (ignorance of the self) leaves. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Clearly, one primary purpose of our existence upon the earth is to obtain a body of flesh and bones. We have also been given the gift of agency. In a thousand ways we are privileged to choose for ourselves. Here we learn from the hard taskmaster of experience. We discern between good and evil. We differentiate as to the bitter and the sweet. We discover that there are consequences attached to our actions. ~ Thomas S. Monson

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

We have little control over the circumstances of life. We can't control the weather or the economy, and we can't control what other people say about or do to us. There is only one area where we have control
we can rule the kingdom inside. The heart of every problem is the problem in the heart. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

Fly from wrath; sad be the sights and bitter fruits of war; a thousand furies wait on wrathful swords. ~ Edmund Spenser

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms. ~ Louise Gluck

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core. ~ Lauren Groff

Let us candidly confess our indebtedness to the needle. How many hours of sorrow has it softened, how many bitter irritations calmed, how many confused thoughts reduced to order, how many life-plans sketched in purple! ~ Caroline Wells Healey Dall

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better. ~ Susan Orlean

The importance of patience and communication. Having a child and husband, working crazy and unpredictable times for shows, and traveling to teach dance around America can make life a bit stressful. I have had to learn to communicate with everyone attached to my life no matter what the circumstance. ~ Allison Holker

Unrequited love does not die; it's only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before. ~ Elle Newmark

Considering one's plate is full with circumstance, how senseless is it to assume one is able to digest someone else's hopelessness? ~ T.F. Hodge

A crisis can knock us off balance, making us afraid, vulnerable, and ripe for change. This also happens in our spiritual journey. We have a crisis in our faith that causes us to reconsider. It might frighten us, at least make us vulnerable. If we become bitter or too resistant, we can get very stuck. But if we let the change or crisis touch us, if we live with it and embrace it as difficult as that is, we are more likely to grow and to move eventually to another stage or spiral in our journey [of faith]. When we are most vulnerable, we have the best chance to learn and move along the way. In the midst of pain there is promise. ~ Janet O. Hagberg

How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of "the modern" wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Believe in miracles. I have seen so many of them come when every other indication would say that hope was lost. Hope is never lost. If those miracles do not come soon or fully or seemingly at all, remember the Savior's own anguished example: if the bitter cup does not pass, drink it and be strong, trusting in happier days ahead. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

What today throws at you will force you to become better or bitter for tomorrow; it will push you toward breakdown or breakthrough ... ~ Brian D. McLaren

The glass bottle does not know its own contents. It has no idea whether it is a vessel for the most delicious apple cider, a lovingly crafted wine, or a bitter poison. ~ Lang Leav

Don't let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world's already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world. ~ James Baldwin

Her name ... was Mrs. marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: "They are like chimpanzees," she said, in her bitter exclamatory voice. She grimaced, baring her teeth grotesquely. "Eee!" she said. "I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive. ~ Dan Chaon

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [ ... ] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator
our very self-consciousness
is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. ~ Annie Dillard

You picked that out?" Caine asked. "That pink, plastic toy?"
I turned to look at him. "I happen to have been a little girl, once upon a time, detective. I know what they like. Every little girl wants to be a princess."
A thoughtful frown overcame the angry tension on Caine's rugged face. "And what happens when they grow up?"
I thought of my mother and sisters and all the horrors that had happened the day they'd died. A bitter laugh escaped from my tight lips.
"Then they just want to be little girls again. ~ Jennifer Estep

Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.' ~ Sextus Empiricus

Some friendships in life sustain themselves only at a particular life stage, products of some mutual developmental problem to be resolved together, or of some external circumstance, like being housed in the same dormitory in boarding school. Others grow out of a deeper spiritual and philosophical affinity, which continues throughout life. ~ Jill Ker Conway

Lleu is a hard lord," said Huw, "He is killing Gronw without anger, without love, without mercy. He is hurt too much by the woman and the spear. Yet what is there when it is done? His pride. No spear. No friend."
Roger started at Huw. "You're not so green as you're grass-looking, are you?" he said. "Now you mention it, I have been thinking - That bloke Gronw was the only one with any real guts at the end."
"But none of them is all to blame," said Huw. "It is only together they are destroying each other."
"That Blod-woman was pretty poor," said Roger, "however you look at it."
"No," said Huw. "She was made for her lord. Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she was longing for the time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns. ~ Alan Garner

Our life is full of brokenness - broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God's faithful presence in our lives. ~ Henri Nouwen

[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook. ~ David Hume

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn