Horror Of Life Quotes

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal. ~ Henry Miller

Six days, and I have eaten nothing. It is night. I am sitting in my chair. Ah, God! I wonder have any ever felt the horror of life that I have come to know? I am swathed in terror. I feel ever the burning of this dread growth. It has covered all my right arm and side, and is beginning to creep up my neck. To-morrow, it will eat into my face. I shall become a terrible mass of living corruption. There is no escape. Yet, a thought has come to me, born of a sight of the gun-rack, on the other side of the room. I have looked again - with the strangest of feelings. The thought grows upon me. God, Thou knowest, Thou must know, that death is better, aye, better a thousand times than This. This! Jesus, forgive me, but I cannot live, cannot, cannot! I dare not! I am beyond all help - there is nothing else left. It will, at least, spare me that final horror… … .
"I think I must have been dozing. I am very weak, and oh! so miserable, so miserable and tired - tired. The rustle of the paper, tries my brain[…] ~ William Hope Hodgson

Science is getting knocked on all sides these days, not only from religious fundamentalists, but from all kinds of people who perceive science as arrogant, one-sided, and the source of the troubles that come with the technology it produces. It's true that individuL scientists can be so arrogant and narrowly focused, they're blind to any but their own truths, and that new discoveries bring new problems with them. Still, I don't know many people who would refuse a biopsy for a newly discovered lump because they think science needs to be taken down a peg or two.

Religion gets knocked for the same kinds of reasons as science: for its arrogance, narowmindedness, and tendency to create more trouble than it's worth. Religion is also accused of concealing reality under a comforting blanket of measureless faith -- the flip side, perhaps of the scientist for whom nothing can be real until she has measured it.

My own sojourn into religion convinced me that good religion reveals rather than conceals. Religion is the soul in search of itself and its relationship to the cosmos. This journey requires looking at all of it: the joy, the sorrow, the beauty and the horror of life. We hope for the best. We want meaning and love to exist not only in ourselves, but in the very soul of the universe. At times this great hope might tempt us to pick and choose only the data that supports our desires. But in religion as in boat-building, the design must be tested in all conditions ~ Margaret D. McGee

I don't complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can't even dream of being removed from my feeling of suffering. ~ Fernando Pessoa

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. ~ Charles Baudelaire

At present this horror of life is already less pronounced, and the melancholy less acute. But I still have no will, and hardly any desires, or none at all that are to do with ordinary life. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art. ~ Franz Kafka

[Aunt Dahlia to Bertie Wooster] 'To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot--certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post. I thought as much. Well, it needed but this. I don't see how things could possibly be worse than they are, but no doubt you will succeed in making them so. Your genius and insight will find the way. Carry on, Bertie. Yes, carry on. I am past caring now. I shall even find a faint interest in seeing into what darker and profounder abysses of hell you can plunge this home. Go to it, lad..I remember years ago, when you were in your cradle, being left alone with you one day and you nearly swallowed your rubber comforter and started turning purple. And I, ass that I was, took it out and saved your life. Let me tell you, young Bertie, it will go very hard with you if you ever swallow a rubber comforter again when only I am by to aid. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life. ~ Jean Giraudoux

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding. ~ Martha Beck

(Satan's) first goal, of course, is to make sure we never meet the Prince who is Jesus of Nazareth or experience a taste of the Great Ball, But once we have, Satan's second and lifelong purpose with each of us is to make sure we never know who we really are; indeed, to keep us living the life of a cellar maid rather than a princess. Even though we who are believers have tasted the Ball and the love of the Prince in beginning ways, the voices of the stepsisters continue to speak to us in tones varying from whispers to shouts, and like Cinderella, each of us has our own years as a "cellar maid" that the enemy can whisper to us about, causing us to wonder if this isn't who we really are after all. ~ John Eldredge

It is my sincerest hope to leave this world in better shape than which I found it. Everyone says that. However the distinction I feel that is necessary to make is. I hope to leave this world better in spite of my departure, not because of it. ~ Kay Whitley

Life brings sorrows and joys alike. It is what a man does with them - not what they do to him - that is the true test of his mettle. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Sometimes you will need to leap from one end of this paradoxical spectrum to the other in a matter of minutes, and then back again. As I write this book, for instance, I approach each sentence as if the future of humanity depends upon my getting that sentence just right. I care, because I want it to be lovely. Therefore, anything less than a full commitment to that sentence is lazy and dishonorable. But as I edit my sentence - sometimes immediately after writing it - I have to be willing to throw it to the dogs and never look back. (Unless, of course, I decide that I need that sentence again after all, in which case I must dig up its bones, bring it back to life, and once again regard it as sacred.) It matters./It doesn't matter. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Life is always full of drama and challenges, but you don't have to overreact to any of it if you choose not to. ~ Sonia Choquette

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life. ~ Miguel De Unamuno

Teamwork requires that everyone's efforts flow in a single direction. Feelings of significance happen when a team's energy takes on a life of its own. ~ Pat Riley

The Drunken Fisherman"

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher's sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when ~ Robert Lowell

All of life is change. When we learn to stop fighting it, that's when we can start to be happy. ~ Traci Depree

As to the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it. ~ Martin Van Buren

[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. ~ Maggie Nelson

In India, there's a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It's called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me. ~ Ram Dass

I never had any real security in my life until I found the false security of stardom. ~ Robert Donat

Of course he had committed forgery;
of course he had committed robbery. That, indeed, was nothing, for he had been cheating and forging and stealing all his life. ~ Anthony Trollope

The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck - good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever. All ~ Edward O. Wilson

I once told Tommy Smothers, 'If I could just get the money and the women straightened out, the rest of my life would be easy.' ~ Pat Paulsen

Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life. ~ Charles Saatchi

"In my youth," said his father, "I look to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw Has lasted the rest of my life." ~ Lewis Carroll

It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view ~ Soren Kierkegaard

I may not have avoided certain wounds in my life, but I do appreciate these scars because they are a constant reminder of my victories. ~ Gift Gugu Mona

The goal of my life is to tie adventure to my feet, stock memories in my pocket, hold imagination in my palms like fairy dust and sprinkle it on my tales. ~ Mitali Meelan

Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight that they are incredulous of a man's habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of Life. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As the long limousine purred to life Edwina felt as if she were Elizabeth, setting sail to battle the Spanish Armada. She was Elizabeth, damn it! What she had built no one was going to take away from her. Not her house, not her hotels, not her fine stable of horses
and most especially not the young thoroughbred she had left sleeping by the side of her Olympic-size outdoor pool. Some pleasures, she decided, were simply too enticing to give up. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Every human being is bound to taste death: and you shall receive your rewards in full on the Day of Resurrection. He who is kept away from the Fire and is admitted to Paradise, will surely triumph; for the life of this world is nothing but an illusory enjoyment. ~ Anonymous

Life isn't fair. Fair is somewhere you go to ride the dodgems and win a goldfish. (from Rush of Blood) ~ Mark Billingham

Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Children have two basic needs, writes Erich Fromm in the Art of Loving: they need both milk and honey from their parents. Milk symbolizes the care given to physical needs ... Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, that special quality that makes life sing with enjoyment for all it holds. Gromm says, "Most parents are capable of giving milk, but only a minority of giving honey, too." To give honey, one must love honey and have it to give. ~ Gladys M. Hunt

Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches. ~ Simran Keshwani

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime. ~ Bryant McGill

For us, warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who can not provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity. ~ Sitting Bull

Strive for balance in your life. You are the heart and soul of your business so take care of yourself. ~ Joey A. Concepcion

We are not for ourselves. We live for the glory of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Part of my life is spent designing in urban centers, and part of my life has been spent in factories. But the other part of my life is spent in nature. ~ Yves Behar

No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality. ~ D. Elton Trueblood

I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for nothing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I want to show the richness of even the most disagreeable bits of life. ~ Alfonso A. Ossorio

As I watch Nicholas make his way back to his truck, I know one thing: this boy is going to make my life very interesting. I feel as if a fragment of the old me broke away tonight and disappeared, and I'm finally, truly beginning my new life. ~ Marie Landry

The sun and the endless hours of swinging a machete in the fields had taken him from child to old man with no stage in between. ~ Judith Ortiz Cofer

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence. ~ Charles Krauthammer