Midlife Crises Quotes

None of these things define you as a person: Your education The size of your bank account Your job title Your failures Your successes And sadly, we let so many of these things rule our lives. Obsession with crossing off the checkboxes of society's life plan leads to little other than therapy, midlife crises, and depression. ~ Srinivas Rao

You know what's funny? I don't ever feel the need to escape. I have a strong marriage. I like my life. You hear about these guys having midlife crises - I don't see that happening to me. ~ Harry Connick, Jr.

I suspect that twenty years down the road they'll be having midlife crises, feeling they were in a straitjacket. Failure to recognize that an education has to be seized rather than delivered to you is the harm that's really done. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages. ~ Lorrie Moore

The Gospels and the Epistles say next to nothing about emotional stability or midlife crises or a bad day at work. But they are practically overflowing with this one word: hope. ~ Ted Dekker

Comparing our current predicament to democratic crises in other parts of the world and at other moments of history, it becomes clear that America is not so different from other nations. Our constitutional system, while older and more robust than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies that have killed democracy elsewhere. Ultimately, then, American democracy depends on us - the citizens of the United States. No single political leader can end a democracy; no single leader can rescue one, either. Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us. ~ Steven Levitsky

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. ~ Lester R. Brown

If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises ... it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom. ~ Carmen Reinhart

Since the tragedy of Marina's death, her parents have heard from strangers around the globe surprised to find themselves writing to share the impact of "meeting" Marina through her words: Jewish teenagers visiting a series of concentration camps while on "The March of the Living" and finding specific comfort and renewed purpose in her writings; college peers living more mindfully; musicians writing songs inspired by her; older readers making midlife recalibrations and career changes, whether they are returning to school or shifting to a nonprofit or finishing that manuscript; people simply rediscovering a sense of hope. These new life paths all build from Marina's own sense that it's never too late to change, that we must take action, that we are indeed "in this together. ~ Marina Keegan

Many families are managed on the basis of crises, moods, quick fixes, and instant gratification - not on sound principles. Symptoms surface whenever stress and pressure mount: people become cynical, critical, or silent or they start yelling and overreacting. Children who observe these kinds of behavior grow up thinking the only way to solve problems is flight or fight. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Institutional nepotism might be tolerated in prosperous times. Setbacks can become crises, however, when there is incompetence in key positions at crucial moments. ~ Stewart Stafford

I've directed seven movies and know a thing or two about dealing with unexpected crises. ~ Penny Marshall

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem. ~ Ben Bernanke

The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the 'official' ideology of such society, and the 'humanities' exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil? Capitalism's reverential hat-tipping to the arts is obvious hypocrisy, except when it can hang them on its walls as a sound investment. Yet capitalist states have continued to direct funds into higher education humanities departments, and though such departments are usually the first in line for savage cutting when capitalism enters on one of its periodic crises, it is doubtful that it is only hypocrisy, a fear of appearing in its true philistine colours, which compels this grudging support. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster. The 'unique individual' is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur's right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the 'right to choose', provided this means the right to buy one's child an expensive private education while other children are depri ~ Terry Eagleton

Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out. ~ C.S. Forester

You know that you have officially HIT at total midlife crisis when you get acne on your wrinkles. ~ Tanya Masse

In sum," Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, "Our defense will be...?" He looked to Matt for the answer/
"Blame the other guy," Matt said.
"Which other guy?"
"Yes."
"Huh?"
"We blame whoever we can," Matt said. "The CFO, the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter-Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled."
"Isn't that contradictory?" Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. "Claiming both malice and mistakes?" He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded.
"We're looking to confuse," Matt said. "You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury end up knowing something went wrong but you don't know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and dotted i. We act like discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it's not. We are skeptical of EVERYONE. ~ Harlan Coben

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty. ~ Eric Hoffer

In minor crises, the preacher can extract himself emotionally and allow others to express grief and fear and doubt while he remains strong. ~ James A. Forbes

If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well. ~ Robert Greene

Capitalism cannot cause a financial crisis because capitalism is about markets constantly correcting errors. It is government intervention that can and often does cause crises, ~ John Tamny

Like heartbreak, these unpredictable crises are not something you should live in fear of. Perpetual fear won't protect you. Fear is not a citronella candle; scary life happenings are not mosquitoes. They happen in ways we can't predict, control or understand. The only guaranteed outcome of feeling scared all the time is that you will feel scared all the time. ~ Kelly Williams Brown

My ability to survive personal crises is really a mark of the character of my people. Individually and collectively, we must react with a tenacity that allows us again and again to bounce back from adversity. ~ Wilma Mankiller

You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting. ~ Max Roach

In crises of this sort the Dyckmanns had usually found it effective to stare into space, encouraging the long pause that might fetch the witty words, 'Well, dear, we must go.' But the Bairds were on an entirely different wavelength, and this was the fault of the Dyckmanns. With the removal of the bottles it had been the mutual impulse of the Bairds to shoot out the door, but their second thought was that they must not... (from "Dinner on the Rocks" (1954) by Dawn Powell) ~ Diana Secker Tesdell

What, however, makes culture and ideology attractive? They become attractive when they are seen as rooted in material success and influence. Soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power. Increases in hard economic and military power produce enhanced self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of one's own culture or soft power compared to those of other peoples and greatly increase its attractiveness to other peoples. Decreases in economic and military power lead to self-doubt, crises of identity, and efforts to find in other cultures the keys to economic, military, and political success. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

Are you having a midlife crisis?"

"You'll be having an end of life crisis if you say that again," he threatened. ~ Nicole Castle

Sometimes we need a personal crisis to reinforce in our minds what we really value and cherish. The scriptures are filled with examples of people facing crises before learning how to better serve God and others. Perhaps if you, too, search your hearts and courageously assess the priorities in your life, you may discover, as I did, that you need a better balance among your priorities. ~ M. Russell Ballard

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Midlife: when the Universe grabs your shoulders and tells you I'm not f-ing around, use the gifts you were given. ~ Brene Brown

Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which ... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises. ~ Andre Maurois

It is so important not to let ourselves off the hook or to become apathetic or cynical by telling ourselves that nothing works or makes a difference. Every day, light your small candle ... The inaction and actions of many human beings over a long time contributed to the crises our children face, and it is the action and struggle of many human beings over time that will solve them-with God's help. So every day, light your small candle. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Behold, I am writing anew, through scribes on Earth who are willing to listen to me again with new ears, in the light of the present crises on planet Earth. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.... In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. ~ Charles Duhigg

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.
So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling. ~ Leon Trotsky

In many ways the culmination of [Judith Butler's] thinking to date, 'Parting Ways' will confirm Butler's place at the forefront of debate about one of the most anguished political crises of our times. ~ Jacqueline Rose

What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision. ~ Jeannette Rankin

Whenever you face obstacles, crises and dilemmas and your confidence is in your associates more than in God- it is a sign your faith is deteriorating. ~ T.D. Jakes

Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction. ~ Amish Tripathi

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it ~ Jules Renard

Are you turning into a cougar? Is this some sort of midlife crisis I need to be concerned about? ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

It has always been the role of government to help solve problems, including and especially health crises. Obesity is a health epidemic across our country, and we have a responsibility as a government and a society to do all we can to promote good nutrition and healthy eating so we can reverse this alarming trend. ~ Richard J. Codey

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises. ~ Lawrence Summers

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. ~ Seamus Heaney

Crises in themselves are highly educational. ~ Henry Arthur Jones

When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases. ~ Erik Erikson

War crimes, you say?

No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified.

I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return.

Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters.

So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen.

But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera.

The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity
births, widowhood, illnesses
and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well. ~ Dorothy Gilman

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die or hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

...the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be born as an inevitable fate; that, on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort should not only indicate the means, but also how to employ them. No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order. ~ Eric Voegelin