Succumb Quotes

Let's face it: Today silly women mired in the sophistries and seductions of the world, and haughty women obsessed with themselves, abound. Regrettably, many women succumb to the temptation to judge, gossip, and undermine one another. ~ Sheri Dew

One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future. ~ Steven L. Stephenson

People want everything to come out of a drive thru window. They want it instant and they want it fast. I succumb to that, we all succumb to that. We're in it. That's the culture. So the enemy, the powers that be, the manipulators behind the scenes play to our natural weaknesses. ~ Alex Jones

Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon's slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts. ~ Mariella Frostrup

For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure. ~ Tracy Chevalier

There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them. ~ Eli Roth

Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document ... The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences. ~ Thomas Sowell

I'm starting to think that most villains aren't evil - they are just misundertood.
Or victims of that manipulative force: Love.
Love causes war and causes death, breaks souls and breaks lives. It runs people into the ground, makes them behave like moronic, immoral beasts, before it dances off, leaving only destruction in its wake - hearts blown wide open for the whole world to see.
Love puts the blame on the poor souls who succumb to it.
Love, that ultimate villainess. She makes examples of us all.
And yet we still come back for more.
We keep playing the role she gives us.
For one more chance to feel alive. ~ Karina Halle

Sometimes we have to face things, face people, face situations in life that we don't like to deal with," he said. "It can feel like everybody is out to get you. That's when you have to refuse to succumb, make people realize you are a force - but you also have to give and take in these situations. ~ Duff McKagan

Those individuals who refuse to join in the lies supporting the war are condemned as being unpatriotic, ill-informed, or friends of the enemy. If the propaganda doesn't silence them and they are seen as a sufficient threat to the war machine, the government will enact laws granting power to arrest and punish those refusing to succumb to the propaganda. This will be done not only to punish the direct targets. It will also be done to frighten others who may be considering boldly challenging the authoritarians supporting a war that will only benefit the special interests. ~ Ron Paul

Then Er Lang was looking at me ruefully. "You have taken at least fifty years of my life!"
I was stricken. "Take it back!"
"I can't. But fortunately, my life span is many times yours."
"How long can a dragon live?"
"A thousand years, if he is lucky. Not all of us are, of course." He raised an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry." I couldn't look him in the eye. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the strong line of his throat. If he had given me blood, I would surely have killed him. But Er Lang was struggling to sit up.
"I should have stopped you sooner. Though I now understand why men succumb to ghosts." He spoke lightly, but my ears blazed with mortification.
"You were the one who put your tongue in my mouth!" I blurted out, regretting it instantly. To talk about other people's tongues was the worst, revealing the depths of my inexperience. And yet, the memory of his made me shiver and burn, as though I had a fever. It hadn't been like this with Tian Bai; it was easy to understand where I stood with him. But he had been courting me, whereas Er Lang was an entirely different commodity. We did not have that sort of relationship, I reminded myself.
But he merely gave me a wry glance. "I was a little carried away."
"Thank you," I said at last. I realized it was the first time I had thanked him formally. ~ Yangsze Choo

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Hotel Du Lac
Edith, once again anonymous, and accepting her anonymity, made an appropriately inconspicuous exit. And, sitting in the deserted salon, the first to arrive from the dining room, she felt her precarious dignity hard-pressed and about to succumb in the light of her earlier sadness. The pianist, sitting down to play, gave her a brief nod. She nodded back, and thought how limited her means of expression had become: nodding to the pianist or to Mme de Bonneuil, listening to Mrs Pusey, using a disguised voice in the novel she was writing and, with all of this, waiting for a voice that remained silent, hearing very little that meant anything to her at all. The dread implications of this condition made her blink her eyes and vow to be brave, to do better, not to give way. But it was not easy. ~ Anita Brookner

Those who are coerced by force become our enemies, those who succumb to reason become our allies. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Taste of sin is terrible in that it is the sweetest tasting fruit. Did not even Eve succumb to it? The more you taste it, the more greedy you become for it. ~ Jeyamohan

For worship is, essentially, the reverse of sin. Sin began (and begins) when we succumb to the temptation, "You shall be as gods." We make ourselves the center of the universe and dethrone God. By contrast, worship is giving God his true worth; it is acknowledging Him to be the Lord of all things, and the Lord of everything in our lives. He is, indeed, the Most High God! ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

He's unbelievably smart. He continually shows me what he can take from me if he wants to, and then turns the tables on me, making me realize how much I want him to have it anyway. How much I want to give it to him. I hate that. On principle I want to not succumb to the manipulation this time. To show the bastard he's not as smart as he thinks he is. Only he is. He's an evil fucking mastermind. ~ Callie Hart

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did. ~ Sally Ride

I think, actually I know that it's overwhelmingly possible for men to conduct such atrocities as to kill a man in cold blood, to burn towns and to parade with the the dead on the tips of their swords. People who think they are doing something for the good of all are the most dangerous and stirs their intent deeper. There might have been a time when I thought differently and I would have answered with a quick no but that time had long passed. Do I think it's in human nature to be violent and to succumb to it? Sure I do. It's to justify it, that I think is inhuman. ~ Celia Mcmahon

night has enveloped, to give me some relief
now invisible are walls of separation, and thy grief

where blood quenches the thirst
disloyalty is faith last and first
is the religion my beloved belongs to

I beckoned, red and black robed lady with a wand
let me take her by the hand
heard of her about sorcery
her powers useless, and witch now about to succumb
from just a gaze of eyes filled with Kohl of Leila

my nights worthless, body breathless
every moment, feeling restless
be silent and hear, hear me, my cries
don't forget the promise you swore
I have lost my childhood over you

don't know, how these years left me alone
sufferings, separation, theft me alone
I never knew how pain excrutiates
sometimes, i enlivened you my dear
Love is a blessing, and not a fear

in a melancholy cloudy day, I mourn
glistening eyes, weeping sky, and heart torn
I gaze from a window in Kashmir
For a moment, condoling the tragedy, sighing
In sombre time, lifeless, as if dying ~ Mirza Sharafat Hussain Beigh

If Republican legislators succumb to their political addiction to compromise for the sake of getting something passed, no matter how odious, they'll be laying out the red carpet of inevitability for socialized care. Once government gets its foot in the door, more government control is unavoidable. ~ David Limbaugh

By strict obedience Jesus won. He did not succumb to Satan's temptings. And if we do what the Lord says, we have no need to fear the consequences. 'Thy will, not mine, O Lord' can be comforting in times of testing or decision. God loves us. He loves you! His will for you when obeyed means your ultimate joy. ~ Elaine Cannon

Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it. ~ Italo Calvino

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato. ~ Leo Strauss

How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them. ~ Lauren Groff

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a l ~ Junot Diaz

How many relationships would be better if they were born out of something genuine rather than merely a petty desire? Divorce would drop because people would know why they started doing something in the first place. Teen pregnancy would almost be eradicated because for the first time we wouldn't need to simply succumb to our desires and cravings pushed onto us from the media and society in general. Prostitutes would be searching for redundancy packages and brothel owners for new careers, and the whole shallow and superficial nature of sex would be under the spotlight. ~ Evan Sutter

I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate. ~ Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death. ~ Thomas Bernhard

The common cultural narratives would tell me that I somehow failed myself, that I'm a quitter or a loser, that I just didn't "have it," that I gave up on my dream and that maybe I let myself succumb to the pressures of society. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn't. End of story. ~ Mark Manson

Ignorance is like a disease. If you don't fight it, it will spread until we all succumb to it. ~ Sara Furlong Burr

To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human. Of course... We are all doomed; we are all poisoned from our birth by the rot of stars. That does not mean we should succumb...to the seductive fallacy of despair, the dark tide that would drown us. You may think I'm stupid, you may call me a madman and a fool, but at least I stand upright in a fallen world. ~ Rick Yancey

If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, man cannot but succumb to it. ~ Simone Weil

What, I'm supposed to succumb to your ideal image of what this is? No. I'm gonna stand above that and I'm gonna be who I am and be a rolemodel for these girls. ~ Demi Lovato

To ignore the religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb to politically correct delusion. ~ Ruth Marcus

Only he qualifies to be an INDIVIDUAL, who has created an IMAGE for himself, in tune with his INTRINSIC NATURE, for majority only succumb to the human stupidity and perish! ~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Adaptability is the name of the game; if you understand that you must now be adaptable and flexible, you will find a way to succeed in your career. If not, you will succumb to job market pressures. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I am generous to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my suppressed rage, that I am punctual only only to hide how little I care about other peoples time. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

From October 2003, I uncovered the following quote, which fully expressed the climate of fear of the time ---

"Any democratic government, whether threatened by real or perceived enemies, can succumb to Fascism if its people permit the slow or precipitate undoing, by executive or legislative fiat, of their civil liberties. ~ Irwin Hood Hoover

We should learn to smile as we fall,
So much so as when we have it all. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force. ~ Lech Walesa

One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

The bells of the Gion monastery in India echo with the warning that all things are impermanent. The blossoms of the sala trees teach us through their hues that what flourishes must fade. The proud do not prevail for long but vanish like a spring night's dream. In time the mighty, too, succumb: all are dust before the wind. ~ Heike

Not one of the creatures of blood can escape death. We all face it, and succumb to it. It follows us like a dark shadow. Yet if we live in terror of it, then we do not live at all. Yes we are born alone, and yes we will die alone. But in between, Tae, we live. We know joy. ~ David Gemmell

To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Any democratic government, whether threatened by real or perceived enemies, can succumb to Fascism if its people permit the slow or precipitate undoing, by executive or legislative fiat, of their civil liberties.
― W R Montgomery (October 2003) ~ W R Montgomery

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb. ~ Noam Chomsky

Piece by Piece Piece by piece They tear at you: Peeling away layers of being, Lying about who you are, Speaking for your dreams. In the squalor of their eyes You are an outlaw. Dressing you in a jacket of lies - tailor-made in steel - You fit their perfect picture. Take it off! Make your own mantle. Question the interrogators. Eyeball the death in their gaze. Say you won't succumb. Say you won't believe them When they rename you. Say you won't accept their codes, Their colors, their putrid morals. Here you have a way. Here you can sing victory. Here you are not a conquered race Perpetual victim - the sullen face in a thunderstorm. Hands/minds, they are carving out A sanctuary. Use these weapons Against them. Use your given gifts - they are not stone. ~ Luis J Rodriguez

As I lay in bed trying to figure out the tangle I had gotten myself into, I realised temptation struck human beings in different forms. In the form of chocolates for children, drugs for young adults, bribe money for people in influential positions, and sometimes in the form of lust –like the kind I had been struck with. Human beings succumbed to this temptation despite knowing too well that they would suffer the consequences days, weeks, months or even years later. ~ Jagdish Joghee

The essential insight and consistent point of view of Islam is tawhid: the fundamental Oneness underlying all of existence. From the perspective of tawhid, everything is emerging from God, being sustained by God, and ultimately returning to God. This has profound significance for all of our experience within this existence. All areas of human knowledge are related to this fundamental, unifying Truth. Sufism is the science, the objective knowledge, of the souls relationship to God. This science describes an Origin, a downward arc of manifestation, and an upward arc of return. In the arc of manifestation, everything is coming down from God into successive levels of ever denser realities. In the arc of return, we recognize our Origin and begin the journey back toward its light. This essentially means that we ourselves must become more conscious of the light within ourselves.

[...]

The arc of return calls us to make a journey from darkness and toward the light. The immediate darkness we face around us is the imaginary world created by human ignorance, fear, self-righteousness, and hatred. We must not succumb to the mass heedlessness and self-hypnotism which presents itself to us, mostly through the mass media, as the so-called real world.
It is our responsibility to find and act upon the knowledge that can guide us in that journey. This means establishing the truth of tawhid within our own minds and hearts.

~ Essays and talks by Kabir Helmins ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes. ~ Tom Robbins

Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.

Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub – the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual beco ~ C.G. Jung

What I call "slumdog hope" is unique. It is the ability of the mind to be hopeful in the worst of the worst scenarios when a person with normal emotional strength may crack and succumb to the pressures of life. Those who possess this unflinching and undettered hope are likely to become slumdog millionaries. ~ Vishwas Chavan

In ev'ry life there comes a winter bleak
That, in it, never yet seems life to come
And on each heart such desolation wreak
That even light from Heaven seems succumb'.
But, even as in year, doth follow Spring
As ever hath it, through all Ages past
Yet so in life a joy again will ring
And light and love will come again at last. ~ Stephanie Osborn

A vigorous democracy a democracy in which there are freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech would never succumb to communism or any other ism. ~ Helen Gahagan Douglas

Be not defeated by the rain, Nor let the wind prove your better.
Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.

Be strong in body. Unfettered by desire. Not enticed to anger. Cultivate a quiet joy.
Count yourself last in everything. Put others before you.
Watch well and listen closely. Hold the learned lessons dear.

A thatch-roof house, in a meadow, nestled in a pine grove's shade.

A handful of rice, some miso, and a few vegetables to suffice for the day.

If, to the East, a child lies sick: Go forth and nurse him to health.
If, to the West, an old lady stands exhausted: Go forth, and relieve her of burden.
If, to the South, a man lies dying: Go forth with words of courage to dispel his fear.
If, to the North, an argument or fight ensues:
Go forth and beg them stop such a waste of effort and of spirit.

In times of drought, shed tears of sympathy.
In summers cold, walk in concern and empathy.

Stand aloof of the unknowing masses:
Better dismissed as useless than flattered as a "Great Man".

This is my goal, the person I strive to become. ~ Kenji Miyazawa

The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don't allow us to succumb to self-doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard. ~ Ken Robinson

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being. ~ Alain Badiou

Do not surrender to the one that rules this world, you have the greater One in you ~ Sunday Adelaja

The essence of Macbeth is seeing a great and intelligent man succumb to the forces of darkness. What gives the tragedy ~ William Shakespeare

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know - if we know anything at all - is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt - spectacularly, brazenly - into the unknown. ~ Dani Shapiro

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. ~ Umberto Eco

Galen glanced at the peregrine circling them. He couldn't shake the feeling that the falcon and Logan's need to uncover who was behind the magic controlling the bird just might be the tipping point that caused Logan to succumb to the darkness. ~ Donna Grant

Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain's weight. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable. This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives. ~ Lemony Snicket

I have fallen in love with writing, unknowingly. Instead of thinking whether people will like what I write or not, I decide to write only for one person- myself! I told myself that 'I as an author is going to entertain I as an audience.' And everything changed that day!

When you find your passion, don't succumb to the pressure of succeeding.Follow your passion just for yourself and for the sheer joy of it. You will see amazing things will follow- that's a guarantee. ~ Vishwas Mudagal

Dendera silences me with a hand on my cheek. "You listen to me, Meira Dynam. Yes, you have made mistakes, but I have watched you succumb to this role over the past few months, and that, I believe, is the biggest mistake you have made. The biggest mistake we all made. We've all been afraid, and Meira, you look at me. You saved us. You, this beautiful, wild girl before me - you saved us. So be you again, and whoever that is will be exactly what we need. ~ Sara Raasch

In Stalin's famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number. ~ Alex Von Tunzelmann

It's strange to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing even in the simplest of people. When you're sleepy, you seem to be getting sick, losing energy, losing clear thought, lying down out of weakness. Then you succumb to the weakness and what happens next resembles death. And then you dream. You abide in a world whose rules are hidden even from you - you who create it. ~ Tony Burgess

Man struggles to survive, not to succumb ~ Paulo Coelho

The issue is not the fear. Rather, the issue is in succumbing to the fear. For when we do, all of the marvelous possibilities that stand in front of us will never find themselves sitting behind us. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When you succumb to obedience, in an erotic sense, you are not giving away a part of yourself, but seeking something new, something other, within yourself. ~ Chloe Thurlow

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Irish ex-priests don't succumb to drunkenness, we just become more talkative on whiskey, ~ Matthew Quick

No person can escape the germs of their eventual deterioration and destruction. A round-table of physical breakdown and death awaits the rich person and the poor person, as well as the common people and world leaders. The skulls of noble men and savages alike litter the streets of ancient cities. Modern humans live longer than the ancient people did, but eventually we all succumb to the same wretched infirmities. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Don't succumb to excuses. Go back to the job of making the corrections and forming the habits that will make your goal possible. ~ Vince Lombardi

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. ~ Thomas Merton

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Gangsters live for the action. The closer to death, the nearer to the heated coil of the moment, the more alive they feel. Most would rather succumb to a barrage of bullets from a roomful of sworn enemies than to the debilitation of old age, dying the death of the feeble. A gangster becomes as addicted to the thrill of the battle and the potential to die in the midst of it as he does to he more attractive lures in his path. In his world, the potential for death exists every day. The better gangsters don't shy away from such a dreaded possibility but rather find comfort in its proximity. ~ Lorenzo Carcaterra

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. ~ Thomas Merton

Any medical man who predicts exactly when a patient will die, or exactly how long he will live, is bound to make a fool of himself. The human factor is always incalculable. The weak have often unexpected powers of resistance, the strong sometimes succumb. ~ Agatha Christie

I think that we succumb to attitudes that do not permit us to dialogue: domination, not knowing how to listen, annoyance in our speech, preconceived judgments and so many others. ~ Pope Francis

When we encounter a friend who's depressed or afraid, we automatically try to take that distress away and to cheer the person up. While we may be operating with the best of intentions, this Band-Aid approach only reinforces the condition. Unless people experience their pain completely and begin to undrstand it, they will not only fail to overcome it, they'll also lose the opportunity of using it to advance their own growth. Pain can get you somewhere, and that somewhere can be a life-enhancing experience. We all tend to forget that pain can signal change. Alleviating the symptoms of pain in someone, without helping them to get at its underlying source, robs them of an important to for self-exploration. It's also a way of placating that reinforces the person'S need to cave in and succumb to another. This attitude undermines healthy character development and contributes to psychospiritual, moral, and ultimately social decay. ~ Adele Von Rust McCormick

Some people live their memorable years fighting against their basic instincts only to succumb in the end to what was actually good for them. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The seminaries have generally been so covetous of academic recognition, and so anxious for locus within the ethos and hierarchy of the university, that they have not noticed how alien and hostile those premises are to the peculiar vocation of the seminary. Thus the seminaries succumb to disseminating ideological renditions of the faith which demean the vitality of the biblical witness by engaging in endless classifications and comparisons of ideas. All this eschews commitment and precludes a confessional study of theology. ~ William Stringfellow

No immunity and no cure. There is only struggle, or succumb. Either way, the Primordial will have its due. We have met our creators, they have given us the answers we sought - and that is our curse. ~ Greg Bear

There is simply something wrong with my conscience. I do try to wrestle with the devil as I ought, but, like Eve, even when tempted by the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, I succumb. Good as they are, how could my parents have bred a daughter like me? ~ Miriam Brenaman

Many who know something but not enough about dreams and their meaning ... are liable to succumb to the prejudice that the dream actually has a moral purpose, that it warns, rebukes, comforts, foretells the future, etc. If one believes that the unconscious always knows best, one can easily be betrayed into leaving the dreams to take the necessary decisions, and is then disappointed when the dreams become more and more trivial and meaningless ... The unconscious functions satisfactorily only when the conscious mind fufills its task to the very limit. ~ Carl Jung

The world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely. ~ Lemony Snicket

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war. ~ James Robertson

Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn't at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she'll live to regret it. ~ Kate Bolick

The most beautiful thing is that despite the shallow life we sometimes succumb to - the soul has no timeline and it knows what it wants and will yearn within until it seeks the journey ~ Malebo Sephodi

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. ~ Albert Camus

I am in the pitiable situation of feeling all the force of temptation without having the strength to succumb to it. ~ Lord Chesterfield

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity i am bought and sold; for them i will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; - though i confess with shame i sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by i shall have the manhood to withhold. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

While it may feel natural to devote yourself to your creative work and succumb to feelings of separation and alienation, it nevertheless isn't a terrific idea in terms of your overall happiness and health. ~ Eric Maisel