“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
Sad feeling
Sad Quotes — page 123 of 475
“Who wants to live forever?”
“The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?”
“As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.”
“All black people who are even minimally conscious, black people who have ever experienced Europe's technological power crusading in the vanguard of a civilizing mission, have profound feelings of inferiority and bitterly regret the fact that the Industrial Revolution did not agreeably commence in Dahomey or Dakar. Nothing is achieved by concealing this fact.”
“I don't play the kind of music that works in a football stadium.”
“If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.”
“Ah, yes, the sea is still and deep, All things within its bosom sleep! A single step, and all is o'er, A plunge, a bubble, and no more.”
“O summer day beside the joyous sea! O summer day so wonderful and white, So full of gladness and so full of pain! Forever and forever shalt thou be To some the gravestone of a dead delight, To some the landmark of a new domain.”
“Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.”
“I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.”
“Adam did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.”
“Victory is gay only back home. Up front it is joyless.”
“I would like better colouration of my legs, like a little less of that English mottled purple thing that makes it necessary to wear tights all the time.”
“Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.”
“The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.”
“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”
“I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.”
“It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" the unemployed can have who go hungry and cannot find utilization of their labor.”
“Adults are just children sometimes. But evil, hurt children.”