Agony famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.
-- Aberjhani -
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what are his sensations...His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.
-- Adam Smith -
This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.
-- Albert Claude -
Invite the Sacred to participate in your joy in little things, as well as in your agony over the great ones. There are as many miracles to be seen through a microscope as through a telescope. Start with little things seen through the magnifying glass of wonder, and just as a magnifying glass can focus the sunlight into a burning beam that can set a leaf aflame, so can your focused wonder set you ablaze with insight. Find the light in each other and just fan it.
-- Alice O. Howell -
Love is one of the true mysteries,' he said at last. 'The truest and the deepest of all. One thing, Maerad: to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong.
-- Alison Croggon -
How beautiful she is, Our Lady of compassion! How dear! How utterly unselfish! How filled with joy for Him - and us - in the depths of her own agony and desolation!
-- Alphonsus Liguori -
I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.
-- Amy Lowell -
Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.
-- Andy Behrman -
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
-- Ann Brashares -
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.
-- Arthur Miller -
Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue.
-- Arthur Penn -
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.
-- Ayi Kwei Armah -
Every hardship is like being in prison. People feel imprisoned by ill-health, marital discord, financial insecurity, family disputes and other problems. To anyone who feels imprisoned by life’s problems I would say: be content with what you already have and never lose hope of things getting better. Be happy with your share because this is a quality of someone who truly loves Allah. When the Companion Muadh ibn Jabal (ra) was undergoing the pangs and agonies of death, he cried out, “O Allah! Bear witness that I love You, so do with me whatsoever You wish!
-- Babar Ahmad -
When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.
-- Barry Hannah -
In his (Christ's) surrender on the cross all the pain and agony of mankind was concentrated at a single point, and passed through from death to immortality, There is no pain of any creature from the beginning to the end of time which was not 'known' at this point and thus transmuted. To know all things in the Word is thus to know all the suffering of the world transfigured by the resurrection, somehow reconciled and atoned in eternal life. It was God's purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things on heaven and things on earth'.
-- Bede Griffiths -
It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.
-- Bela Lugosi -
I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony.
-- Ben Hecht -
Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.
-- Bernard Crick -
Suddenly, this romantic agony was enriched by a less romantic one: I had to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, I couldn't let her know about this urge, for great lovers never did such things. The answer to "Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" was not "In the men's room, Julie.
-- Bill Cosby -
Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing--that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart--is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.
-- Bill Vaughan -
As for the stage fright, it never goes away. When I'm waiting in the wings to go on, it's agony every single time but I stay focused and I know that once I'm on stage it'll be fine; I'll be in my happy little bubble.
-- Britt Ekland -
Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.
-- Carl Rogers -
She showed him something no one else had ever shown him; that it was possible to love someone more than himself; that another's suffering could bring him more agony than his own; that someone's life could come before his; that's what she showed him.
-- Carlos Salinas de Gortari -
I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I know not, but I feel the agony.
-- Catullus -
If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
-- Chaim Potok -
Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The fountain of my heart dried up within me,-- With nought that loved me, and with nought to love, I stood upon the desert earth alone. And in that deep and utter agony, Though then, then even most unfit to die I fell upon my knees and prayed for death.
-- Charles Robert Maturin -
Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.
-- Charles Stanley -
I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
-- Charles Stross -
The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman -
I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.
-- Clara Schumann -
Run like hell and get the agony over with.
-- Clarence DeMar -
There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.
-- Colleen McCullough -
What Must I Do to Be Saved? It is impossible to ask a more weighty Question! It is deplorable that we hear it asked with no more Frequency, with nor more Agony.
-- Cotton Mather -
The Savior's suffering in Gethsemane and His agony on the cross redeem us from sin by satisfying the demands that justice has upon us. He extends mercy and pardons those who repent. The Atonement also satisfies the debt justice owes to us by healing and compensating us for any suffering we innocently endure.
-- D. Todd Christofferson -
If I was going to go out tonight, I was going to go out fighting. Or screaming in agony. Either way.
-- Darynda Jones -
Why does death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater then we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all.
-- David Clement-Davies -
But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult - and it's very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder.
-- David Cronenberg -
True. The one certainty about riding, Braygan, is that - at some time - you will fall off. It is a fact. Another fact you might like to consider, in your life of perpetual terror, is that you will die. We are all going to die, some of us young, some of us old, some of us in our sleep, some of us screaming in agony. We cannot stop it, we can only delay it.
-- David Gemmell -
Life is a struggle, from the agonies of birth to the railing against death. Devour or be devoured. The law of the wild.
-- David Gemmell -
You get a concussion. It could take 30, 40 days until that starts to come to life where you're in agony. Ask any doctor.
-- David Gest -
I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.
-- David Zindell -
I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on...
-- Donald Barthelme -
I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.
-- Donald Ray Pollock -
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.
-- Edith Hamilton -
Most trouble is unnecessary. Between the indignity of being born and the agony of dying enough bad things must of necessity happen to people. But we can't be satisfied with that. We have to go to work and see how much additional trouble we can create. Misunderstanding, turmoil, effort put on all the wrong things, and then more misunderstanding.
-- Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett -
...History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.
-- Elizabeth Kostova -
I shall never forget the despair and agony on the parents' faces on the awful day of the funeral when the 13 little children, victims not only of John D. Rockefeller, but of the government of the state of Colorado were buried.
-- Ella Reeve Bloor -
I like a look of Agony, because I know it's true - men do not sham Convulsion, nor simulate, a Throe
-- Emily Dickinson -
We have been through this is biennial convulsion four or five different times over the past 10 or 12 years, and now it appears that we are going through this quiet agony all over again.
-- Everett Dirksen -
Agony is truth its our connection to the living I accept it as perfection and keep on existing in the now
-- Eyedea -
Godly sorrow is a gift of the Spirit. It is a deep realization that our actions have offended our Father and our God. It is the sharp and keen awareness that our behavior caused the Savior, He who knew no sin, even the greatest of all, to endure agony and suffering.
-- Ezra Taft Benson -
...she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her, like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word 'we' - and perhaps without intention - he had let her know that he loved her.
-- Ford Madox Ford -
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.
-- Francois Truffaut -
I have a motto: My job is not to make up anybody's mind but to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking.
-- Fred W. Friendly -
The point of departure for my creation was not primarily the destiny of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne but the figure of the young Blanche. In a historic sense she never lived, but she received the breath of life from my internal spirit, and she cannot be detached from the origin, which is hers. Born in the profound horror of a time darkened by the signs of destiny, this figure arose before me in some way as the embodiment of the mortal agony of an era going totally to its ruin.
-- Gertrud von Le Fort -
It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs.
-- Grantly Dick-Read -
Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.
-- H. G. Wells -
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
-- H. P. Lovecraft -
Much-Afraid, don't ever allow yourself to begin trying to picture what it will be like. Believe me, when you get to the place which you dread you will find that they are as different as possible from what you have imagined, just as was the case when you were actually ascending the precipice. I must warn you that I see your enemies lurking among the trees ahead, and if you ever let Craven Fear begin painting a picture on the screen of your imagination, you will walk with fear and trembling and agony, where no fear is.
-- Hannah Hurnard -
Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.
-- Harold Brodkey -
The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. . . . As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before. This is the purpose to which we are being summoned to harness our world-body!...Heroic responses in ideals and in conduct are a choice of regal dignity in the presence of a new earth and Heaven.
-- Helen Keller -
... was there no one over thirty-five who had not some secret agony, some white-faced fear? Half one's life one walked carelessly, certain that some day one would have one's heart's desire: and for the rest of it, one either goes empty, or walks carrying a full cup, afraid of every step.
-- Helen Waddell -
One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.
-- Henning Mankell -
What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love.
-- Henri Nouwen -
Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.
-- Henri Nouwen -
Jesus has never slept for an hour while one of His disciples watched and prayed in agony.
-- Henry Clay Trumbull -
The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.
-- Henry Grady Weaver -
There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.
-- Hermann Hesse -
Look, therefore, which way we will, whether at the direct Scriptural statements of death as the penalty of sin, or at the agony of the cross as a means of rescue, or at the joy of the angels of God over a rescue; we see from either that it must be a work of infinite and eternal consequence--the work of redemption.
-- Herrick Johnson -
Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia's revolution and Spain's agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth.
-- I. F. Stone -
The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
-- Iain Banks -
I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.
-- Ian Fleming -
Vishous screamed. The only thing that was louder was the pop as the hip was relocated, as it were. And the last thing he saw before he checked out of the Conscious Inn & Suites was Jane's head whipping around in a panic. In her eyes was stark terror, as if the single worst thing that she could imagine was him in agony... And that was when he knew that he still loved her.
-- J.R. Ward -
Not one has shown an iota of fear of death. They want to end this agony.
-- Jack Kevorkian -
First of all, do any of you here think it's a crime to help a suffering human end his agony? Any of you think it is? Say so right now. Well, then, what are we doing here?
-- Jack Kevorkian -
In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.
-- Jacques Monod -
Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?
-- James Whistler -
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight and a half years ago. Dare not say that a man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.
-- Jane Austen -
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It's agony. Of course it's stupid, but it's agony.
-- Jeffrey Archer -
Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice.
-- Jennifer Stone -
...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.
-- Joanne Greenberg -
Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
-- John Keats -
Love masters agony; the soul that seemed Forsaken feels her present God again And in her Father's arms Contented dies away.
-- John Keble -
The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.
-- John L. Lewis -
Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.
-- John L. Lewis -
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
-- John Mason Brown -
We do have choice, but not without some agony.
-- Josephine Hart -
We suffer much agony because we try to get from people what only God can give us, which is a sense of worth and value. Look to God for what you need, not to people.
-- Joyce Meyer -
A cynic should never marry an idealist. For the cynic, marriage represents the welcome end of romantic life, with all its agony and ecstasy. But for the idealist, it is only the beginning.
-- Julie Burchill -
To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
-- June Jordan
