Abysmal Quotes & Sayings

I know the most important faculty to develop is one for hard, continuous and varied work and living; but the difference between knowing this and doing anything consistent about it is often abysmal. — James Agee

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts. — Bessie Head

But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime - ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud- dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment. — Jack London

Try to imagine this formless, liquid abyss of many waters and surfaces. With and within this awesome, abysmal substance, God Mother creates universes. We are made from this stuff, literally! And we literally live, move, and have our being in this fathomless, multi-dimensional matrix. — Stefan Emunds

I look forward to the promising upside of the long-term that lingers ahead for me after such abysmal days. Things always just seem to balance out in the long run. In fact, I'm almost there. The zero line is within inches of my trembling outstretched grasp. — David B. Lentz

I'm not very good at relationships, Claire. In fact, my track record is abysmal." Claire gently squeezed Annie's shoulder. "It takes a concerted effort to make any relationship work. Your walk with God is no different. It's a lifelong process that won't be perfected until you reach Heaven. And I must warn you, Annie, just because you're a believer now doesn't mean your life will become easier. In fact, it might become much harder. — Mark Romang

Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths. — Fulton J. Sheen

This is so TYPICAL / APOCALYPTICAL
Hanging on abysmal release / Jesus
I don't need this / Don't wanna be this
Icon in the Making / My hands are f**king shaking — Slipknot

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love. — Ralph Ellison

The village was run-down, stank of butcher blood, and was filled with ravenous creatures that would rip your throat out for a snack. All of that I could deal with. The thing that made it truly abysmal was that it was in New Jersey. — J.C. Nelson

True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned. — Anthony De Mello

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathomed centre. — Hartley Coleridge

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they're all the same, all the same celebrities. It's really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out. — David Talbot

I, myself, sank into that abysmal pit of feeling utterly worthless, useless and burdensome. Caring for an animal, especially one that's been rescued, can help return people to a sense of being needed and useful. — Ken Wahl

Trenton cops wore more hats than I could name. They were arbitrators, social workers, peacekeepers, baby-sitters and law enforcers. The job was boring, terrifying, disgusting, exhausting and often made no sense at all. The pay was abysmal, the hours inhuman, the department budget was a joke, the uniforms were short in the crotch. And year after year, the Trenton cops held the city together. — Janet Evanovich

The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier. — Beau Willimon

No abyss of evil can remain hidden from him through whom the world is reconciled to God. But the abyss of the love of God[26.] embraces even the most abysmal godlessness of the world. In an incomprehensible reversal of all righteous and pious thought, God declares himself as guilty toward the world and thereby extinguishes the guilt of the world. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We all know there are problems with Obamacare, and Washington's implementation of it has been abysmal. But rejecting Medicaid won't fix any of those things. — Jay Nixon

When unprepared people think they're strong enough to resist any intimidation they may face, they're at great risk for abysmal failure. Pride in one's own strength cannot take the place of spiritual preparation. Discipleship is crucial to our ultimate destiny, but its cost is total commitment. Jesus warned against failing to count this cost before committing (Luke 14:25-33). — David Jeremiah

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal. — P. J. O'Rourke

No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty. — P.G. Wodehouse

Pet ownership is an absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation. — Ingrid Newkirk

METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1
It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals - whether ecstatic or abysmal - we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with - only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void. — Thomas Ligotti

...by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. — Lynne Truss

Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf ... There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile ... I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable ... The difference between us is abysmal ... You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other. — Maurice Samuel

The most abysmal advise ever given by the ignorant to the stupid. — Tommy Armour

The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone. — Anna Kavan

The run is already currently occurring, but in slow-motion. Large investors are letting CDs mature, but not renewing them due to the abysmal returns. Most CDs currently pay less than 1%. — Kelly Mitchell

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know ... — Marvin Mudrick

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one. — Christopher Hitchens

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world. — Jack Kerouac

I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. — Clarice Lispector

One feels such love for the little ones, such anticipation that all that is lovely in life will be known by them, such fondness for that set of attributes manifested uniquely in each: mannerisms of bravado, of vulnerability, habits of speech and mispronouncement and so forth; the smell of the hair and head, the feel of the tiny hand in yours - and then the little one is gone! Taken! One is thunderstruck that such a brutal violation has occurred in what had previously seemed a benevolent world. From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable. — George Saunders

In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. — Joseph Conrad

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom. — Lillian Russell

A dreadful suspicion was coming over me. Hadn't my mortal life been nothing but abysmal struggle and trivia and fear? Wasn't that the way it was for most mortals? Wasn't that the message of a score of modern writers and poets - that we wasted our lives in foolish preoccupation? Wasn't this all a miserable cliche? — Anne Rice

The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place. — Norman Mailer

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her. — Francis Thompson

Let me just say that while I personally am very fond of John Boehner, his record of predicting what would happen if certain policies, economic policies were instituted is abysmal, okay? — Jay Carney

The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. — Robert Smithson

I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I'd write to the point of suffocation
I'd write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I'd write about you
a lot more
than I should — Benedict Smith

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal. — Chad Harbach

The courage to put an end to war, to see the abysmal stupidity of it, is certainly no less than that needed to start one. — Claudio Magris

Love was real. Painfully real. He loved Julianne. Wholly, completely and irrevocably. And in exchange, he was getting exactly what he deserved. An abysmal whipping at the hands of the ultimate sadist, Life. — Jillian Verne

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal. — David Geffen

The distance separating the statute and constitutionality is so abysmal that negotiations are impossible. — Mariano Rajoy

In Lincoln's day, Riley's account also spoke to a burning issue: the troubling institution of slavery. Inverting the American paradigm, it provided a useful perspective and helped expose the brutality of that abysmal practice. In our time, when one of the great challenges we face is to find common ground for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the plight of the crew of the Commerce achieves a new relevance. It — Dean King

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love? — Madeleine L'Engle

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They're moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth's sloping atmosphere? — Lauren DeStefano

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. — H.L. Mencken

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants? — Robert Solow

Because you're going to help me train a seven-year-old Witch who's got the raw power right now to turn us both into dust and yet" - he dropped the shoe onto the chair - "is abysmal at basic Craft. — Anne Bishop

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed - and pitied. — Edith Wharton

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal? — Alan Moore

Drawing her closer he tucked his chin and lifted hers to meet his abysmal onyx eyes. — Jennifer Silverwood

Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. — Thomas Ligotti

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. — Henry James

Could a benevolent designer, a craftsman who is mindful of harmony and joy, pleased by plenty and safety, tolerate such an abysmal existence for its most precious expressions of creation? — John Zande

There is but one who qualifies as Savior. He alone has the ability to solve our most abysmal dilemma. He alone has the power of life and death. — R.C. Sproul

Hope knows no fear.
Hope dares to blossom even inside the abysmal abyss.
Hope secretly feeds and strengthens promise. — Sri Chinmoy

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility. — Brendan I. Koerner

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you. — Wendy Beckett

The Book of Kells is the kingdom of Proteus. It is the product of a cold-blooded hallucination that did not require any mescaline or lysergic acid to produce these abysmal labyrinths, also because it does not represent the delirium of a single mind, but rather the delirium of an entire culture engaged in a dialogue with itself and citing other Gospels, other illuminated letters, other tales. — Liberato Santoro-Brienza

A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. — Michelle Malkin

Missus said I was the worst waiting maid in Charleston. She said, "You are abysmal, Hetty, abysmal." I asked Miss Sarah what abysmal means and she said, "Not quite up to standard." Uh huh. I could tell from missus' face, there's bad, there's worse, and after that comes abysmal. — Sue Monk Kidd

Perhaps to the north? I hear Scotland is lovely this time of year." "Are you barmy? Scotland is wholly abysmal this time of year. — Gail Carriger

I have outlived the stillborn. I have outlasted my usefulness. I have become an abysmal ocean sponge, ten millennia old, and just as wise. — Logan Ryan Smith

The CD image remains heart-sinkingly abysmal compared to the majesty of the LP sleeve. These things count. — Morrissey

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again ... I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O'Neill were laughing. — Woody Allen

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment. — Carlos Fuentes

Life is abysmal hilarious if you have the eyes to see. — Stefan Emunds

Having been kept pretty strict in prep schools, I guess I couldn't cope with all the freedom at Yale. I had a wild, wonderful time, got abysmal grades and was bounced out in my freshman year. I then came back the following fall as a repeating freshman, lasted until April and got bounced out again - for the same reason. — Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not. — Rabindranath Tagore

The "stigma" of finitude which appears in all things and in the whole of reality and the "shock" which grasps the mind when it encounters the threat of nonbeing reveal the negative side of the mystery, the abysmal element in the ground of being. This negative side is always potentially present, and it can be realized in cognitive as well as in communal experiences. It is a necessary element in revelation. Without it the mystery would not be mystery. Without the "I am undone" of Isaiah in his vocational vision, God cannot be experienced (Isa. 6: 5). Without the "dark night of the soul," the mystic cannot experience the mystery of the ground. — Paul Tillich

I just want to ask one of these singers, have you ever watched a single one of the many thousands of abysmal covers of your own song that are on YouTube? Because those are dreams. Dreams are not always beautiful things. — Anonymous

My life has consisted of challenging authority, which I was taught as a young girl. Life is only noise between two abysmal silences. Silence before birth, silence after death. — Isabel Allende

Statism systematically violates the rights of individuals and is, therefore, immoral. Because it suppresses the mind and violates men's rights, it thereby causes abysmal poverty and is utterly impractical. — Andrew Bernstein

The night skyline was stunning. I could see the Monas and Istiqlal Mosque bathed in brilliant white lights and a dozen other places of cultural and historical significance. It's an amazing, beautiful world we live in ... despite Uncle Google's abysmal view of American schools, the security checkpoints and vehicle inspections that seem to be everywhere, and the need to be vigilant because of the things we do to each other. — Tucker Elliot

The Trouble with liberals is twofold: They have a horrible blind spot with respect to moral principles and they have an abysmal understanding of economic principles. — Jacob G. Hornberger

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

A major consequence of being psychologically asleep is the psychological and spiritual blindness which results from it. This results in action not from conscious awareness and true intelligence but from self-righteousness, which leads individuals and society as a whole into an abysmal pit. — Belsebuub

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable — Carl Jung

Presidents Truman and Nixon left office under dark clouds of scandal and with abysmal levels of support, but with the passage of time, both have been reassessed far more positively. — Monica Crowley

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty. — P.G. Wodehouse

that of the mind is in abysmal stillness; — Lao-Tzu