Agonize Quotes & Sayings

When we judge and agonize over another's faults, we become attached to their imbalance and sickness. — Bryant McGill

Organize, don't agonize. — Nancy Pelosi

So often in life we agonize, we deliberate, and we beat ourselves up to carefully evaluate the reasons we should or should not do something. But usually it's so much simpler than that. If you have no other offers, take the one offer you have. — Kunal Nayyar

Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain. — Horace Mann

Now see here, Guy," said the voice, "you're not dealing with any dumb two-bit trigger pumping morons with low hair-lines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we're a couple of intelligent caring guys that you'd probably quite like if you met us socially! I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!"
"And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood! — Douglas Adams

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day. — Robert Grudin

Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch
yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way. — Robert C. Martin

When you have a tough loss, go through it and agonize. I had one loss that I still want to change, but at the same time I realize it is an important part of who I am. — Andrew Shue

Although at the time I didn't realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, 'If it's all right with you.' If I thought I'd done anything to make someone unhappy, I'd agonize. — Katharine Graham

I love you sons of bitches. You're all I read any more. You're the only ones who'll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell. — Kurt Vonnegut

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. — Carl Sagan

How much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new. — Louise Bogan

Most new trainers agonize over the perfect workout, over-train virtually everyone and are the crazy purist idiots who embarrass themselves at restaurants trying to impress everyone with how clean they eat. — Dan John

Consider that all these torments of body and soul are without intermission. Be their suffering ever so extreme, be their pain ever so intense, there is no possibility of their fainting away, no, not for one moment ... They are all eye, all ear, all sense. Every instant of their duration it may be said of their whole frame that they are 'Trembling alive all o'er, and smart and agonize at every pore.' And of this duration there is no end ... Neither the pain of the body nor of soul is any nearer an end than it was millions of ages ago. — John Wesley

he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers. — Brian D. McLaren

God brings you to places, among people, and into certain conditions to accomplish a definite purpose through the intercession of the Spirit in you. Your part in intercessory prayer is not to agonize over how to intercede, but to use the everyday circumstances and people God puts around you by His providence to bring them before His throne, and to allow the Spirit in you the opportunity to intercede for them. In this way God is going to touch the whole world with His saints. — Oswald Chambers

He who will not economize will have to agonize — Confucius

It is the intelligent and highly educated that agonize over their limitations. — Louis Eliot

Don't you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved. — Tom Rachman

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. — Carl Sagan

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out. — Peter Orner

I bet girls never agonize about texts like this. — Anne Eliot

The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we're going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We're living life in a more deliberate way. We don't want to miss a single important event. We don't want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions. — James Redfield

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive--you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. — Robert Browning

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book. — Neil Gaiman

Agony is not something that happens to you.
To agonize is a choice. — Alan Cohen

Muhammad was a jackass. People who believe in him are stupid. Let us call a spade as spade. These people must be laughed at. They, and their screwball prophet have to be ridiculed not respected. Let them cringe, let them wince, let them agonize. We must demolish this fetish and break the shackles of these wretched people. They must be set free and the only way to do that is to demolish their fetish. — Ali Sina

So, Kurt Cobain kills himself at 27 and becomes a legend. People like that are one in a million. I'm just a normal human being. I agonize and suffer, but I also laugh all the time. People all die someday and disappear as if they never existed, but that's natural. I though I wasn't afraid of dying. No, NOBODY is actually afraid of dying itself. The pain of suffering lasts for an instant. What truly agonizes me... Is the thought of your crying face from far far across the entire galaxy. You were always prettiest when you smiled. — Inio Asano

A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food's contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance. — Pete Dexter

God enabled me to so agonize in prayer that I was quite wet with perspiration, though in the shade and the cool wind. My soul was drawn out very much from the world, for multitudes of souls. — David Brainerd

Parents should not agonize over anything a child does or fails to do if the child is perfectly capable of agonizing over it himself. — John Rosemond

As a kid, I used to fear that my life would be wasted. I would agonize over how I was going to live this finite life. We only have so much time, after all, and I didn't want my only experiences with different cultures to be on TV or in the pages of National Geographic. I wanted to visit the Kansas plains, the Virginia battlefields, and the California coast. I wanted to see the world instead of being stuck in just one part of it. I wanted to feel the energies of new places and different people, and I wanted to experience the glories of history. — Zak Bagans

Here's my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don't ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do. — Diablo Cody

The Bible says, Be anxious for nothing, and that is a commandment! I took up a battle in this area, fought my way through and avoided having to be anxious! You can agonize over something for ages and plague yourself and those around you. It's much better to fight your way through as soon as it comes up. — Esther Smith

In the eighties, I was fortunate to be one of the young art directors that Jerry Roach, creative director at JWT New York, took under his wing. He taught me how to use typography more visually, to push against design norms and not to rely on preconceived notions of what something should look like. I learned that nuance is everything and to agonize over the details. I have Jerry to thank for driving plenty of people crazy over the years! — John Butler

He who will not economize will agonize — Confucius

I had to agonize over my selection since our music is so rich and all the above plus many others have contributed. — Jimmy Heath

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books. — Anthony Bourdain

The absence of life is not the same as material privation: we will never again see the same soul occupying the same space. The world refers to them as pets, but that is what we do, not really what they are. Affection pays for itself in proportion to the love we offer, and if the love we lavished on him was any indication, we are inconsolable. The suffering is more on our side now, for he led an enormously happy and productive life, and we are left to remember and agonize. It is all wretchedness now. Grief is the currency for death, leaving us in emotional debt perhaps forever, but love is the tax we happily pay toward the investment of another's company, and we would all rather pay it and be happy and poor than be rich in a friendless life. He is gone, and we are now beholden to him, but we are so much happier for his having been here than we deserve to be.
On the death of Ted, beloved cat — Michelle Franklin

Shall I give you yet another reason why you should pray? I have preached my very heart out. I could not say any more than I have said. Will not your prayers accomplish that which my preaching fails to do? Is it not likely that the Church has been putting forth its preaching hand but not its praying hand? Oh dear friends! Let us agonize in prayer. — Charles Spurgeon

Happenstance and accidents didn't seem so random. The mystery of the connections intrigued him, but he wasn't going to agonize about them, and he had not yet reached an age where he was interested in analyzing them either. He figured that all the threads of his experience would eventually be sewn together, taking shape in harmony and form to create a glorious work of art. But who would sew those pieces together? Who would make him whole? That was something Ciro thought about a lot. Before — Adriana Trigiani

I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear. — John Cusack

Otto would pull the trigger at the slightest provocation and you, Michael, would agonize aver its morality even if your life were threatened. I'm the tiebreaker. — Arthur C. Clarke

There is something at work that's bigger than us. It's about having a trust in life and being at peace that things are happening the way they should. You do what you do as well as you can do it, and then you don't worry or agonize about the outcome. — Sherilyn Fenn

I try not to agonize over my lyrics, though, because that can come across in them. Some lyrics come more easily than others and some you have to spend a lot of time on, but I think you have to watch that you don't take the life out of them by worrying too much. — Jane Siberry

I've seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook 'likes' and Twitter followers than they do. — Neil Strauss

To me, acting is like a party. It's like a fun thing to do. You don't have to worry. You don't have to agonize about anything. — Rob Reiner

I tell myself that some names can be mistakes, like Mxyplyzyk, a store in New York that lost customers because few could spell its name to look up the address. I tell myself that lots of writers agonize over titles, and often get them wrong at first. — Caroline Leavitt

If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write. — Deb Caletti

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The limitation in our ability to perceive broad distinctions in scope can be applied to our moral and temporal responses ... We agonize over a dinner menu, or have engine trouble on the way to work; and for seconds or minutes our cosmos shrinks to a miniscule volume of being, an epic of cheese sauces or tragedy of fanbelts. — Robert Grudin

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. — Susan Sontag

I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-rangers bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend! — Douglas Adams

The circumstances of a saint's life are ordained of God. In the life of a saint there is no such thing as chance. God by His providence brings you into circumstances that you can't understand at all, but the Spirit of God understands. God brings you to places, among people, and into certain conditions to accomplish a definite purpose through the intercession of the Spirit in you. Never put yourself in front of your circumstances and say, "I'm going to be my own providence here; I will watch this closely, or protect myself from that." All your circumstances are in the hand of God, and therefore you don't ever have to think they are unnatural or unique. Your part in intercessory prayer is not to agonize over how to intercede, but to use the everyday circumstances and people God puts around you by His providence to bring them before His throne, and to allow the Spirit in you the opportunity to intercede for them. — Oswald Chambers

Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow's trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now. — Robin Hobb

The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple dead. — Hassan Blasim

Procrastinators may resemble Sprinters, because they too tend to finish only when they're against a deadline, but the two types are quite different. Sprinters choose to work at the last minute because the pressure of a deadline clarifies their thoughts; Procrastinators hate last-minute pressure and wish they could force themselves to work before the deadline looms. Unlike Sprinters, Procrastinators often agonize about the work they're not doing, which makes it hard for them to do anything fun or meaningful with their time. They may rush around doing busywork as a way to avoid doing what they know they have to do. — Gretchen Rubin

If you want to be a writer, I have two pieces of advice. One is to be a reader. I think that's one of the most important parts of learning to write. The other piece of advice is 'Just do it!' Don't think about it, don't agonize, sit down and write. — S.E. Hinton

Those sloppy priests that go around without their cassocks!" he would agonize. "Better that they go without their cassocks since they're just chasing after prostitutes anyway!" And he'd agonize more. It was true. There were womanizing priests. And liquor flowed faster than communion wine among them. Pastoral plans? They all went up in smoke. There was no interest. There was no effort. And the bishop? Bishop Machado didn't give orders and he didn't give advice. What he gave were loans at outrageous interest rates. Everybody knew those stories, and Father Romero knew them best because he saw all the drama from the inside. — Maria Lopez Vigil

The more decisions you make, the better, statistically, your odds of success are. And what I also learned was, it doesn't matter: anything can be fixed. When you're directing, you can agonize, but you can't indulge. Stuff has to happen. — Tony Goldwyn

From those who agonize that they may no longer be able to write off their private jet to someone who doesn't feel like making the three mile hike to the well to get water and carry it back, everyone struggles. — Henry Rollins

I have ideas that I think might be amusing, and I try them, and if they look right, I carry them out, and if they don't, I throw them out and try something else. I don't agonize about it. — Iris Apfel

The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize. — Rukhsana Ahmad

God! I hated this business of being grown-up. I hated having to make decisions where I didn't know what was behind the door. I wanted a world where heroes and villains were clearly labeled. Where ominous music comes on-screen so you can't possibly mistake him. Where someone asks you to choose between playing with the beautiful princess in the fragrant garden and being eaten by the hideous monster in the foul-smelling pit. Not exactly a difficult one, now is it? Not something that you would agonize over, or that would make you lose a night's sleep? — Marian Keyes

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry. — Woody Allen

Life was too short though to agonize over the little stuff; sometimes you had to do what was best for you and if your family loved you they would be happy regardless. — L.A. Fiore

I can draw pencil lines to show something is moving, but if I'm writing, I struggle with how to write it. The boy ran down the hallway? The boy ran quickly down the hallway? The boy ran down the marble hallway? I agonize over the words. So my editor works very hard. I'm lucky to have her. — Brian Selznick