Besetting Quotes & Sayings

For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort. — Aldous Huxley

Suffering related to circumstances beyond my control, suffering related to consequences of my besetting sin, and suffering caused by others who refused to see their own sin. In all these instances, the Lord has been at work, refining my focus upon personal holiness, amplifying my ministry through very humbling experiences, and reminding me repeatedly to extend grace not just to the gracious but to those who lack a grace I took too long to come to myself. — James MacDonald

Bryony began laughing, with a great deal of bitterness to be sure, but still, laughter. That had always been her great gift and her besetting sin, that even in the darkest and most somber times, she had the urge to laugh. — T. Kingfisher

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allan about besetting sins last Sunday — L.M. Montgomery

It's a besetting sin of the family. Uncle Hart had his own personal brothel at my age, where he trained ladies in the art of exquisite pleasure. He trained them, not the other way around, the pompous bastard. Dad had his own racing stable, Uncle Mac was already a celebrated artist with a scandalous marriage. I'm a bit late in the proceedings for a Mackenzie. — Jennifer Ashley

Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship. — P. J. O'Rourke

Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods. Jeremiah 16:20 One great besetting sin of ancient Israel was idolatry, and the spiritual Israel are vexed with a tendency to the same folly. Remphan's star shines no longer, and the women weep no more for Tammuz, but Mammon still intrudes his golden calf, and the shrines of pride are not forsaken. Self in various forms struggles to subdue the chosen ones under its dominion, and the flesh sets up its altars wherever it can find space for them. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A sign that a peace association is going adrift is its exclusion of other political parties, with whom it could collaborate effectively on most of the problems besetting the cause of peace. — Fredrik Bajer

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? — Karen Joy Fowler

Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well maybe She should have thought of that when She was besetting us with droughts and floods and poisonous snakes. Nature started the fight for survival and now She wants to quit because She's losing? Well I say 'Hard Chesse! — George Monbiot

All my life I have been seeking to climb out of the pit of my besetting sins and I cannot do it and I never will unless a hand is let down to draw me up. — Seneca The Younger

Tom Walls' buddies remain an isolated minority, except during times of economic or social stress, when a mass following develops to blame cranky sociopaths for the problems besetting society. If it weren't for brown-nosing evil firebrands, he would have no friends. The ideas backing up his rejoinders are extremely superficial and sex-crazed. — Linda Chavez

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant. — Azar Nafisi

Everyone has his besetting sin. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

But what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue? — Washington Irving

For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time. — Bill Keller

Claiming to be a unique divinely guided state, destined by the Almighty to bring Christian civilization to the entire globe, lost most of its force after two-thirds of the empire had been conquered by the standard-bearers of a different religion. Fortunately, Judaeo-Christian texts offered another, now more apposite model. From divinely ordained world conquerors, emperors were able to use the Old Testament to morph themselves into the leaders of a Chosen People, riding the Constantinopolitan Ark of salvation through besetting tempests towards final Salvation and Triumph, with apocalypse a recurrently popular genre. — Peter Heather

The besetting evil of our age is the temptation to squander and dilute thought on a thousand different lines of inquiry. — John Herschel

Cynicism is the besetting and venial fault of declining youth, and disillusionment its last illusion. — Francis Macdonald Cornford

Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accoutrement to besetting social and human problems. — Harry Woodburn Chase

Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward to the convent, as if the ghosts of former travellers, overwhelmed by the snow, haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply down. — Charles Dickens

Are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. A real work is to be wrought in us and upon us. Besetting sins are to be conquered; evil habits are to be overcome; wrong dispositions and feelings are to be rooted out, and holy tempers and emotions are to be begotten. A — Hannah Whitall Smith

Without a sincere and diligent effort in every area of obedience, there will be no sucessful mortification of any one besetting sin. — John Owen

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other's views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct. — John Stuart Mill

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. — Aldous Huxley

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound. — Theodore Dalrymple

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions. — Freya Stark

Indulgent Reader, up till now I have concealed it, but I must confess at last. I have one besetting weakness, a weakness that amounts to a vice. I am ashamed of it. Often I have tried to wean myself of it; often cursed the heredity that imposed it on me. Opium? Morphine? Cocaine? Nothing so fashionable. Absinth? Brandy? Gin? Nothing so normal. Alas! let me whisper it in your ear: I am a Chewing Gum Fiend! — Robert W. Service

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny. — James F. Cooper

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour. — Alfred North Whitehead

Spot the first risings of your besetting sin and kill it, till it is no more. — John Piper

Sloth, or acedia, is the unheralded, almost hidden, besetting sin
of our times - unheralded because it is misunderstood; hidden
because its symptoms are disguised or misdiagnosed; and besetting
us all to some degree because we have overlooked a mighty, Godgiven cure. It is, as the Church fathers taught, deadly. It strikes at the
very roots of our freedom - at human dignity itself. Sabbath rest
cannot be understood or appreciated apart from awareness of this
sin that undermines everything Sabbath was created to give to the
human person for his edification and development. — Charlotte Ostermann

Regarding 'Jabez's Prayer', I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can honestly say I have never sunk to confusing prayer: the soul's colloquy with the Creator, mortal man's dialogue with the Deity: with magical incantation and the ritual of the 'spell. — Markham Shaw Pyle

The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and flatterers. "Authorities," "disciples," and "schools" are the curse of science and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its enemies. — Thomas Huxley

Hardening of the hearteries is the most serious affliction besetting marriage, and warm, good-humored, approving words are the only effective preventive. — Jo Coudert

The besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole. — John Stuart Mill

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas. — John Derbyshire

The oil is a gift bestowed by God on the Arab nation, to use after centuries of poverty, backwardness and servitude - in raising its living standards, developing its economic, social and cultural conditions, and building up its own power to meet the challenges and conspiracies besetting it. — Saddam Hussein

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world
what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him. — Bruno Bettelheim

Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls 'the mad pride of intellectuality,' taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books. — Theodore Roosevelt

Prayer is the surest remedy against the devil and besetting sins. — J.C. Ryle

Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. — Ron Chernow

I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It's strange how many people suffer from it. I don't mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what's worse, fear of life. Often they're people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they're tortured by it. I've sometimes thought it was the most besetting humour of men, and I asked myself at one time if it was due to some deep animal instinct that man has inherited from that primeval something that first felt the thrill of life. — W. Somerset Maugham

But every one has a besetting sin to which he returns. — Jean De La Fontaine

The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek. — John Courtenay James

Seeing oneself as a prophetic minority does not mean retreat, and it certainly does not mean victim status. It also does not confer faithfulness. Marginalization can strip away from us the besetting sins of a majoritarian viewpoint, but it can bring others as well. We must remember our smallness but also our connectedness to a global, and indeed cosmic, reality. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. Our story is that of a little flock and of an army, awesome with banners. Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission. — Russell D. Moore

There is plenty of other evidence, however, that the nominal conversion of the Roman Empire to the Christian religion had effected no visible improvement in the common morals. The world was worse rather than better. Out of its besetting temptations men fled to save their souls. They fled from the world, which in the first century was believed by the Christians to be doomed, and liable to be destroyed by divine fire before the end of the year, and which in the fourth century was believed by the Christians to be damned: it belonged to the devil. They fled also from the church, which they accused of secularity and of hypocrisy. Many of the monks were laymen, who in deep disgust had forsaken the services and sacraments. They said their own prayers and sought God in their own way, asking no aid from priests. They were men who had resolved never to go to church again. — George Hodges

Malcolm believed, by the way, in Student Power: not only did he feel that the college-educated black, if he could retain (as he must) his sense of reality and history, and refrain from being absorbed into the white world by its material enticements, was obviously better equipped to cope with the problems besetting his people in America, but he also believed, or hoped, that the white college student was more receptive to change than were his parents. — Malcolm X

I guess [Mrs. Reagan is] one of those many American adults of a certain advanced age who believe that the root of all evil lies in the area of young people's self-abuse. Someone should tell Mrs. Reagan that young people-- not even young people on drugs-- are not the ones responsible for the major problems besetting the world! — John Irving

We learn to love by basking in the love of other people. We learn how to express our love and our warmest feelings whenever other people grace us with the privilege of besetting upon them many acts of kindness. We unleash a germinal of internal tenderness by affectionately doting upon pets and by generously spending time admiring the natural world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The modern State's greatest single instrument of oppression, its murderous tax on drink ... accounts for nearly all the miseries besetting our once-merry land; football hooliganism, colour prejudice, industrial unrest, cynicism about politicians; the list is endless. — Auberon Waugh

Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best - That is our besetting danger. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness
faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain. — Jack London

You ask a lot of questions, don't you?"
"My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin. — Cassandra Clare

Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom. — Elizabeth Enright

There are briers besetting every path,
Which call for patient care;
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer;
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee
Is happy anywhere — Alice Cary

You can use whatever term you want: besetting sin, shadow side, strength and weakness. The very thing that makes you you, that makes you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that, unchecked, will ruin you. For me, it's lust for life. It's energy, curiosity, hunger. — Shauna Niequist

As Pliable and Christian find themselves walking together toward the narrow gate, we see the stark contrast between the two pilgrims. One is burdened; the other is not. One is clutching a book that is a light to his path. The other is guideless. One is on the journey in pursuit of deliverance from besetting sins and rest for his soul. The other is on the journey in order to obtain future delights that temporarily dazzle his mind. One is slow and plodding because of his great weight and a sense of his own unrighteousness; the other is light-footed and impatient to obtain all the benefits of Heaven. One is in motion because his soul has been stirred up to both fear and hope; the other is dead to any spiritual fears,
longings, or aspirations. One is seeking God; the other is seeking self-satisfaction. One is a true pilgrim; the other is false and fading.
15. — John Bunyan

But there is another danger besetting your path. I mean the error of regarding your own capacities instead of your work, of putting self-consciousness in place of God. — Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness. — Samuel Butler