Capriciously Quotes & Sayings

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) — George Monbiot

The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it's for an intelligent reason. So it's really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You're better off acting capriciously. — Pablo Picasso

Speramus meliora; resurgret cineribus. We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes, — Jeffrey Eugenides

God forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, Divine pre arrangement; forgives universally, on the grounds of atonement and on the condition of repentance and faith. — Richard Salter Storrs

A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. — Lionel Shriver

This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president. — Rick Perlstein

I undertake my scientific research with the confident assumption that the earth follows the laws of nature which God established at creation ... My studies are performed with the confidence that God will not capriciously confound scientific results by "slipping in" a miracle. — James W. Skehan

When I am feeling rotten, I like to walk. When you walk, there's a kind of rhythm. Your mind slows down to match your body. Your thoughts start to go in lazy, comfortable circles. — M T Anderson

Children hated generously, capriciously. — Ian McEwan

I'd like to turn the silence right up, but how do you do that? — Valerie Zenatti

Perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful. — Erica Jong

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding? — Richard Dawkins

Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface. — James Russell Lowell

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist's nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences. — Thomas Mann

Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none. — Thomas Hardy

You will ask how I felt about spending so much time with people who supported the Hitler regime. I will tell you that, since I had absolutely no choice in the matter, I no longer dared to think about it. To be in Germany at that time, pretending to be an Aryan, meant that you automatically socialized with Nazis. To me, they were all Nazis, whether they belonged to the party or not. For me to have made distinctions at that time - to say Hilde was a "good" Nazi and the registrar was a "bad" Nazi - would have been silly and dangerous, because the good ones could turn you in as easily and capriciously as the bad ones could save your life. — Edith Hahn Beer

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again
and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law. — Mark Twain

When I graduated, I was going to go to school for law, but had such an affinity for hip-hop. It was like walking into a casino and I decided to bet everything on hip-hop, and I hit! My hit wasn't just a hit for me, it was a hit for everyone in this culture. — Doug E. Fresh

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part. — Lionel Shriver

The whole of God is present at every point in space at the same time. Take time to meditate on this great idea. In other words, God doesn't come and go. God doesn't capriciously move substance from God's supply "up there" to fill your needs "down here." Nor does God answer prayer in some kind of coming forth. God is always present, totally present - as a Presence. — Eric Butterworth

Mostly, though, I prefer to believe that God has no grace to give. Because the alternative is that He gives grace capriciously or, even worse, that He plays favorites. Some desolate valleys become places of springs, and others wither until they are sere beyond hope, and if God is the one who chooses which is which then I would rather live in a universe lucky enough to have escaped His notice. — Joel Derfner

You have to live a little." Grandma fitted the track bar into the cog on the track. "Go out with a bad boy. Run headfirst into a fight. Get roaring drunk. Something! — Ilona Andrews

Athens' biggest worry was the sheer recklessness of its own democratic government. A simple majority of the citizenry, urged on and incensed by clever demagogues, might capriciously send out military forces in unnecessary and exhausting adventures. — Thucydides

The man of good character is humble before those less educated than him, compassionate to those less fortunate than him, and kind to those inferior to him. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Some deeply untrusting actors - the kind that need to know exactly what's what and are completely insecure - might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting. — Mike Leigh

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it
that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269 — Irvin D. Yalom

Coldly and capriciously the slanting sunbeams fall. — Alice Cary

I was tired of an outlaw's life. — Frank James

If I had my choice of all the blessings I can conceive of I would choose perfect conformity to the Lord Jesus, or, in one word, holiness. — Charles Spurgeon

The problem with growing up fearing and expecting rejection is that you cannot enter into adult relationship in the expectation of happiness. — Dorothy Rowe

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins

Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars. — Edwin Percy Whipple

If the emperor had capriciously decreed the death of the most eminent and virtuous citizen of the republic, the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation by the ministers of open violence or of specious injustice. The caution, the delay, the difficulty with which he proceeded in the condemnation and punishment of a popular bishop, discovered to the world that the privileges of the church had already revived a sense of order and freedom in the Roman government. — Edward Gibbon

Troubles are exceedingly gregarious in their nature, and flying in flocks are apt to perch capriciously. — Charles Dickens

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

I can't talk about every single film I made. It's not my way to go back into the past and to look at my old pictures and to discuss them. — Otto Preminger

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify
capriciously
their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships
and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes
husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer ... — Tom Stoppard

It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks. — Arthur Conan Doyle

So which guideline should a writer follow, "Avoid elegant variation" or "Don't use a word twice on one page"? Traditional style guides don't resolve the contradiction, but psycholinguistics can help. Wording should not be varied capriciously, because in general people assume that if someone uses two different words they're referring to two different things. And as we shall soon see, wording should never be varied when a writer is comparing or contrasting two things. But wording should be varied when an entity is referred to multiple times in quick succession and repeating the name would sound monotonous or would misleadingly suggest that a new actor had entered the scene. — Steven Pinker

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed. — Greg Egan

All shall be well. — Julian Of Norwich

The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited. — Evelyn Waugh