Disastrously Quotes & Sayings

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world. — N. T. Wright

So what you have," Kenner said, "is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as — Michael Crichton

But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...
And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?
And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.
(- to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918) — Violet Trefusis

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle. — Jessica Mitford

My husband saw me go through the 2008 campaign cycle. We did it together for Sarah Palin and John McCain. It ended disastrously, and afterward I really wanted to do something different, so I started writing novels, and I imagined a fictional female president in my head. — Nicolle Wallace

True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong. — Julian Baggini

But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in. — Alice Munro

With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously. — Thomas Hardy

Men always failed Maman in the end. They forever fell disastrously short of whatever ideal she held them up to. What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits and the flinging of cooking utensils and collapse. High drama. Maman was incapable of either starting or ending a relationship without excess. — Khaled Hosseini

The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice
all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole. — John Dewey

Jane had that happy disposition which would like to imagine that every one really wishes the well-being of his neighbour and struggles, though sometimes rather disastrously, to help him towards it. — Phyllis Bottome

I tell you, I've always been quite physical about acting. I've always felt about for the shape of someone or the deportment, for better or worse. Sometimes I think I've done it disastrously, and other times, when I'm not thinking about it so much, less disastrously, but I can't seem to control it much. — Martin Clunes

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? — Thomas Sowell

To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb. — Alice Munro

For dishonest thinking, however well-intentioned, can only discredit the cause it serves, and must in the long run boomerang disastrously on those who indulge in it. — J.I. Packer

I've got mates who have got married through meeting on Internet dating sites, so it really can work out - even if sometimes it does go disastrously wrong. — Sheridan Smith

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are. — John Kenneth Galbraith

[Li Ch'uan cites the case of Fu Chien, prince of Ch'in, who in 383 A.D. marched with a vast army against the Chin Emperor. When warned not to despise an enemy who could command the services of such men as Hsieh An and Huan Ch'ung, he boastfully replied: "I have the population of eight provinces at my back, infantry and horsemen to the number of one million; why, they could dam up the Yangtsze River itself by merely throwing their whips into the stream. What danger have I to fear?" Nevertheless, his forces were soon after disastrously routed at the Fei River, and he was obliged to beat a hasty retreat.] If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. [Chang Yu said: "Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive." He adds: "Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack." It would be hard to find a better epitome of the root-principle of war.] — Sun Tzu

The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent. — Kate Grenville

The market likes to lull you into the false security of high success rate techniques, which often lose disastrously in the long run. The general idea is that what works most of the time is nearly the opposite of what works in the long run. — William Eckhardt

Not to sound like a jerk, but Jane isn't really my type. Her hair's kinda disastrously curly and she mostly hangs out with guys. My type's a little girlier. And honestly, I don't even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I'm asexual or something - I just find Romance Drama unbearable. — John Green

Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul. — E. M. Forster

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. — Anne Carson

It is the contention of this book that the idea that Islam is a religion of peace is fundamentally, totally, and disastrously wrong. In fact, Islam is intrinsically violent; it is the impetus for modern terrorism, and its doctrines necessitate that the only possible relationship between Islamic civilization and non-Islamic civilization is war or subjugation. — G. M. Davis

Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent - Live - live fully, live passionately, live disastrously if necessary. Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again! Live, let's live, you and I - let's live as none ever lived before, let's explore and investigate, let's tread fearlessly where even the most intrepid have faltered and held back! — Violet Trefusis

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. — Dallas Willard

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy. — Anne Carson

They'd used sex instead of communication in the past, and it had turned out disastrously. — Miranda Liasson

Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. — Vera Brittain