Disheartening Quotes & Sayings

To hear the amount of hate that people have in the United States is disheartening. However, I still have hope that we have not reached the pinnacle. — Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

Whatever the situation and however disheartening it may be, it is a great hour when a man ceases adopting difficulties as an excuse for despondency and tackles himself as the real problem. No mood need be his master. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

I was signed to a record label when I was younger. I was in a group, and I just wasn't - personally, I wasn't ready to get out there. I don't know. It was a pop group. Not like the Spice Girls, but when you don't have any control over anything, it's disheartening. — Tika Sumpter

It's a disheartening feeling when you can't stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away. — Walter Mosley

It's very disheartening to encounter a fearful twenty-one year old. They haven't earned the right to be that afraid. It's not like we're living in war-torn Bosnia or something. — Fran Lebowitz

I had taken some of my solo music into the record label. They didn't really care for the direction I was moving in and I found it really disheartening. They wanted a pop hit, which I understand in terms of making money. I get that. But what they were going to ask of me was something I wasn't prepared to deliver and I felt kind of trapped. I just stopped writing. I just stopped. It was stifling. — Shirley Manson

I found it incredibly disheartening that in the late '90s, suddenly pop culture became even more misogynistic and more homophobic, and so I criticized Eminem for having lyrics that were egregiously homophobic and egregiously misogynistic. — Moby

We had never before seen a place where European influence had not contributed to smooth and soften the rough features of uncultivated nature. The prospect of Rangoon, as we approached, was quite disheartening. — Adoniram Judson

After a particularly disheartening day in my freshman year of high school, in which my arrogance had once again stirred up the insecurity of my classmates and driven them to acts of ill-concealed hostility, — Kate Mulgrew

Among the most disheartening and dangerous of ... advisors, you will often find those closest to you, your dearest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing whatever ... — Minnie Maddern Fiske

As the reflections of our pride upon our defects are bitter, disheartening, and vexatious, so the return of the soul towards God is peaceful and sustained by confidence. You will find by experience how much more your progress will be aided by this simple, peaceful turning towards God, than by all your chagrin and spite at .the faults that exist in you. — Francois Fenelon

As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience. — Sylvia Day

Mr. Obama would be a disheartening president even during a super boom, with his grim demeanor and empty rhetoric, as well as his obvious hatred of business bravado. — Paul Johnson

...few truly understood how disheartening it was to be cut off from worlds so strange and distant they remained to us fantasies rather than distant realities, too surreal and foreign to be touched. Their minds were fixated on what they knew to be real, unable to create the atmospheres of the nebulous realms that lay just beyond our reach, just beyond the dimming horizon, our celestial limits. — Moonshine Noire

The music industry went through such a strange stretch in 1977, especially in this country, with the whole punk rock thing coming about. Punk was rebellious-and justified in that response-but it had very little to do with music, and so it created a highly-charged but frighteningly floundering atmosphere that I found very, very disheartening. Musical quality for me has always been an important part of rock'n'roll-and winning recognition for that has long been an uphill battle all the way. Punk seemed like rock'n'roll utterly without the music. — Steve Winwood

It really has been a blessing because you can go and look at our other movies we've done in a studio system. We didn't get to make the movie that we wanted to make. We made the movie that someone else wanted us to make. That can be a little disheartening, a lot disheartening. While there have been struggles, it doesn't matter which table you're at because you're going to have obstacles, but I kind of like being able to make the movie that you want to make. — Todd Farmer

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one's stomach when hungry. — David Markson

My mother told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. — Ronald Reagan

It can be disheartening to see acts that don't necessarily have any input on their own material to do so well in the charts. — Jake Bugg

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now. — Carrie Brownstein

Disloyalty in trusted servants is one of the most disheartening things that can happen to a public performer. — Harry Houdini

For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. — Herman Melville

The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival is an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use of which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It's the sort of stuff to make me wince- a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It's no taste which is so disheartening. — Jonathan Meades

I lightly grasped the edges of my shirt and dropped into a neat curtsy, batting my eyes coquettishly. "Thank you, Liege," I said, Gratefully Condescending. "You're still not in Cadogan attire, you know." I frowned, awash in the disheartening realization that I'd tried again, and failed, at playing Cadogan vampire. Was I ever going to be able to be good enough for Ethan? I doubted it, but faked a smile and cheekily offered, "You should have seen what I was going to wear." Ethan rolled his eyes. — Chloe Neill

Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness. — Henri Barbusse

Knowing now what goes into making a successful artist, it's disheartening. — Sia Furler

There's little in life that's so disheartening as constant cold. — Stephen King

A wretched disheartening result. And a little mouse shall lead them. — Hugh Dalton

You get halfway through with your life and you realize you haven't done the things you wanted to do or become what you'd thought you'd become and it's disheartening. — Katja Millay

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality. — Emma Goldman

Indecision is the most unsexy thing on the planet. I don't know if I'm sexy but I think decisiveness is sexy. I also lose trust and faith in them when I realise I'm a bit on my own and that's a very disheartening feeling. — Drew Barrymore

The trip back from Pointe du Lac was thrilling. And the constant chatter of Lestat was positively the most boring and disheartening thing I experienced. Of course as I said, I was far from being his equal. — Anne Rice

It's disheartening to write goals from year to year, looking back only to see you are in the same place. You can make so many promises that you get sick of yourself, but what is it that God can't do? — Monica Johnson

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know. — Paul Goodman

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. — Willa Cather

One moment of unwelcomed silence is more disheartening than a lifetime of incessant screams.

And the silence deafens me. — Scott Hildreth

It's disheartening that animal people criticize societies that enlist the help of actors or organize creative acts like 'I'd rather go naked than wear fur,' to increase public awareness to our cause. These are great/courageous ideas which time has come! Liberation of animals is REVOLUTION - not elegant performance/ intellectual competition. We should do most anything to advance the animal rights cause. All the bickering may make the one step forward ... TWO STEPS BACKWARD??? — Adela Popescu

People are going to see you talking to nobody and think you're weird." This amused him.

It neither amused nor worried Blue. She'd gone through eighteen years as the town psychic's daughter, and now, in her senior year, she had already held every single possible conversation about that fact. She had been shunned and embraced and bullied and cajoled. She was going to hell, she had the straight line to spiritual nirvana. Her mother was a hack, her mother was a witch. Blue dressed like a hobo, Blue dressed like a fashion mogul. She was untouchably hilarious, she was a friendless bitch. It had faded into monotonous background noise. The disheartening and lonesome upshot was that Blue Sargent was the strangest thing in the halls of Mountain View High School. — Maggie Stiefvater

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma. — Joseph Joubert

I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. — James Salter

For over a long period of time there's little in life so disheartening as constant cold - not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. — Stephen King

I can't think of anything more disheartening than living a life without a clear purpose. — Daniel Willey

There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it ... All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit. — Larry Kramer

A child's bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn't, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn't predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried. — Cathy Lamb

I went to a private school, and I struggled academically. It was really disheartening to always be considered bad at that. — Gia Coppola

Whether people like your work or not, but it's also based on a lot of other things - geography, who you happen to connect with and where they sit in that ladder - and all of that felt really isolating and disheartening to me when I figured it out. — Victoria Chang

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author. — Cat Stevens

Sometimes I really hated people in general. I wanted to believe in the good that I knew existed in all of us, but it was so disheartening to see what happened when we let our bad over-rule that good. — J.M. Northup

When someone has tried to please you, it is rude, as well as disheartening, to respond by announcing that the effort was a failure. — Judith Martin

I was only driven to be the best and it was very disheartening sometimes that it took me so long to start getting my voice heard. That certainly started with television, but it was never because of where I came from, it was because people saw something in me. — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times. — Wendy Lesser

It's disheartening that people think that Donald Sterling is the outlier and that he's the exception and not the rule. — Roxane Gay

For it is disheartening to inspire in a man the desire, and to take away from him the hope, of emulation. — Seneca.

When you think of what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities and all the good it's done in the world, it's kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally. — Frank Miller

I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and usinspiring. — Carrie Brownstein

In the center of the sofa were two oblong companion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and painfully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations. — Fred Chappell

The shame of the U.S.S. Liberty incident is that our sailors were treated as though they were enemies, rather than the patriots and heroes that they were. There is no other incident
beyond Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
that shows the power of the Israeli Lobby by being able to silence successive American governments. Allowing the lies told by the Israelis and their minions in the U.S. is disheartening to all of us who are proud of our servicemen. — James Abourezk

We grow up with such an idealistic view on how our life should be; love, friendships, a career or even the place we will live ~ only to age and realise none of it is what you expected & reality is a little disheartening, when you've reached that realisation; you have learnt the gift of all, any new beginning can start now and if you want anything bad enough you'll find the courage to pursue it with all you have. The past doesn't have to be the future, stop making it so. — Nikki Rowe

I love the art form, but working in film can be a disheartening experience. — Madonna Ciccone

Continue writing... No matter how difficult it is or how disheartening... never stop. — Ugochukwu Kingsley Ani

When we observe trials and tribulations in our world, there's even more reason to lighten the heavy load. Sometimes life gets tough and it's disheartening. Never mind happiness; what we genuinely need is joy! God didn't intend for us to be sad or serious all of the time. His word in Proverbs 17:22 (ESV) says, A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. — Dana Arcuri

I'll be honest, watching the music industry collapse has been demoralizing and disheartening at times. — Trent Reznor

It's disheartening to read the really negative stuff, but at the same time, I know who I am, and I'm comfortable with myself. — Austin Carlile

Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. — John Green

How poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope! — Vita Sackville-West

What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul, a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome and therefore, of what use graduate work? — Brad Gooch

When there is no one there to cheer you on through it, or the right kind of therapy team, it can be very disheartening for people — Amy Rankin

Other bands gave us lip service, but when it came down to it they kind of backed off. That was a little disheartening. But I respect them. That's their business. — Mike McCready

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. — Herman Melville

But for fear of disheartening them, we also spoke to them of disappointments and the bitter taste that rest has after a useless action. And seeing the eldest of them lost in a reverie that pained us, we added that perhaps the only truth is the peace to be found in books ... — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother - a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos - told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God's Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn't let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you'll find yourself thinking - If I hadn't had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn't have happened to me. — Ronald Reagan

[On her collaboration with Adolph Green:] We stare at each other. We meet, whether or not we have a project, just to keep up a continuity of working. There are long periods when nothing happens, and it's just boring and disheartening. But we have a theory that nothing's wasted, even those long days of staring at one another. You sort of have to believe that, don't you? That you had to go through all that to get to the day when something did happen. — Betty Comden

PESSIMISM- philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. — Ambrose Bierce

It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences. — George Trumbull Ladd

I just cannot help but feel as though [Christianity] cheapens life. After all, what we must conclude at the end of the day is this disheartening and somewhat debilitating possibility: everything you think, feel, hope for, long for, experience, taste, smell, touch, learn, comprehend, discover, create, work toward, work on, and do, means absolutely nothing to the Christian God if you do not have faith in Jesus. — Michael Vito Tosto

I don't find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life - we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That's how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too. — John Green

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings. — James Joyce

Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow. — Sheena Iyengar