Fatal Quotes & Sayings

There is a point at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Miserables. — Victor Hugo

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.) — Ron Chernow

The idea of the freedom of the human will has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervor, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thinking. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion. — Rudolf Steiner

People who ought to die of shock and exposure don't die of shock and exposure, et cetera, et cetera. The human frame is tougher than one can imagine possible. Moreover, in my experience, a physical shock is more often fatal than a mental shock. — Agatha Christie

Man's fatal flaw is misplaced optimism. — Allan Wolf

Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes. — William Shakespeare

Holding a grudge is a fatal flaw. — Rick Riordan

Action without study fatal. Study without action is futile ... — Mary Ritter Beard

It's one thing to face great odds, but even the smallest struggle, if undertaken without hope, looms and swells with the fatal poisons of despair. — K.W. Jeter

The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon! — Federico Garcia Lorca

Science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into neat logical well-explained packages. The fey are magical capricious illogical and unexplainable. Science cannot prove the existence of faeries so naturally we do not exist. That type of nonbelief is fatal to faries. — Julie Kagawa

Mark Twain said it well, 'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. — Brent Rock Russell

When if or chance or hunger's powerful sway Directs the roving trout this fatal way, He greedily sucks in the twining bait, And tugs and nibbles the fallacious meat. Now, happy fisherman; now twitch the line! How thy rod bends! behold, the prize is thine! — John Gay

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. — Alain De Botton

I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit. — Dennis Potter

It's always more interesting to take on someone that's going to have hidden sides or a fatal flaw, because there's going to be more to play with - more conflict, internally or in and around them - but it's probably the thing of finding the positive in there. — Aidan Gillen

All victories breed, and that over your superior is foolish or fatal. — Baltasar Gracian

They (religions) dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live. — Thomas Jefferson

The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated. — Ben Macintyre

The self-deception of slave owners and proponents of slavery is well documented by the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in their book Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Slavery was not perceived by most slaveholders in the nineteenth century to be an exploitation of humans by other humans for economic gain; instead, slaveholders painted a portrait of slavery as a paternalistic and benign institution in which the slaves themselves were seen as not so different from all laborers - black and white - who toiled everywhere in both free and slave states; further, the South's "Christian slavery" was claimed to be superior. — Michael Shermer

She believes that I love her!" cried the King. "What a fatal mistake! What is to be done to undeceive her?" "You know best," answered the Mermaid, smiling kindly at him. "When people are as much in love with one another as you two are, they don't need advice from anyone else. — Andrew Lang

Opposition to the truth is inevitable, especially if it takes the form of a new idea, but the degree of resistance can be diminished- by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method of approach. Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth- for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth. — B.H. Liddell Hart

I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo. — Lucia Perillo

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously. — Stephen Fry

She knew in her heart that to be without optimism, that core of reasonless hope in the spirit rather than the brain, was a fatal flaw, the seed of death. — Anne Perry

The fatal mistake is waiting for life's circumstances to be right before we begin. Simply begin with your heart, look deeply into it and trust what you feel. Practice knowing and you will know. — Hugh Prather

Success is not forever and failure isn't fatal. — Don Shula

Why couldn't I have a fatal disease? It'd be so much easier. — Julie Anne Peters

Failure is never fatal. But failure to change can and might be. — John Wooden

We die of habits,
deplorable ones
like merely living:
finally fatal.
- from Tubes — Donald Hall

Fear is the Fatal killer of Desire. — Zig Ziglar

We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil ... Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place. — Mahatma Gandhi

It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful. — Thomas Hardy

We're dying of boredom, Corporal, that's the problem.' [Blend]
'If boredom was fatal there wouldn't be a soldier alive on this whole world, Blend.' [Picker] — Stephen Erickson

If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it. — Annie Dillard

He was capable of wild mood swings that went from murder to concern for a spider in under five minutes. In the end, loving Myrnin, really loving him, could be like living with an unexploded bomb - sooner or later it was bound to go off, and for someone fragile and human, it would be fatal. — Rachel Caine

The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be that it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example of the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfection of individuals, but in fact towards — Steven Pinker

A life well lived is the best antidote to that fatal truth. Be active, not a passive worrywart. Find magic in the moment, joy in making someone smile. Listen to a lover's sigh; look into the dancing eyes of a child you made feel special. Most of all, marvel at the wonder that eons of evolutionary time and all your unique experiences have joined to comprise the symphony that is YOU. — Philip G. Zimbardo

MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive. — Annette Funicello

Managing your small failures (iterations) and major failures (pivots) as part of the entrepreneurial development process to save you from a fatal failure that has been the hallmark of most entrepreneurial journeys. — Peter A. Baskerville

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees. — William James

The enlightened rational man is not unlike the title character in Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni": a likeable rake, intelligent and enterprising, free to do as he pleases, outmaneuvering his honorable, tradition-bound adversaries at every step. One cannot begrudge him his liberty and pursuit of happiness, but looming large above him is his fatal flaw: his mind's maturity does not match his freedom. His pursuits are frivolous, tawdry and destructive. And this, we maintain, is the historical moment of our techno-scientific world: like some allegorical alien race in a science fiction story, we have placed broad freedoms and enormous power in the hands of a flawed creature: ourselves. Empirical reason has brought us here, and by its light we will have to find a way forward. — Danko Antolovic

There are no choices that are really a detour that will take you far from where you're wanting to be - because your Inner Being is always guiding you to the next, and the next, and the next. So don't be concerned that you may make a fatal choice, because there aren't any of those. You are always finding your balance. It's a never ending process. — Esther Hicks

But our trials need not be spiritually fatal. They need not take us from our covenants or from the household of God. — Neil L. Andersen

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost. — Gertrude Stein

Knowledge is power, and all things are to be known in due season. But premature knowledge
knowing at the wrong time
is fatal both to progress and to happiness. — Orson F. Whitney

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia ...
... Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death. — Rex Stout

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome. — William Styron

Salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the tipping point fatal. — Stephanie Danler

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying ... but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal. — Stephen King

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "conciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. — Hunter S. Thompson

I can tell you how to get what you want: You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal. — William John Locke

The Bible says there is a certain pleasure in sin.
However, it is short-lived and fatal. — Billy Graham

If our identity gets broken, it affects our ability to connect. And I wonder if we're not all a lot better for each other than we previously thought. I know we're not perfect, but I wonder how many people are withholding the love they could provide because they secretly believe they have fatal flaws. — Donald Miller

In home life contentment is an essential to daily comfort. One discontented person in the house creates an atmosphere fatal to tranquillity. — Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

To the family of a victim of a fatal accident, the deceased was at the wrong place at the wrong time. To the family of the morgue owner, the deceased was at the right place at the right time. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error. — Keith Henson

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why would you help us? (Delphine) I hear stupidity is a fatal disease. Doing my own experimentation to see if that's true or not. If I survive, we'll know it's not. If I die ... well, it'll suck. Bad. And I won't be happy. (Asmodeus) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Failure isn't fatal unless you let it be. — Mike Ditka

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. — Auguste Rodin

The mere fact that so many continue to rise, year after year, out of just such conditions as you may think are fatal to your advancement, ought to convince you that you also can conquer your environment. — Orison Swett Marden

Hesitation was fatal. Choose. — Robert Galbraith

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. — John Updike

Because it flew without a pilot, the D-21 was designed to fly over territory where the U.S. was denied access and to take photographs of weapons facilities from altitudes as low as 1,500 feet. But the project was canceled on July 30, 1966, after a fatal accident at sea during the drone's first official launch. — Annie Jacobsen

Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe. — Malcolm X

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. — Mark Twain

I try to assure myself that "everyone's in debt nowadays" but the fact of it being an epidemic doesn't help one iota, any more than the knowledge of being swept up in a fatal plague would aid in any practical way the infected individual. — Steve Toltz

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues. — Jerome Groopman

It might be, too - doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole - it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union that, unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

He appreciated it, to a point. He also had no intention of having a second marriage like his first, a marriage in which the wife taught the husband, and didn't care who knew it; in fact, took pains to let others see how much she had taught him, how much more she knew about art and politics and all the rest. That had been Dorothy Hearst Paley's fatal flaw, one she recognized too late. Babe — Melanie Benjamin

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. — Simone De Beauvoir

Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal. — Harper Lee

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. — Evelyn Waugh

One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant and twaddle? — Oscar Wilde

for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since - the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. — C.S. Lewis

None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do. — Alexander McCall Smith

Sometimes i had thoughts like 'i don't deserve to live, i'm a big loss, i made fatal mistakes. i should've gone, i don't deserve it ... ' -Nikratama Zakrie — Sitta Karina

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps - but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision. — Soseki Natsume

The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so. — John Ruskin

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow. — Cyril Connolly

We have not only multiplied diseases, but we have made them more fatal. — Benjamin Rush

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. — Aldous Huxley

Do not ride in cars: they are responsible for 20% of all fatal accidents. Do not stay at home: 17% of all accidents occur in the home. Do not walk on the streets or pavements: 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians. Do not travel by air, rail, or water: 16% of accidents happen on these. Only .001% of all deaths occur in worship services in church, and these are usually related to previous physical disorders. Hence the safest place for you to be at any time is at church! — Mark Leslie

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light - that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained. — James Salter

In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes [ ... ], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion [ ... ] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug. — Vladimir Nabokov

The fire was barely fifteen minutes old. What followed was a series of fatal errors that set the fire free and doomed the city to a fiery death. — Jim Murphy

And marriage, generally, requires an exquisite sense of timing. As a single person, time is relative to one's needs and demands; as a married partner, time is a joint venture - the husband may be an hour late getting home, while dinner grows cold; the wife may be an hour late dressing for a party, while her mate grows hot under the collar. Time does not belong to us alone; we share it with those we love, those we work for, those we play with. It is an elastic concept: we must, as we grow older, be willing to be bored for someone else's sake. And it can be as fatal to be stingy with our time as with our money. — Sydney J. Harris

Why was it that the people who made idiots of themselves immediately felt it necessary to compound their sins by flipping off the people who saved them from possibly fatal mistakes? — Patricia Briggs

I got by on talent. That was my fatal mistake. — Pete Maravich

For once reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal. — Thomas Henry Huxley

Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal. — Timothy Garton Ash

Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. — Mike Pence

By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. — Paul Valery

THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two. — Ken Wilber

He argued unconvincingly that they would let him alone, perhaps even make an outlaw of him. But then the fatal unreasoning knowledge came to him again. The breaking of the conch and the death of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor. These painted savages would go further and further. Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never. — William Golding

Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated: the field of politics supplies the alchymists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. — John Quincy Adams