Humiliations Quotes & Sayings

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told. — Azar Nafisi

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else. — Nancy Friday

As the days passed, I began to look upon my fate with new eyes. I often lamented the wicked turns my life had taken, but I rarely considered how much I had to be thankful for, how I had survived so long where so many others had perished, how I had seen wonders that no other Zamori had ... I had been so intent on counting all the miseries and humiliations I had endured that I neglected to thank the Almighty for the blessings he had bestowed upon me. — Laila Lalami

I gave you justice, it said, as I was taught it. And I gave you mercy , too, so far as I could. While I could not spare you pain and humiliation, I make you a gift of my own pains and humiliations, that yours might be easier to bear. — Diana Gabaldon

Things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. — Marilynne Robinson

I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage. — John Lennon

Everything is a grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father's love - difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul's miseries, her burdens, her needs - everything, because through them, she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is a grace because everything is God's gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events - to the heart that loves, all is well. — Therese Of Lisieux

Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland. — Edwin A. Abbott

One of the duties of fortitude is to keep the weak from receiving injury; another, to check the wrong motions of our own souls; a third, both to disregard humiliations, and to do what is right with an even mind. All these clearly ought to be fulfilled by all Christians, and especially by the clergy. — Saint Ambrose

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever. — Michel Faber

There is really no end to life's little humiliations. — Lev Grossman

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. — Richard Flanagan

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn't dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we'll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear. — Curtis Sittenfeld

They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. — Anne Lamott

One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected. — Theodore Dalrymple

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did. — V.S. Naipaul

Whether our feet are compressed in iron shoes, our faces hidden with veils and masks; whether yoked with cows to draw the plow through its furrows, or classed with idiots, lunatics and criminals in the laws and constitutions of the State, the principle is the same; for the humiliations of the spirit are as real as the visible badges of servitude. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

We learn humility through accepting humiliations cheerfully. — Mother Teresa

Life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, it's our own expectations that crush us.
from Skippy Dies — Paul Murray

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma's dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world. — Pat Conroy

Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you'll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us. — Paul Murray

we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations." How — Ryan Holiday

You will gain more by receiving scorn peacefully than if you fasted for a week on bread and water. It is good to humble ourselves; but it is much more worthwhile to accept the humiliations that come to us from others. — Alphonsus Liguori

It is cruel for you to leave your daughter, so full of hope and resolve, to suffer the humiliations of disfranchisement she already feels so keenly, and which she will find more and more galling as she grows into the stronger and grander woman she is sure to be. If it were your son who for any cause was denied his right to have his opinion counted, you would compass sea and land to lift the ban from him. — Susan B. Anthony

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

He dropped the tapestry back into place and stood with his back to it, looking at me across the width of the room. "It seems," he said, "that seeking your opinion will not cease to embroil us in argument, whatever the cause. I apologize. I also realize trying to convince you of my good intentions is a fruitless effort, but my own conscience demanded that I make the attempt."
I couldn't think of any reply to make to that, so I whirled around and retreated into the library, my insides boiling with a nasty mixture of embarrassment and anger. Why did I always have to bring up that war
and pick a fight? What kind of answer was I looking for?
All I do is repeat the humiliations of last year. As if I haven't had enough of those, I thought grimly. And the worst thing was, I wouldn't dare to go near that room again, despite his offer at the beginning of the encounter
an encounter which was thoroughly my own fault. — Sherwood Smith

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture — Max Beckmann

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference. — Maria Montessori

Is what's manifesting as a fear actually some instinct to resist being young? Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it's too late. Is the sense of imminent death bound up in the desire to leave some kind of a legacy? — Lena Dunham

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her. — Simone Weil

[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them? — Jon Ronson

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker. — H.L. Mencken

If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored. — David Graeber

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside. — Lorna Sage

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations. — Vijay Seshadri

To live with his physical hideousness, incapacitating deformities and unremiting pain is trial enough, but to be exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by all who behold him -- is even more difficult to bear. [...] For in order to survive, Merrick forces himself to suffer these humiliations, I repeat, humiliations, in order to survive, thus he exposes himself to crowds who pay to gape and yawp at this freak of nature, the Elephant Man. — Bernard Pomerance

As soon as error is corrected, it is important that the error be forgotten and only the successful attempts be remembered. Errors, mistakes, and humiliations are all necessary steps in the learning process. Once they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we constantly dwell upon the errors, then the error or failure becomes the goal. — Vince Lombardi

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations. — Alice Munro

The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator's efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price. With — Alice Miller

Our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. So — Anne Lamott

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there. — Tom Hodgkinson

What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications. — Larry Kramer

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun. — George Barker

The greatest of all humiliations is that disgrace delivered without a word being spoken, or a hand ever raised. — John Zande

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas - of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn't had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding. — Nicole Krauss

Why," he was saying, "why should one not tolerate this life, since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beasts, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-g0-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behaviour of certain minute cells (gesture) or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue heavens. — Raymond Queneau

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London. — William Dalrymple

How many more humiliations do I have to suffer? I've only been here a day. — Amy Ewing

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French - all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm - was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors - that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history. — Leo Tolstoy

Historical context apart, Klemperer's journals can be read for their own sake as a gnawing meditation on the disappointments of life and the irrevocability of choices. He is intensely aware at all moments, perhaps because of his consciousness of being a "survivor," that death is only a breath away. He is one of the great kvetches of all time, endlessly recording aches and pains, bad dreams, shortages of food and medicine, snubs and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In — Christopher Hitchens

Since the attachment to the cult of Islam is psychological, the solution must also be psychological. We have all the logical proof that Islam is false. But logic has its limitation. Brainwashed people dismiss logic and pride themselves in their blind faith. Psychological warfare is extremely powerful. The Muslim bravado must be destroyed by humiliations and ridicule. — Ali Sina

A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately. — George Bernard Shaw

The street is full of humiliations to the proud. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life. — Henning Mankell

Life has taught Alice Bhatti that every little step forward in life is preceded by a ritual humiliation. Every little happiness asks for a down payment. Too many humiliations and a journey that goes in circles means that her face is permanently in the red. She accepts that role. 'I'll do my best'. — Mohammed Hanif

Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence. — George Saunders

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender. — Andrea Dworkin

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so. — Jorge Luis Borges

As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the successful because somehow you made it through the day without anyone finding out that you are a complete fraud. — Colson Whitehead

There was humiliations, cruelty, abuse, violence. And they were all the time trying to put to fight the prisoners one against the other, filling us with wrong information about the others or giving privileges to some so that the others would feel jealous and would react. And I could see how they were manipulating us. — Ingrid Betancourt

We plunge into love with a naivete that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again. — Michael Perry

The humiliations and defeats,
given with a primitive honesty,
end not in frustration, despair or futility,
but in hunger, an ecstatic devouring hunger - for more life.
- Anais Nin — Anais Nin

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free. — Noam Chomsky

The first blind man had begun by declaring that his wife would not be subjected to the shame of giving her body to strangers in exchange for whatever, she had no desire to do so nor would he permit it, for dignity has no price, that when someone starts making small concessions, in the end live loses all meaning. The doctor then asked him what meaning he saw in the situation in which all of them there found themselves, starving, covered in filth up to their ears, ridden with lice, eaten by bedbugs, bitten by fleas, I, too, would prefer my wife not to go, but what I want serves no purpose, ... I know that my manly pride, this thing we call male pride, if after so many humiliations, we still preserve something worthy of that name, I know that it will suffer, it already is, I cannot avoid it, but it is probably the only solution, if we want to live. — Jose Saramago

Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps. Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died. — Leon Uris

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn't realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me. — Melissa Bank

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. JL Borges — Jan Karon

You really work in those conditions?"

She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: "And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?"

They didn't answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that - this was the idea they had grown up with - they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off," she said, "you and the working class. — Elena Ferrante

A disease and its treatment can be a series of humiliations, a chisel for humility. — Laurel Lea

Writers live with fear. Some writers cannot deal with the fear, and so they quit or refuse to publish. In order to write, you must either ignore the fear or trick it into leaving you alone. The fear is very sly, though and hard to trick. The fear in writing comes from exposing your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences, your ideas, your talent, your intelligence and ultimately your self to public scrutiny and possible scorn. The fear is by no means groundless. You have opened yourself up to the possibility of public humiliations...I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest novel ever written isn't gathering dust in some filing cabinet somewhere, simply because its author could not overcome the fear of having it published. — Patrick F. McManus

I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK. — Jennifer Gilmore

We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands
whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention
but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us. — Mark Slouka

Nor is any evidence to be found, either in History or Human Nature, that nations are to be bribed out of a spirit of encroachment and aggression, by humiliations which nourish their pride, or by concessions that extend their resources and power. — James Madison

Had Martha Foley returned William [James Sidis]'s passion as Margaret [Engemann] did Norbert [Wiener]'s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. ... In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert's response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives. — Amy Wallace

Time to repay old humiliations, is that it, Bean? 'Of course,' Ender said contemptuously. 'I'm not as close to the floor as you are. — Orson Scott Card

For a Clown, Death is Closing the gate on all Daily humiliations. — Kambiz Shabankareh

Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and - humiliation of humiliations - she began to cry. Right there in the street. "I'm so confused," she said but it came out as a great honking wail.
"Come here, you silly girl," Phyllis said.
The woman put her arms around Rosy, patted her back, and for the first time in forever, Rosy allowed herself to just cry.
A young mother with twins in a pram passed them. The children's eyes tracked Rosy for a second before their faces crumpled and they started to cry too.
"I'm sorry," Rosy said, and flapped her arms. "I'm sorry. — R.G. Manse

These humiliations are the essence of the game. — Alistair Cooke

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room. — Yukio Mishima

Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end - and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then - unwittingly - the error or failure itself becomes the "goal" that is consciously held in imagination and memory. — Maxwell Maltz

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. — Cory Doctorow

As patience leads to peace, and study to science, so are humiliations the path that leads to humility. — Bernard Of Clairvaux

It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit. — Anna Godbersen

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared. — Marilynne Robinson

Sometimes, for revenge to be as sweet and painful as it is intended, some time has to pass. Time enough that people have forgotten about past hurts and humiliations. Time enough to make the poison of bitterness consume a soul. It was to be that time ...
Two worlds collide and find a common link. A plan was made, a price was paid and revenge was set in motion. — Elizabeth Bourgeret

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration. — Igor Stravinsky

Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. — J.K. Rowling

Youth, with all its accompanying risks, humiliations, and uncertainties, the pressure to do it all before it's too late. — Lena Dunham

Revenge! Workingmen, to Arms!!! . . . You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; . . . you have worked yourself to death . . . your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord - in short: you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years: Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the coffers of your lazy thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, kill you! . . . To arms we call you, to arms! — Howard Zinn

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. — Anne Lamott

Sufferings, adversities, humiliations, failures and suspicions that have come my way are splinters that keep alive the fire of my love for You, O Jesus. — Mary Faustina Kowalska

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone. — Rachel Kushner

Part of growing up spiritually is learning to be grateful for all things, even our difficulties, disappointments, failures and humiliations. — Mike Aquilina

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. — W. H. Auden

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. — William James

We ought to run after crosses as the miser runs after money ... Nothing but crosses will reassure us at the Day of Judgment When that day shall come, we shall be happy in our misfortunes, proud of our humiliations, and rich in our sacrifices! — John Vianney

Warned by such evidences of their spiritual illness, believers profit by their humiliations. Robbed of their foolish confidence in the flesh, they take refuge in the grace of God. And when they have done so, they experience the nearness of the divine protection which is to them a strong fortress (Ps 30:6-7). — John Calvin

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.
I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. — Jeanette Winterson