Impairing Quotes & Sayings

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. — Roger Zelazny

My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me. — Joan Mitchell

I saw in a flash that if I shrank from this there would at once be less Queen and more Orual in me. — C.S. Lewis

She decided to sleep with him and get it over with. It was the only way. He had become an annoying jingle, striking in the shower, or at work, or just as she was falling asleep. She had to at least kiss him deeply and completely, in a way that left nothing behind. So she could move on. So she could stop imagining it. She couldn't keep losing herself to the jingle. It was impairing her ability to function. — Max Barry

Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists. — Agatha Christie

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass ... if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass ... slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own ... structure. — Dale Carnegie

I'm the only nerd with a piece of paper, — Patricia Arquette

Any creature, even one as unassuming as a fish, can become something mighty. When they courageously endure their trials, they meet their destiny. — Colleen Houck

I've never said hello to a pretty girl alone in the woods at night with my pants unzipped, holding my dick. You, Caleb?'
'Can't say that I have. But I have said hello by breaking arms before. It has the unfortunate side effect of impairing one's ability to hold their dick.'
'That sounds painful,' Xander observed.
Caleb said, 'Ah. That would explain the screaming. — Ashlan Thomas

Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably. — John Carey

At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good ... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it. — Woodrow Wilson

Bills of attainder, ex-post facto laws and laws impairing the obligation of contracts are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. — James Madison

He may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labour without wearing his moral natuee thin or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. He may think that he can play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes... For man is a unit. Weakness in one part becomes weakness in every part — Charles Franklin Thwing

A financial panic is a very bad thing, but a government panic can do far greater damage in a far shorter time. — Tom McClintock

Becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus' teaching, it is the very heart of his message. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole. — Leon Battista Alberti

A word of advice. If, as a young man, student, you are tormented by a desire for women, it is best to get out into the fresh air as much as possible. — Penelope Fitzgerald

There is no king or sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate;
Each to all is venerable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them. — Peter Breggin

Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final "improvement" the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any "bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves." "The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions - African slavery as it exists among us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization." This question, Stephens baldly admitted, "was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."20 Stephens then referenced — Don H. Doyle

No State shall pass any law impairing the [natural] obligation of contracts. — Lysander Spooner

Movies were much better in the days when I was doing them. — Rita Hayworth

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I'm only looking at a friend. — Stevie Ray Vaughan

The development of adversary criminal trial raised an acute theoretical challenge, which has never been satisfactorily resolved in the Anglo-American tradition: how to justify the truth-impairing tendencies of a procedure that remits to partisans the work of gathering and presenting the evidence upon which accurate adjudication depends. — John H. Langbein

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another. — Margaret J. Wheatley

from the fine American essayist Agnes Repplier: "I used to think that ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards or the power of contrast, and the right to estimate." And, "We can know nothing of any nation unless we know its history. — John Lukacs

Smiling through confusion is courage.
Smiling through tears is strength.
Smiling through pain is power.
Smiling through tragedy is greatness. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not. — Mark Twain

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that. — Naomi Wolf

I was so intimidated by the thought of improvising back in the '80s when I was in Chicago. I think the opportunity only even came up once that I can recall, and I turned down the offer. It was to go improvise in some club in the suburbs or something. Good God, I couldn't think of anything more frightening than to get up there without a plan. — Neil Flynn