Quotes & Sayings About Making Things Worse

The birds screeched and continued to dive at us. One of them settled on a nearby branch and began berating us. I stopped in my tracks, however, when it actually called out, "Stupid creatures!" "Can they talk?" "Yes," Shardas said curtly, "making them even worse than Marta's monkey. If you talk to them, they will mimic the words. Unfortunately, most of what they hear are curse words, so please don't be shocked if they call you ruder things than 'stupid'. — Jessica Day George

RVM Thoughts for Today -
Things will happen.You can't stop them from happening, but you can control your reaction from making things worse . React Positively. Live Happily — R.v.m.

There are worse things than eating the dead, my dear fellow. Far worse things. There is, for instance, making a huge profit out of their funeral, which is the normal custom in the civilized world. — Leonard Wibberley

By standing still, we're making the things we don't like about Obamacare even worse, forcing Missourians to bear all the costs of this law - and reap none of the benefits. — Jay Nixon

He realized his fears were making things worse. So he did what he would do if he weren't afraid. He moved in a new direction. As he started running down the dark corridor he began to smile. Haw didn't realize it yet, but he was discovering what nourished his soul. He was letting go and trusting what lay ahead for him, even though he did not know exactly what it was. To his surprise, Haw started to enjoy himself more and more. "Why do I feel so good?" he wondered. "I don't have any Cheese and I don't know where I am going." Before long, he knew why he felt good. — Spencer Johnson

I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out."
He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks. — Helen Brown

Breeze chuckled. "He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he'd joke. I
remember how chipper he was the very day after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of our
skaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his step, making one of his inane jokes."
"Sounds insensitive," Allrianne said.
Ham shook his head. "No. He was just determined. He always said that laughter was something the
Lord Ruler couldn't take from him. He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-year
empire - and he did it as a kind of ... penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But, he
did it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face."
"We need what he had," Elend said. — Brandon Sanderson

I think maybe bad things seem worse when people are alone. When they can turn that bad thought over and over in their head, polishing it like a stone, until it shines dark and black. Maybe the key to making things better is being with other people. Little by little, smiles and laughter and hugs can chip away at any dark stone, even if it's as big as a boulder to start. Then finally, bit by bit, it shrinks until it's no bigger than a pebble, something that even I could kick down the road. — Shannon Wiersbitzky

The whole body-mind thing comes into play, when you are feeling that self-doubt and your body is not going to help you if you're not paying attention. Your body's going to go with the self-doubt and make you feel worse, so by making the adjustments - pulling your shoulders back, standing up straight, walking in a more sort of expansive way - all sorts of little things will help pull you out of that self-doubt. — Amy Cuddy

Fundamental [tax] reform almost always runs the risk of making things worse. — Dan Rostenkowski

This is our world and we need the same things to survive. If I'm making my life better and the circumstances of your life worse, that's terrible because in the end it will affect me, too. — Gisele Bundchen

The actions, thoughts, and words of each of us are important. All of us together are making the world. So we have to ask ourselves: How am I living? What kind of actions am I taking? Am I a force for good in the world or am I just another person doing nothing to help and therefore making things worse? — Norman Fischer

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or - worse yet - leaving the blanks blank? — John D'Agata

In an antique city-state, or a modern municipality, shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics - making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties - people did not move around voluntarily and considered uprooting a horrible calamity. In larger organisms like the mega holy nation-state, with a smaller role for face-to-face encounters, and social roots, shame ceases to fulfill its duty of disciplinarian. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is ironic that the Great Depression was produced by government but was blamed on the private enterprise system. The Federal Reserve System explained in its 1933 annual report how much worse things would have been if the Federal Reserve had not behaved so well, yet the Federal Reserve was the chief culprit in making the depression as deep as it was. So the government produced the depression, the private enterprise system got blamed for it, and there was a tremendous change in attitudes. — Milton Friedman

My friend Jenni calls them Sunshine Stealers. Men who have been at it a little too long, who are tired of the ride but can't get off. They're looking for some new form of energy, of approval. It's linked with sex, but it's not the same. What they want to take from you is way worse than your thong in the back of their Lexus. It's ideas, curiosity, an excitement about getting up in the morning and making things. — Lena Dunham

Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse. — Martha Stewart

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better. — Michael Leunig

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation. — Steven Erikson

Politics is deliberately making things better for some people by deliberately making them worse for others. — Cillian Murphy

But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work. — Oliver Burkeman

In the case of all things which have a certain constitution, whatever harm may happen to any of them, that which is affected becomes consequently worse; but in like case, a man becomes both
better ... and more worthy of praise, by making the right use of these accidents. — Marcus Aurelius

In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie (Groundhog Day), Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about "doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse." Which might not sound like very much, but it's just about all you can do in life.

Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they'll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That's the way to show them. That's how a mentsh gets revenge. — Michael Wex

Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq. — Chuck Hagel

There are always worse things waiting. You think you have seen the most terrible thing, the one that coalesces all your nightmares into a freakish horror that actually exists, and the only consolation is that there can be nothing worse. Even if there is, your mind will snap at the sight of it, and you will know no more. But there is worse, your mind does not snap, and somehow you carry on. You might understand that all the joy has gone out of the world for you, you might wish you were the one who was dead - but you go on. You might realize that you are in a hell of your own making, but you go on nevertheless. Because there is nothing else to do. — Stephen King

If we were going to default, we would have decided that many months ago. It would be wrong for the Greek economy, it would be wrong for the European economy, it would make things worse in the end. That's why we're taking the pain and making these structural reforms, and we're on target. — George Papandreou

Our excessive possessions are not making us happy. Even worse, they are taking us away from the things that do. Once we let go of the things that don't matter, we are free to pursue all the things that really do matter. — Joshua Becker

When he makes mistakes, he's so focused on righting the wrong, and so overconfident about his ability to fix it all, that he loses sight of the big picture and ends up making things worse. — Jenn Bennett

It was making me think about human life in a way I didn't want to think about it. Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things. — Matt Haig

Things will happen. You can't stop them from happening, but you can control your reaction from making things worse. React Positively. Live Happily.-RVM — R.v.m.

Whenever I come across someone speaking negatively about escapism or looking down on those who seek a temporary escape from this world, I can't help but look at them as absolute fools. To deny someone the right to find temporary peace in escapism is to deny human nature itself as well as all the benefits of such a beautiful concept. Often times, these instances show them saying that "it'll only make things worse" or "it's not gonna change anything", except, a lot of times, that's not the case at all. How many times has someone shut themselves away from the world by listening to a song they hold dear only to return more ready to face the world than before, how many times has someone learned something about themselves through the fictional events of a novel that they wouldn't have other wise, how many times has society experienced great change through people who dreamed of making the world a better place, only to eventually make those dreams into a reality. — Justin Allen

If we're not actively making things better, chances are we're making them worse. — William Westney

Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things. — Robert Farrar Capon

Because we have never been taught any other way to meet our distress, we don't realize how much our habits of avoidance or brooding are making things worse, turning momentary tiredness into exhaustion, momentary fear into chronic worry, and momentary sadness into chronic unhappiness and depression. So it isn't our fault that we end up exhausted, anxious, or depressed. We have been given only certain tools to deal with things we don't like: get rid of it, work harder, be better, be perfect - and if we fail to make things different, we too easily conclude that we are a failure as a person. — Ed Halliwell

Augustine's feeling of fragmentation has its modern corollary in the way many contemporary young people are plague by a frantic fear of missing out. The world has provided them with a superabundance of neat things to do. Naturally, they hunger to size every opportunity and taste every experience. They want to grab all the goodies in front of them. They want to say yes to every product in the grocery store. They are terrified of missing out on anything that looks exciting. But by not renouncing any of them they spread themselves thin. What's worse, they turn themselves into goodie seekers, greedy for every experience and exclusively focused on self. If you live in this way, you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to sau a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes. — David Brooks