Not Everything Is As Good As It Seems Quotes & Sayings

Do you know that i paid two dollars for [Doxocology] thirty-three years ago? Everything was wrong with him, hoofs like flapjacks, a hock so thick and short and straight there seems no joint at all. he's hammerheaded and swaybacked. He has a pinched chest and a big behind. He has an iron mouth and he still fights the upper. with a saddle he feels as thought you were riding a sled over a gravel pit. He can't trot and he stumbles over his feet when he walks. I have never in thirty-three years fond one good thing about him. He even has an ugly disposition. He is selfish and quarrelsome and mean and disobedient. to this day I don't dare walk behind him because he will surely take a kick at me. when I feed him mush he tries to bite my hand. And I love him. — John Steinbeck

There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine's critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another person only if you know something of humility; otherwise your ego gets in the way. If, however, you are humiliated instead of humbled, there is no 'you' to enter into a relationship. Massilians and Pelagians had differing understandings of when humility before God became too much of a good thing, but they had common cause in not liking Augustine's scruples about the human will to relate to God. If everything about the soul's relationship to God is God's doing, including the very desire to be in relation, where exactly does the soul surface in its redemption? The Word seems to have become a monologue. — James Wetzel

I believe that Love is at the center of everything; therefore, I accept Love as the healing power of life. I permit Love to reach out from me to every person I meet. I believe that Love is returned to me from every person I meet. I trust the guidance of Love because I believe it is the power of Good in the universe. I feel that Love is flowing through me to heal every situation I meet, to help every person I contact. Love opens the way before me and makes it perfect, straight, and glad. Love forgives everything unlike itself; it purifies everything. Love converts everything that seems commonplace into that which is wonderful. Love converts weakness into strength, fear into faith. Love — Ernest Holmes

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

It's just that if you're not disruptive everything seems to be repeated endlessly - not so much the good things but the bland things - the ordinary things - the weaker things get repeated- the stronger things get suppressed and held down and hidden. — Robert Adamson

There are
people everywhere. Lindsay wants to be sick, it's like he can
feel
all their
eyes on him, but he does it anyway and when he finally moves away a
good minute later Valentine seems to have turned from himself into a silly
bashful schoolgirl, blushing and smiling and not quite looking up.
"Oh," he says, like that explains everything.
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"That's a shit thing to say when somebody's just ripped all his
principles in half to make you feel better."
"Thank you very much?"
"You're welcome. — Richard Rider

I don't like it when people are trying too hard. That goes for clothes, for acting, for everything. It's just not good when it seems like you're making too much of an effort. — Clive Owen

I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know. — George Eliot

The way I wanted to write it, is with a hero, or sort of a pure character who was the protagonist. And the antagonists were these demonic evil children, cause when you're a kid, seven or eight years old, and you're looking at the world around you - everything seems black or white, good or bad. — John Wozniak

That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything. — Sharon Creech

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself. — Stephen King

I enjoy a good cliffhanger. As a reader, I relish that nervous feeling you get when you're engrossed in a story, but in the back of your mind you're aware that there aren't that many pages left. How will it end? Everything can't be wrapped up! This can't end! Then it does, and your heart seems to stop. — Kresley Cole

Why would anyone entertain Satan's questions about God's goodness when everything is good? But a few bumps in the road, and our knowledge of God seems fragile, and that's what Satan is counting on. — Edward T. Welch

When I eat, everything tastes so good I can't get all the taste out of it; when I look at something-say, the lake-the waves are so green and the foam so white that it seems I can't look at it hard enough; there seems to be something there that I can't get at. And even when I'm with you, I can't seem to be with you...enough. — Maureen Daly

It may be argued that, at least so far as work is concerned, what I call my addictions have benefited other people. Even if that were true, it still wouldn't explain or justify addiction. The contributions I have made in a number of areas that I am passionate about could have been achieved without the addictive zeal that often drove me. There is no such thing as a good addiction. Everything a person can do is better done if there is no addictive attachment that pollutes it. For every addiction - no matter how benign or even laudable it seems from the outside - someone pays a price. — Gabor Mate

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn't poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren't. — T. S. Eliot

God can turn everything that seems negative in our life around and make it positive, for our good — Sunday Adelaja

Honey, you're a smart kid, and you're sensitive too. That's not a bad thing, but it is a hard thing. For you, the dark's going to feel a whole lot darker, and you won't be able to hide from it. But I want you to listen to me. Listen good. You don't know everything, not yet you don't. And when you see those good things-and I promise you, there are so many good things-they're going to be so much brighter for you than they are for other people, just like the abyss seems deeper and bigger when you stare at it. — Emily Henry

Everything on earth
both the good things and the bad things
is not given to a man according to his just deserts, but as a result of certain as yet unknown, yet logical, laws which I won't even undertake to suggest to you, although it sometimes seems to me that I feel them as through a glass darkly. — Ivan Turgenev

I couldn't decide on a title for my first novel and my editor came up with Everything Good Will Come. After that, I thought I should name my own books.A Bit of Difference seems just right. — Sefi Atta

Write down everything you can think of, no matter how stupid it seems. I always write down my thoughts throughout the day. Sometimes good things come out of it, and I'll find an idea to develop into a song, so my best advice is to try and draw inspiration from everyday things. — Daya

The things that the world fills time with are enough to turn the heart to stone, but the goodness of time itself is as untouched by them as the freshness of a spring morning is untouched by yelps from the scaffold. Time is good because the Holy One made it that way and then set the heavenly bodies wheeling through the sky so there would always be a way of marking its passage. Unfortunately, not even the most devout understand this for more than possibly a day or two out of the entire year when everything seems to be going their way. The rest of the year they go around like everybody else rolling their eyes and expecting terrible things to happen. When terrible things do happen, they fail to understand that for the most part they have brought them down on their own heads. They prefer to think that it is time itself that is terrible and that terrible things are only another method by which the Holy One afflicts them for their sins. — Frederick Buechner

He himself feels happier at this moment than he remembers he ever did in his life. The woman in front of him, who loves everything with or without a good reason, seems happy, too. — Yiyun Li

If everything always went perfectly, I would feel like, When is the ball going to drop? Because good things don't always last. Maybe I'm a pessimistic person. When something just seems too good, I can't believe it. — January Jones

Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you're worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt. Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate. Never attempting to do the impossible - but everything up to that line. Simply flipping the obstacles that life throws at you by improving in spite of them, because of them. And therefore no longer afraid. But excited, cheerful, and eagerly anticipating the next round. — Ryan Holiday

Sweetness flows from your appearance and your beauty makes me fall more in love with you. Anytime I feel low, I think about the good times you have given me and everything seems good again. — Billy Joel

Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder - if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places? — Malcolm Margolin

I do not see how we can help thinking about God when He is so good to us all the time. Let me tell you how it seems to me that we come to know about our heavenly Father. It is from the power of love which is in our own hearts. Love is at the soul of everything. Whatever has not the power of loving must have a very dreary life indeed. We like to think that the sunshine and the winds and the trees are able to love in some way of their own, for it would make us know that they were happy if we knew that they could love. And so God who is the greatest and happiest of all beings is the most loving too. All the love that is in our hearts comes from him, as all the light which is in the flowers comes from the sun. And the more we love, the more near we are to God and His Love. — Phillips Brooks

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refused to have anything as a gift. — Josef Pieper

It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that's mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious. — Ariel Levy

If the script's good, everything you need is in there. I just try and feel it, and do it honestly. I also don't learn things for auditions, because I feel like it's just a test of memorizing rather than being real. Maybe every other actor would think that was terrible, I don't know. But it seems to have worked for me, so far. — Olivia Colman

More than the choking heat, more than the blinding flames that rise up into the night sky, more than the endlessly leaping colours that change shape with every moment, more than all of these is the transforming power of fire. Fire takes solid wooden beams and reduces them to charcoal. It licks at everything with a scarlet tongue and leaves it black. It spreads like the folds of a golden robe over human bodies and what is left is gray and chalky: ash, blown up and up by every breath of wind only to fall like dust on the ground. When it is burning most fiercely, it seems that it might go on forever and devour everything in its path. It does not cower and withdraw in front of princes. Palace and hovel alike are good fuel and nothing more. It is unstoppable. And when it has moved, what remains is desolation. — Adele Geras

And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you're in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Going through life without love is like going through a good dinner without an appetite
everything seems so flat and tasteless. — Helen Rowland

Even after years of constant abuse from her stepmother and her stepsisters, Cinderella remained a good person with high hopes. She never stopped believing in herself and in the good of the world. And although she married the prince in the end, Cinderella always had inner happiness. Her story shows that even in the worst of situations- even when it seems no one in the world appreciates you-as long as you have hope, everything can get better... — Chris Colfer

Let's put it this way: I don't have a good work ethic. I have a real casual relationship with hours. I don't understand why, in entertainment, the hours are as long as they are. It seems like everything takes forever, and no one can tell you why, exactly. — Janeane Garofalo

It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me! ... But to whom should I say this? To some power
indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words
The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important! — Leo Tolstoy

You don't see yourself at all, do you? It seems to me that you're good at everything you try," said Ethan sincerely.
"I had a dream I could breathe underwater," I said flippantly, "Maybe I'll go swim with the mermaids."
Ethan turned to look at me with shock in his eyes.
"Just kidding," I said, alarmed at his reaction — Derrolyn Anderson