Painfully True Quotes & Sayings

Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it's painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure. — Stephen Richards

I find acting in contact lenses is bizarre to me, because there's just a giant filter between you and the world. I know it sounds painfully, ridiculously obvious, but it's true. You're just so detached. — Matthew Rhys

It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgement and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendor of if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exiting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can we verified and demonstrated. — Primo Levi

Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally sup- ports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when "theoretical" or political, is never simple or linear or "objectified," generalized: she draws her story into history. — Helene Cixous

Good fiction doesn't claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice - the way we all know things should be - without suggesting that's how things really are. Good fiction is the mirage that declares itself a mirage, yet compels us to faith through its beauty. Good fiction is the dream that's too good to be true, so perfect and symmetrical that it gives itself away every time. But it doesn't trick you into suspending your disbelief by trying to look anything like reality. Good fiction makes you acutely, painfully aware of your disbelief, and makes you believe anyway. And when it's done well - when it's done right - good fiction is more real than reality. — P.S. Baber

It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. — Davide Longo

Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.
My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheelchair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot's hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse children! — Agatha Christie

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves (William Penn)- It was painfully true. I ended up hurting far more than anyone else whenever I allowed jealousy to infect me. — Gillibran Brown

But how can I let him just walk away with a smile on my face and a slap on his back when every cell in my body is tied painfully to him, and I can't breathe when I think of him being away from me?! — Llarjme

I'm not a superstitious person, but when I wake up from this dream, this painfully clear memory of John, I have the most horrible feeling in my chest.
I would rather die than see them hurt you.
And I have a sudden fear that somehow, some way, what he said in the dream will come true. — Marie Lu

But sometimes i have to ask myself this question. its true that to us his imaginings are nothing but the inventions of a busy mind. But to him, there simply is no other reality. Further more, he is happy there, so why, I ask myself, why in the name of healing him must we drag him painfully into the world of our own reality?'
- Doctor's Memo — Sadamu Yamashita

Making wishes on the elephant is emotionally dangerous, because inevitably one's hopes rise abnormally high, unhealthily high, and when the wish does not come true, one's high hopes get crushed more painfully than if one had not asked for the help of supernatural powers. Therefore, one should always try to make the wish casually and forget about it instantly after making it, which is what I try to do now. — Amanda Filipacchi

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead. — Sinclair Lewis

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven. — Samuel P. Huntington

Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;" and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. — James Russell Lowell

We could stay. You could sleep it off and we can still go to Disney with everyone tomorrow. Don't you want to go to Fantasyland?" I batted my eyelashes.
Jackson ran his thumb and forefinger over his lip, catching his grin and a speck of dried blood at once. The second that grin appeared, it was as if the entire evening's events evaporated. "Why, Emma Pierce, do you want me to take you to Fantasyland and make all of your dreams come true?" He winked with his good eye.
It was painfully adorable. — Rachael Wade

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned. — J.K. Rowling

That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe - well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, 'who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,' but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men. — H.G.Wells

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain? — Bernhard Schlink

Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born Who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully ... And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshiping weakness in the person of the Savior. The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength. — Khalil Gibran