Quotes & Sayings About Predicaments

There are only a few things worse than having to face up to the fact that the predicaments one finds oneself in are usually the results of one's own foolish actions. — Jean Ferris

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments. — Cheryl Strayed

I was not aware of my actions. Everyone must find out who they are and be aware of their actions before they wind up in a vicious predicament. — Richard Ramirez

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament. — James G. Frazer

Predicament, n. The wage of consistency. — Ambrose Bierce

When love exists, nothing else matters, not life's predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity. — Isabel Allende

Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone. — Philip Roth

Jesse swiveled a little in his saddle to see Charley plodding his mare along to the right. "You ever consider suicide?"
"Can't say I have. There was always something else I wanted to do. Or my predicaments changed or I saw hardships from a different slant; you know all what can happen. It never seemed respectable."
"I'll tell you one thing that's certain: you won't fight dying once you've peeked over to the other side; you'll no more want to go back to your body than you'd want to spoon up your own puke. — Ron Hansen

As a writer, I'm driven by settings. Others are driven by characters or predicaments, but with me, settings come first. — Jim Lynch

Ageing is a privilege not a predicament — Martin Firrell

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been. — Terence McKenna

It has always struck me as an amusing thing that the world, and all the human beings thereon, do get themselves into such curious and painful predicaments, and then spend the rest of the time wishing they could get out. — Bruce Bairnsfather

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help?
However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder
in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. — Thomas Szasz

Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world's most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win. — Robert Grudin

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us. — Terence McKenna

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none. — Jeanne Safer

Though every legal task demands this skill, it is especially important in the effort to frame public policy in a way that is properly responsive to human needs and predicaments. The question is always: How will the general rule work in practice? — Elliot Richardson

I feel with loving compassion the problems of others without getting caught up emotionally in their predicaments that are offering them messages they need for their growth. — Ken Keyes Jr.

Many of our choices have led to the predicaments we are presently complaining about. — Monica Johnson

Life is adventure, not predicament. — James Broughton

The attack on youth is a national pathology, unwarranted by fact, smokescreen for the failure of adulthood and its leadership to confront larger predicaments. No rescue by the monied, governing, institutional, or otherwise privileged is in sight. It's up to the energy and inventiveness of the younger generation to pull the gated minds of millennium America toward acceptance of diversity, community, and fairness, and I hope they have as much fun as I did in my adolescences achieving what we Sixties kids only imagined. — Mike A. Males

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it — Neal Stephenson

There are many predicaments in life that one must be a bit crazy to escape from. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

If you have no enemies you are apt to be in the same predicament in regard to friends. — Elbert Hubbard

In statesmanship there are predicaments from which it is impossible to escape without some wrongdoing. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are trying to tell us/ ... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossible to do. — William Meredith

Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us. — Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Islanzadi sighed, and suddenly appeared tired. "Ormomis may have been your proper teacher, but you have proved yourself to be Brom's heir, not Oromis's. Brom is the only person who managed to entangle himself in as many predicaments as you. Like him, you seem compelled to find the deepest patch of quicksand and then dive into it."
Eragon hid a smile, pleased by the comparison. — Christopher Paolini

I forgot to sup
annoyance
from his glass full of
mingled dread and rage
Now let me take
a small draught of solace
from my own little cup
full of predicaments!
From the poem- Draught — Munia Khan

The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

When we are not any lengthier capable to alter a predicament, we're challenged to alter ourselves — Viktor E. Frankl

[...] the foreign policy of any government [...] is a prolongation of its domestic policy. This is all to often forgotten in a period of 'summit' meetings, when the public is led to believe that three or four Big Men solve, or fail to solve, the world's predicaments according to whether they have or do not have the wisdom, the good will, or the magic wand needed for their task. — Isaac Deutscher

Well, I was lost but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament! — Mitch Hedberg

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart. — Tayari Jones