Refractory Quotes & Sayings

It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a proprietor and a farmer at the same time. The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Where's your dress? — Kate DiCamillo

As long as I remain imperfect and refractory, neither obeying God by practising the commandments nor becoming perfect in spiritual knowledge, Christ from my point of view also appears imperfect and refractory because of me. For I diminish and cripple Him by not growing in spirit with Him, since I am 'the body of Christ and one of its members' (I Cor. 12:27). — Maximus The Confessor

I think that for him, I'd risk everything."
~ Taylor — Julie James

I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry. — Salvador Dali

The malicious humor of men, though perverse and refractory, is not so savage and invincible but it may be wrought upon by kindness, and altered by repeated obligations. — Plutarch

A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds ... how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory? — Henri Poincare

I'm a bit insane when it comes to doing my own stunts and getting down and dirty. It's fun, you know? It's things I wouldn't normally do in my real life, so when I go to work and get to beat people up and shoot guns and get waterboarded, those are things I find completely interesting. — Katee Sackhoff

Not one idiot in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred has not been made more happy and healthy; more than thirty per cent have been taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man; more than forty per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, of working like two-thirds of a man. — Edouard Seguin

There is a law in each well-ordered nation
To curb those raging appetites that are
Most disobedient and refractory. — William Shakespeare

The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain. — Cyril Connolly

Men do not sufficiently realize
that their future is in their own hands.
Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not.
Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live,
or intend to make just the extra effort required
for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet,
the essential function of the universe,
which is a machine for the making of gods. — Henri Bergson

What about the Pack?" His upper lip trembled, betraying the edge of his teeth. "Fuck the Pack. I gave them fifteen years of my life. I fought for them, bled for them, and the moment my back was turned, they attacked my wife. I owe them nothing." Curran reached over and covered my fingers with his hand. "I'm serious. Say the word right now and we're gone. — Ilona Andrews

I've been . . . I just finished reading that book you told me about, Accidentally Married to the Billionaire Sheikh."
My mouth fell open in shock. "You have? So, um, did you like it?"
"It's a little predictable, and very explicit, in an oddly lyrical way. I can only imagine how disappointed female readers must be when facing the reality of - " He cleared his throat. "Well, in any case, I'm not certain Hedwardh is a good match for Swanella. And by the way, the refractory period doesn't work like that. — Camilla Monk

It would seem, indeed, that there is in certain men the veritable instinct of a beast, pure and complete like all instinct, which creates antipathies and sympathies, which separates on nature from another for ever, which never hesitates, never is perturbed, never keeps silent, and never admits itself to be in the wrong; clear in its obscurity, infallible, imperious, refractory under all the counsels of intelligence, and all the solvents of reason, and which, whatever may be their destinies, secretly warns the dog-man of the presence of the cat-man and the fox-man of the presence of the lion-man. — Victor Hugo

You. Are. Mine ... I don't care how wrong we are for each other. I don't care that I'll never be good enough for you or that we're risking everything to be together. Your mother would never approve. Whatever. Fuck it all. You are fucking mine. And I'm yours. And we belong together. — Linda Kage

Each time we see and are touched by the expression of some eternal principle, we catch a sweet glimpse of some aspect of our True Self. — Guy Finley

The central problem of biological evolution is the nature of mutation, but hitherto the occurrence of this has been wholly refractory and impossible to influence by artificial means, although a control of it might obviously place the process of evolution in our hands. — Hermann Joseph Muller

You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000-dollar-a-week writers and I will write it myself. — Joe Pasternak

Wit is the refractory pupil of judgment. — William Shenstone

Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory. — Thomas Jefferson

Yeah, well, I'm pissed off that I give a shit too but I do. When I fuck you, I want you to know it's me, I want you to need me there with the very core of your being, clinging to me as if you'd die without it. I want it to be raw and real. Hell, even when Cupid was involved, at least I knew it was about us and not because I happened to be there when you were having a bad week. — Donna Augustine