Sobering Thought Quotes & Sayings

I think it is terribly important to have opinions, and to think. We live in a world of action without thought. — Vivienne Westwood

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. — Tom Lehrer

Thar's only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we're the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it's a mighty sobering thought. (Porkypine) — Walt Kelly

The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it. — Charles Handy

You have got to decide, look, this is who I am; this is my best way to present myself, and I'm going to ride that horse to the finish line. Not everybody will like it, but that's OK. — Phil McGraw

A sobering thought: what if, right at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential? - JANE WAGNER — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Here in Bosnia I had already seen several cases of rheumatic fever and a case we thought was miliary tuberculosis, diseases now rare in America. It was sobering to think that the mundane process of vaccinating these children might ultimately save more lives than any UN-brokered peace treaty. — Pamela Grim

Vexation of spirit is a waste of time
Negative thinking, don't you waste your thoughts
Verbal conflict is a waste of word
Physical conflict is a waste of flesh
People will always be who they want
And that's what really makes the world go round
Unconditional love is scarce ... — Damian Marley

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries. — Kurt Vonnegut

I see characters lying all the time in a lot of Hollywood movies. They can't do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can't do anything good or bad, they can only do something that's true or not. — Quentin Tarantino

The thought was sobering. How many people's motives didn't match up with what I'd taken for their actions? How many villains were the heroes of their own stories? I didn't know, and I was terribly afraid that I was never going to find out. — Mira Grant

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them. — Milton Friedman

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential? — Jane Wagner

Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? — Anthony Powell

Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Stunned, I sat down on the bed, reading the message over and over again, convinced I had misunderstood it in some way. I couldn't believe that Jack would have written something so cruel or been so cutting. He had never spoken to me in such a way before, he had never even raised his voice to me. I felt as if I'd been slapped in the face. Surely I deserved some explanation and, at the very least, an apology? I needed to talk to someone, badly, so it was sobering to realise there was no one I could call. My parents and I didn't have the sort of relationship that would allow me to sob down the phone that he had left me by myself and for some reason I felt too ashamed to tell any of my friends. Where had the perfect gentleman I'd thought him to be gone? Had it all been a facade, had he covered his true self with a cloak of geniality and good humour to impress me? — B.A. Paris

She'd looked it up and read the definition ("deprived of the possession or use of something; lacking something needed, wanted, or expected") — Luanne Rice

North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world. — Barbara Demick

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns. — Francis Collins

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment
or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric "treatments"
because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact. — Thomas Szasz

There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite. — Ian Wilson

It is a sobering thought that animals could do without man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals. — Ruth Harrison

The fact that she was even lying here in this bed with me right now was a freaking miracle. I'd never treated any girl so horribly in my life.
Wasn't that a sobering thought?
The one woman I wanted above all others was the one I treated the worst. — Cambria Hebert

It's sobering really," she thought, "how easy it is to reduce a human being to the state of an animal. You just take away some paraphernalia like clothing and put him in another environment. I bet that if I were to keep him there for a few months he would simply adapt to the swine lifestyle. A pity, but I haven't got time to experiment. But a few days, well, they are necessary to take his hope away and mollify his spirit. — Andrew Ashling