Temporizing Quotes & Sayings

Sun Tzu said: We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: (1) Accessible ground; (2) Entangling ground; (3) Temporizing ground; (4) Narrow passes; (5) Precipitous heights; (6) Positions at a great distance from the enemy. — Sun Tzu

The secret of surviving housework is simply to do it. Pull the plug on the part of your brain that always wants to negotiate everything. You need to change a diaper, rinse a bottle, clean a spill, fluff a pillow? Consider it done. It's a no-brainer. End of conversation. End of story.
Not postponing chores-and not spending any mental energy equivocating, temporizing, or stalling-is actually a lot more restful than worrying about what needs to be done. — Veronique Vienne

The heavens do not send good haps in handfuls; but let us pick out our good by little, and with care, from out much bad, that still our little world may know its king. — Philip Sidney

Democrats are fighting fire with fire. Our principled stance on Medicare and Social Security is absolutely no different than the Republicans' stance on no revenue increases without cuts. — Judy Chu

Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

He couldn't say the words, had spent too long in Silence, but he'd learned other ways to speak. Taking the paperweight she'd knocked off her desk out of his pocket, he put it in her hands. It's fixed. As long as you don't mind more than a few scars. — Nalini Singh

I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone. — William Goldman

[M]y wish is, that the Convention may adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution [i.e., the Articles of Confederation] to the bottom, and provide radical cures. — George Washington

Love is hanging out at the ocean, watching my wife and little girls play in the sand. I know, I threw up a little too, but it's true. — Patrick Fabian

In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us. — Chuck Palahniuk

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time? — Josephine Humphreys

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue
Chang - Lost Horizon (1933)
— James Hilton

Never buy your own hype. — Sommer Marsden

Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence. — Noah Webster

When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped. — Laura Riding

I love you." He pushes his nose into my hair and inhales deeply. "I love you so fucking much." "I know." I whisper, turning my head into him and capturing his lips. — Jodi Ellen Malpas

If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? — Carl Sagan