Troublesome Quotes & Sayings

This act is an ancient tale new told;
And, in the last repeating, troublesome,
Being urged at a time unseasonable. — William Shakespeare

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth. — Michael Pollan

Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. — Mark Twain

On a regular basis I go over in my mind some of the most troublesome things I see about how people approach eating, and the wonder mess we have made out of a very simple thing. — Gabrielle Reece

Fairy roses, fairy rings, turn out sometimes troublesome things. — William Makepeace Thackeray

We frequently are troublesome to others, when we think it impossible for us ever to be so. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party. — Arthur Helps

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. — George Eliot

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots. — George Eliot

I will be kind to everybody, particularly to those whom I find troublesome. — Anthony Mary Claret

She realized all at once that Doon, thin, dark eyed Doon, with his troublesome temper and his terrible brown jacket, and his good heart
was the person she knew better than anyone now. He was her best friend.
City of Ember
— Jeanne DuPrau

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They're rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft. — Terry Pratchett

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other. — T. S. Eliot

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome. — Silvan S. Schweber

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. — Mark Twain

two of the most fascinating yet troublesome topics in moral philosophy - forgiveness and redemption - issues that must be dealt with together. Without forgiveness there can be no redemption, and forgiveness that does not grant redemption is hollow. — William Irwin

never be afraid or nervous when approaching Jesus. He loves you so much and all He wants is to be close to you and to help you through this troublesome world. — Mary May

Not to be slack and negligent; or loose, and wanton in thy actions; nor contentious, and troublesome in thy conversation; nor to rove and wander in thy fancies and imaginations. Not basely to contract thy soul; nor boisterously to sally out with it, or furiously to launch out as it were, nor ever to want employment. — Marcus Aurelius

Readers want what is important to be clearly laid out; they will not read what is too troublesome. — Jan Tschichold

Her hair is troublesome and curly ... It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note. — Amit Chaudhuri

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. — Mary H. Eastman

Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else. — Pseudonymous Bosch

A secret, like a chore, always seems to lead to another, one even more troublesome than the first. — Bette Lord

Elysia!" Driggs interrupted. "Slow the hell down."
She grinned at Lex. "Sorry. I talk a lot when I get excited."
"That's okay," Lex said with an impish nod. "We all have our flaws. Driggs here loves Titanic."
"Really??"
Driggs folded his arms and studied the girls. "I can already see the ramifications of an alliance between you two. And they are troublesome. — Gina Damico

I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents - his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism - could have denied that they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not taken explicitly into account - namely that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find out. — George Eliot

My work is to love my body, all of it. Whole and entire. The whole aging mortal troublesome failing miraculous intricate breathing doomed cancerous warm mortifying unreliable hard-working imperfect beautiful appalling living struggling tender frightened frightening living dying living breathing temporary wondrous mystifying afflicted mortally-ill assemblage of the atoms of the universe that is my self, is me, for this space of time. — Irvin D. Yalom

But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal. — Indu Sundaresan

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome. — Plutarch

The Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son, and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year. — Jane Austen

Relationships, it seems to me, are timeless. What works between two people always works; what doesn't is always troublesome. Over time, people learn - or not - how to negotiate what's difficult, but that doesn't mean the misfit has gone away entirely. — Rafael Yglesias

OK, some people might think he's a degenerate, troublesome, drug dealing, coke dependant, alcoholic, but that doesn't make him a bad person. — Peter L Masters

Chronic disease like a troublesome relative is something you can learn to manage but never quite escape. — Mary Tyler Moore

Troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them. — Lemony Snicket

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing - a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces. — George Bernard Shaw

Kill him." Dr. Kissing repeated my words in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. "Just so. But 'kill,' as you will have observed, like 'spy' and 'stop,' is really just one more of those short but exceedingly troublesome words. — Alan Bradley

The secret counsels of princes are a troublesome burden to such as have only to execute them. — Michel De Montaigne

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable. — Anthony Trollope

You want to know what's even more troublesome?" I scooted up. "Our real names rhyme."
He chuckled. "Yeah, they do. I never thought of that. — Diana Peterfreund

I think in national security, the war in Iraq is troublesome and a difficult challenge, but our troops and the military leaders we have are managing that situation, although it continues to be very risky and very dangerous. — Thad Cochran

Vampires hated to lose blood - it was troublesome to replace and always left a stain. — Gail Carriger

God knew she was a troublesome wench, with a tongue that could strip the barnacles off a ship's hull. — Sabrina Jeffries

The phrase 'Boys will be boys,' reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There was much talk about why the prime minister had brought back such a troublesome and unpredictable colleague, and the consensus was that he preferred to have Churchill inside the tent spitting out. — Ken Follett

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are. — Thomas Ligotti

Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion. — George Eliot

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections. — John Hanning Speke

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity. — Rebecca Traister

Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. — Bruce H. Lipton

To say my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette. — Nichole Chase

You are strangely troublesome. — William Shakespeare

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.. I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome. — Marcus Borg

I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain. — Oscar Wilde

If we call insects "pests," then we can make war on them. And we have done that, developing powerful chemicals that kill all insects to eliminate the ones that are troublesome to us. To me, using broad-spectrum pesticides is like dealing with high rates of crime in a town or neighbourhood by removing or killing everyone in the area. — David Suzuki

Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words. — Oliver Lodge

The more you are at sea,' Sigrud explains, 'the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more help and assistance is a troublesome bother. Dealing death, after all, is a solitary affair. — Robert Jackson Bennett

If you feel ... that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good. — Lemony Snicket

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first. — Jim Thompson

She is a good creature - that fine girl - but a little too earnest," he thought. "It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste. — George Eliot

There is a troublesome humor some men have, that if they may not lead, they will not follow; but had rather a thing were never done, than not done their own way, tho' other ways very desirable. — William Penn

An Ambitious woman shewes her selfe to bee a troublesome disturber of the world, powerfull to make smale things great, and great monstrous — Thomas Overbury

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it. — Catherine Crowe

All this, in the midst of a city already plagued by the Ku Klux Klan - a group more sinister and suspicious than most people have any idea, and their public face is troublesome enough without any secret agenda hiding beneath their ridiculous robes. I tell you, they're stranger than the Freemasons and not half as well thought out, but they're radical, blind believers of awful things. — Cherie Priest

It gets a little bit troublesome when you have something that's overcompressed that shouldn't be. — Beck

Happiness is an equivalent for all troublesome things. — Epictetus

A dream is a manifestation. Just like what you live is a manifestation, but a dream is quicker and easier to achieve, and not so troublesome if there's something you don't want. — Abraham Hicks

With joint-stock corporations, investors can place bets on the success of many different companies, without having to play a central management role in any one of them. This allows investors to diversify their financial holdings. It also allows them to capture profits on their investments, without having to get involved in the dirty, troublesome business of actually running a company. — Jim Stanford

All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most. — Daniel Pipes

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. — John Dewey

But the idea that this world is not self-explanatory and that revelation from beyond it is necessary to understand it is profoundly distasteful to us humans. It means that we are not in control of our own destiny or able to make our own disposition of things for our own benefit. This thought, the thought that we cannot supply our ultimate needs for ourselves, that we are dependent on someone or something utterly beyond us, is deeply troublesome. — John N. Oswalt

Engaging with children in troublesome thinking is problematic, but important. Ignoring the hard stuff and only engaging in the fluff and fun from curriculum choices is to keep underground issues of social justice and to further silence and compound the inequity — Janet Robertson

It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful. — George Bernard Shaw

I love escaping into film, because everyday life I find quite troublesome. So any excuse to go into a cinema and say goodbye to the world for a couple of hours, or in a book or whatever, is great. — Alison Goldfrapp

Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter. — Learned Hand

And from the time I was a kid, I've had this internal monologue roaring through my head, which doesn't stop - unless I'm asleep. I'm sure every person has this; it's just that my monologue is particularly loud. And particularly troublesome. I'm constantly asking myself questions. And the problem with that is that your brain is like a computer: If you ask a question, it's programmed to respond, whether there's an answer or not. I'm constantly weighing everything in my mind and trying to predict how my actions will influence events. Or maybe manipulate events are the more appropriate words. It's like playing a game of chess with your own life. And I hate fucking chess! — Jordan Belfort

Amadan." I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother's startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. "Amadan." The — Alice McDermott

Every one regards his duty as a troublesome master from whom he would like to be free. — Mazo De La Roche

Grief for a dead Wife, and a troublesome Guest, Continues to the threshold, and there is at rest; But I mean such wives as are none of the best — Benjamin Franklin

In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business
no variety
it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. I hate to sit down and direct documents, and I hate to stay in this old room by myself. — Abraham Lincoln

Even if conventional medicine tells you that your condition is incurable or that your only option is to live a life dependent on drugs with troublesome side effects, there is hope for improving or reversing your condition. — Leon Chaitow

In North Germany, a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in some lone spot or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is entertained. — Sabine Baring-Gould

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting. — L.M. Montgomery

To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome. — Christina Rossetti

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow man. — Baruch Spinoza

The fact remains that we often exhaust ourselves in troublesome pursuits that don't in any way further the actualization of our very own values, whatever they may happen to be. These useless pursuits are the mental traps. Mental traps keep us from enjoying television as readily as they keep us from serious work. They are absolute wastes of time. — Anonymous

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden. — W. Somerset Maugham

He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. — Mark Twain

Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you ... If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it. — Emmet Fox

Knowledge will not be acquired without pains and application. It is troublesome and deep, digging for pure waters; but when once you come to the spring, they rise up and meet you. — Tom Felton

The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure, Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor. — Ogden Nash

The belly will not listen to advice; it makes demands, it importunes. And yet it is not a troublesome creditor; you can send it away at small cost, provided only that you give it what you owe, not merely all you are able to — Seneca.

Whenever encountering a troublesome person, do not identify him as being cruel or stupid or rude or anything else like that. Instead, see him as a frightened person. — Vernon Howard

I must remember to be troublesome now and again, else you are going to be impossible to live with. And by what magic did you find the gown and the horse?"
"Scottish fairy magic." His grin widened.
"Do you mean that fairies are real in Scotland? — Shelly Thacker

Though very troublesome to others, anger is most so to him that has it. — Richard Steele

Unfortunately, stain removal methods was one of those troublesome subjects somewhere between relationship issues and mysterious car noises. Everybody was an expert, everybody had a cure, and they all fell over themselves to offer their advice. — Jeaniene Frost

That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can think better. I do not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if I had a model, but I made this one from memory. But is no particular matter; they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and don't pay enough. — Mark Twain

Once upon a time, the American girl was a shining symbol of something fresh, spirited, and fully self-confident. Mark Twain said, "The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities. — Nancy Jo Sales

Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation. — Samuel Johnson

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously. — Barbara Deming

When a man is to travel into a far country ... one staff in his hand may comfortably support him, but a bundle of staves would be troublesome. Thus a competency of these outward things may happily help us in the way to heaven, whereas abundance may be hurtful. — Richard Sibbes