Unhelpful Quotes & Sayings

They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind. — Anne Lamott

It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture. — Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

Musicals are strictly for homosexuals and womenfolk, Kenny says drily, in a way that's so post-post-post-ironic it actually stops being communication, and simply becomes confusing and unhelpful. — Caitlin Moran

I told them that when I heard Billy was bright, an artist and musician, and when I heard that he loved his family and loved people through difficulty in relationships, and when I heard that he struggled with heroin and booze addictions and an unhelpful brain chemistry, and when I heard that he was beautifully queer and passionate and sometimes played piano in his sister's dresses, I knew. I knew that Billy was pretty much exactly the kind of person Jesus would hang out with. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

I think we have to understand that sugar is an essential component of food; it's just that sugar in excess is an inappropriate and unhelpful diet. — Andrew Lansley

Parental criticism is unhelpful. It creates anger and resentment. Even worse, children who are regularly criticized learn to condemn themselves and others. They learn to doubt their own worth and to belittle the value of others. They learn to suspect people and to expect personal doom. — Haim G. Ginott

Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect. — Diane Setterfield

However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. 'There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,' complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. 'There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term. — Christina Lamb

Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it. — Sam Harris

Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds
that sacred place of reason, action and will
and throw off our compasses. — Ryan Holiday

The practice of imagination, on an everyday basis, involves clearing unhelpful images that block or misdirect our energies, and choosing to focus on positive, mobilizing imagery that gives us courage and confidence. — Robert Moss

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols. — John Maynard Keynes

Hollywood has glorified adult premarital sex, and that is unhelpful if your goal is to reduce teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births. — Joe Lieberman

French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning. — Naomi Wolf

Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values - the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings - will all be out of whack. Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be. Most — Mark Manson

We Muslims must get used to the fact that people will criticize our religion, just as we criticize everyone else's religion for not being "true." Some people will choose to leave the faith, and we Muslims will need to come to terms with this, and to understand how to treat ex-Muslims not just with civility but with the utmost respect. Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it. So I'm not one to try to avoid these issues. We have to address them head-on. — Sam Harris

Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding. — Sean M. Carroll

The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others. — Ulrich Beck

Goldman Sachs itself - and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry's credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn't risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman's books, they'd be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things, — Michael Lewis

I think talking to other people can bring its own unhelpful baggage. Sometimes you just need to talk to an entity. The void. Your God. — Sophie Kinsella

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited
long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms
what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling. — Alain De Botton

I try not to think in terms of good and bad but more in terms of helpful or unhelpful in regards to specific moral codes and goals. — Richard Brancatisano

When you notice an unhelpful emotion or a shift in mood, or when you notice that you're doing something you know can cause problems (being snappy, for example, or drinking too much), that could act as a cue to examine your own thoughts - "what am I thinking?". — Peter Kinderman

You are the capital U in Unhelpful. — Marissa Meyer

Just cheer up is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. — Jenny Lawson

Obviously, there's no possible rebuttal to a suggestion that an unknown variable is producing some result because the phrase itself is as unhelpful as a politician's election promise. — Robert Lanza

When I wrote Lean In, some people argued that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don't have a partner. They were right. I didn't get it. I didn't get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home. I wrote a chapter titled "Make Your Partner a Real Partner" about the importance of couples splitting child care and housework 50/50. Now I see how insensitive and unhelpful this was to so many single moms who live with 100/0. My understanding and expectation of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled. Today almost 30 percent of families with children are headed by a single parent - 84 percent of whom are women. I — Sheryl Sandberg

(I was) slightly suspicious of these babbling children of intellectuals who were themselves babblers, my schoolmates who had already produced the next senile generation . . . I had noticed that behind their masks people were actually unhelpful, cold, brutally indifferent toward everything that at the moment did not fall within the sphere of their immediate interest. — Miroslav Krleza

The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests. — Henry Hitchings

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care. — Alain De Botton

Helpful is happy.
Selfish is sad.
(It's not uncommon to confuse the two.) — Richelle E. Goodrich

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren't and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. — Malcolm Gladwell

Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted. — Julian Baggini

Reject without regret whatever seems on reflection wrongheaded, dull, destructive, or irrelevant to your vision. It's just as important to be able to discriminate between helpful and unhelpful criticism as it is to be able to write. — Janet Burroway

The whole point of a top secret invisible guard," Deathbringer said severely, "is for them to be invisible and secret. Therefore it is extremely unhelpful for certain queens to go pointing them out and discussing them loudly with the entire rainforest. — Tui T. Sutherland

Which was complimentary but unhelpful, because the librarians were tough. — Robertson Davies

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product. — Nick Hornby

The only disadvantage to directing if you've been an actor is how self-conscious you are. When I'm directing, I'm always so aware when I'm speaking to an actor of how easily I could throw them off by saying something careless or not being clear or concise. So it does make you watch your words in a way that sometimes is unhelpful. — Sarah Polley

With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past. — Sean Brady

Richard Rohr says the skills that take you through the first half of your life are entirely unhelpful for the second half. To press the point a little bit: those skills I developed that supposedly served me well for the first half, as I inspect them a little more closely, didn't actually serve me at all. They made me responsible and capable and really, really tired. They made me productive and practical, and inch by inch, year by year, they moved me further and further from the warm, whimsical person I used to be . . . and I missed her. The — Shauna Niequist

There's a few people who I've accumulated over the years who I really trust to show a first cut to and to be helpful rather than unhelpful. — Kenneth Lonergan

I think we all agree that the comments Donald Trump made in relation to Muslims were divisive, unhelpful and wrong. — Theresa May

I can tell you that "Just cheer up" is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It's pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to "just walk it off." Some people don't understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having "a case of the Mondays." Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I'm keeping myself from recovering because I really "just need to cheer up and smile." That's when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached. — Jenny Lawson

This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself. — Steven Moffat

Putting myself into categories is fun, and I think it also gives me insight into my own nature. When I see myself more clearly, I can more easily see ways that I might do things differently, to make myself happier. Categories can be unhelpful, however, when they become too all-defining, or when they become an excuse. — Gretchen Rubin

With success comes unhelpful criticism - ignore it. — Suze Orman

there comes a point when holding on to your dreams becomes unhelpful and even unhealthy. — J.K. Rowling

The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. — C.S. Lewis

The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible. — N. T. Wright

Why do I even bother talking to you? You are not helping. You are the capital U of Unhelpful. — Marissa Meyer

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It's chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago. — Michael Shermer

My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them. — Victoria Aveyard

The sad part is that all we're trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by. — Pema Chodron

If an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one said you can't ever cry. Forget "manliness." If you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one's emotions, not in pretending they don't exist. — Ryan Holiday

And needy," Doris said. "You sound ancient and unhelpful," I shot back. — Rebecca Chastain

I used to struggle with letting go and allowing my children to find their own way, but something that I learned in the research dramatically changed my perspective and I no longer see rescuing and intervening as unhelpful, I now think about it as dangerous. Don't get me wrong - I still struggle and I still step in when I shouldn't, but I now think twice before I let my discomfort dictate my behaviors. Here's why: Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle. And let me tell you, next to love and belonging, I'm not sure I want anything more for my kids than a deep sense of hopefulness. — Brene Brown

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for.
Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful. — Kurt Vonnegut

The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic. — Ryan Holiday

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions. — Richard Rorty

In Marxism there are some very unhelpful ideas about the need to push for a revolution that will overturn all of society. Marx gets that from Hegel, and it leads to some very bad politics, such as the hope that things must get worse because that will then turn into the antithesis and get better from there. A kind of wishful thinking then grows out of not seeing a realistic path forward. — Cynthia Kauffman

The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them grown up. The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world. The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect. — Sherry Turkle

You should really go inside now," he said.

Her glazed, unfocused stare was starting to clear, and the cranky look he was used to being levelled at him started to take shape. "And if I don't?"

"You want to fuck me on your doorstep?" he asked, his voice low and gravelly. "Call me tomorrow when you're sober. I'll be right over."

She jutted her chin defiantly - clearly pissed at him for trying to be the responsible one. "I won't need you after I've spent all night with a couple of multi-speed toyfriends and a box of batteries."

Linc shoved his hands on his hips, pushing back unhelpful images of her naked and pleasuring herself with a hot pink cock. "Go inside," he growled.

Before he did something crazy like offering to watch. — Amy Andrews

Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD's top tax official, said the move was "very unhelpful" as it lumped jurisdictions that have signed up to global transparency initiatives together with holdouts such as Panama. He criticised the criteria as unfair, inefficient and subjective. The commission drew the "first pan-EU list of third-country non-cooperative tax jurisdictions" from blacklists provided by individual members. There were high numbers of offshore centres listed as unco-operative by some countries such as Greece and Italy, while others such as the UK, Germany and Sweden did not list any countries. — Anonymous