Quotes & Sayings About Unreliable

Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality. — T.A. Barron

Trust life, even if you cannot trust people. For human nature is unreliable, but life itself is ruled by immutable law. Right action leads always, in the end, to victory. — Goswami Kriyananda

He past is only an unreliable memory held in the present. The future is only a projection of our present conceptions. The present itself vanishes as soon as we try to grasp it. So why bother with attempting to establish an illusion of solid ground?.. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing. — Pico Iyer

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable. — Peter Watts

Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion. — Hannah Arendt

If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity. — Josh McDowell

Christians are notorious for acting like used car salesmen, treating non-Christians as if they're standing there holding a blank check and sporting a hard-on for unreliable vehicles. — Orlando Winters

One's lover is one's partner in observing and understanding the world. Marriage is a place where joint narratives are composed. If the lover is a liar then all your joint observations are unreliable. You will have to start all over again. — Philippa Gregory

Torture produces unreliable evidence and therefore doesn't achieve and protect anybody. Torture corrupts those who are doing the torturing. — Cherie Blair

I have found in my experience that expediency, whether it is practical or not, is an unreliable guide for behavior. Human behavior must be guided by a higher principle. Practicality has its place but only within a framework of values, which all men of good will share. — King Hussein I

They appear somewhat unreliable," he murmured.
"Unreliable? Nonsense, Superior! Out of luck is all, and we both know how that goes, no? Why, there's not a man of them I wouldn't trust my mother to."
"Are you sure?"
"She's been dead these twenty years. What harm could they do her now? — Joe Abercrombie

Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get. — Iain M. Banks

People can be unreliable and disloyal; possessions can lose their value; jobs that once stimulated you can become boring. But principles remain steady through it all. — Nido R. Qubein

Jesus prescribes a doctrinal test for false prophets because a behavioral test is unreliable. — John Robbins

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. — Jakob Nielsen

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come.
I'm free, and against organized, clothed society.
I'm naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It's too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time ...
No matter, I'll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can't even light the next cigarette ... If it's an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life. — Fernando Pessoa

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man's strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things. — Peter Drucker

Evolution is unobservable. It's based on blind faith in a few dry bones and on unreliable dating systems in which the gullible trust. Kids should be allowed to make up their own minds about this issue, and not be censored to 'one side is all we will let you hear.' — Ray Comfort

When young, we're anxious - understandably - to find out if we've got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you - in particular you, of this generation - may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can ...
And this is actually O.K. If we're going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously - as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended. — George Saunders

My memory of that day is like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable. — Wally Lamb

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. — Paul Theroux

How confusing. Could it be that our narrator is unreliable? No such chance. Mind like a steel trap, I have. — Daniel Handler

Don't be misled by History, or any other unreliable source. — Will Rogers

My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. — Ashleigh Brilliant

All family histories, personal histories,are as sketchy and unreliable as histories of the Phoenicians, it seems to me. We should note everything down, fill in the wide gaps if we can. Which is why I am writing this my darlings. — William Boyd

The pages were yellowing a tad but sometimes it was best to go old school for reliable facts. The internet was a flaky and unreliable tool sometimes. — M.E. Harmon

Wikipedia was the single most unreliable source of knowledge this side of The National Enquirer. — Paul Combs

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

In real markets, agents make bad choices. They are often ignorant, misinformed, and irrational. Yet, markets tend to punish agents for making bad choices, and they tend to learn from their mistakes. For instance, if you fail to pay your bills, your credit rating declines and you have a harder time getting loans. If you fail to do research and buy an unreliable car, you suffer from repair bills. In contrast, when people in government make bad choices, the political process almost never punishes them. Studies show that voters are terrible at retrospective voting - they do not know whom to blame for bad government - and so politicians are not punished for making bad choices. — Jason Brennan

I hide my true feelings to avoid causing you trouble or pain, I act strong to show you that I'm not unreliable, I hold my tears back to show you that I'm happy but what hurts the most is knowing the fact that I'm not all these things I portray to be. — Harriet Morgan

Roy had communicated, days earlier, to the Zen master that I was a drunk - unreliable - either faint-hearted or vicious - therefore during the cerimony, don't ask Bukowski for the rings because Bukowski might not be there. or he might loose the rings, or vomit, or loose Bukowski — Charles Bukowski

There are three things that robots cannot do," wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote "Show preference without reason (LOVE)" and then "Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)" and finally "Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE). — Lydia Netzer

Whereas, in the west, individuality and drive are considered positive qualities, they are not seen the same way, in Japan. In that country, if you are too much of a rugged individualist, it might actually indicate that you are a weak,
unreliable character and that you are selfish, in a childish, willful kind of way. — Alexei Maxim Russell

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Memory - uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable - is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we're inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can't be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Only by looking backward are we able answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive? — Stephanie Kallos

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. — Anne Fadiman

When we are relaxed and reasonable content, we are naturally wise. We accept that life is unpredictable, unreliable. We say jokingly or philosophically, "Nothing is sure except death and taxes," or "God willing and the creek don't rise," reminding each other that, notwithstanding the level of planning, we are continually dealing with being surprised. We get startled. We recover. We are disappointed. We adjust. Mostly-with Wisdom intact-we manage. — Sylvia Boorstein

Life after death. Sex after marriage. While claims are made for the existence of both, the sources are oftentimes unreliable and the evidence, at best, anecdotal. — J.D. Lexx

In general, I think people should be skeptical of the Internet as a reference tool because so much of what's on it is unreliable and costumed - a hall of mirrors. — James Gleick

Here, there is simply no substitute for the kind of work that experimental psychologists do, work which shows some mechanisms to be quite reliable, and others to be quite unreliable. — Hilary Kornblith

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old! — Stephen Richards

The idea that affable Boris[Johnson] is actually divisive, selfish and unreliable is Mr 's biggest weakness. — James Kirkup

Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable? - people needed their daily fix. — Manil Suri

Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes. You look good, attract attention, and if you're lucky, you make some money. Women flock to you. In that sense, having talent's preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn.
[ ... ]
If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have? — Haruki Murakami

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted. — Neal Stephenson

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady. — Guy De Maupassant

Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what
Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight. — Luke Rhinehart

Automobiles are unreliable and dangerous slaves. They frequently revolt and kill their masters. I hate them. — Michael D. O'Brien

After trying several unreliable web site hosts, I signed up with NitroTek and was pleased to discover there is a reliable, easy to work with service available to individuals and companies who want to keep a solid presence on the net. NitroTtek is a helpful, no-hassles company to work with. — Lesley Choyce

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are. — Lisa Unger

Sin is when you turn away from God - or, in the other language, alienation occurs when the ego, that erratic, unreliable driver of the personality, temporarily turns aside from the great quest for integration with the inner self, the self that's authentic, the self that contains the potential to be fully human, fully fulfilled and fully alive. — Susan Howatch

By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable. — Nicole Krauss

Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. — Eugene H. Peterson

The most unreliable thing in this world is human relationships. — Jack Ma

Right, we've got a few questions for you," Harry told Mundungus, who shouted at once.
"I panicked okay? I never wanted to come along, no offense, mate, but I never volunteered to die for you, an' that was bleedin' You-Know-Who come flying at me, anyone woulda got outta there, I said all along I didn't wanna do it--"
"For your information, none of the rest of us Disapparated," said Hermione.
"Well, you're a bunch of bleedin' 'eroes then, aren't you, but I never pretended I was up for killing meself--"
"We're not interested in why you ran out on Mad-Eye," said Harry, moving his wand a little closer to Mundungus's baggy, bloodshot eyes. "We already knew you were an unreliable bit of scum."
"Well then, why the 'ell am I being 'unted down by 'ouse-elves? Or is this about them goblets again? I ain't got none of 'em left, or you could 'ave 'em--"
"It's not about the goblets either, although you're getting warmer," said Harry. "Shut up and listen. — J.K. Rowling

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn't do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. — Thomas Keneally

Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would be quite different. [But] the same goes for the pluralist ... If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn't be a pluralist. Does it follow that ... his pluralist beliefs are produced in him by an unreliable belief-producing process? — Alvin Plantinga

First impressions are always unreliable. — Franz Kafka

Whatever has been achieved through pressure and violence is unstable, unreliable and incorrect. — Janusz Korczak

If our life is a dream, let it continue; who wants the reality? If our life is a reality, let it continue; who wants the dream? Unknown is unreliable! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Parents must begin to discover their children as individuals of developing tastes and views and so help them be, and see, themselves as thinking, feeling people. It is far too easy for a middle-years child to absorb an over-simplified picture of himself as a sloppy, unreliable, careless, irresponsible, lazy creature and not much more
an attitude toward himself he will carry far beyond these years. — Dorothy H Cohen

If you have been told that you are late and unreliable more than once, then not only do you lack punctuality, but you also lack decency and seriousness, which is certainly very annoying. — Auliq Ice

If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. — J.D. Salinger

To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33) ... The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn of reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action. — Brennan Manning

Things I Want Decided

Which shouldn't exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you're alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things -
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world? — Izumi Shikibu

The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available. — Marilyn Ferguson

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi) — Andrew Klavan

You are unreliable, Flavia,' he said. 'Utterly unreliable.'
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself. — Alan Bradley

After two months of horrible computer problems, I had concluded that the free Windows 10 installation was an unreliable lobotomized operating system as compared to Windows 7 on a 2011 HP G72-B50US laptop computer. — Steven Magee

I'm a very loyal and unreliable friend. — Edward De Bono

In her experience cowboys were notoriously unreliable, generally unfaithful, and rarely capable of settling at all. — Victoria Vane

The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims. — Rebecca Solnit

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines - or one million machines - can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable. — Ray Kurzweil

All memories fashioned at the level of a child's eye were unreliable in scale ... — Carol O'Connell

How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another. — Karl Kraus

He doesn't trouble himself with closing the shutter - total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs. — Ian McEwan

At the moment, the general perception ... is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. — Bernard Lewis

We commonly do not remember that it is ... always the first person that is speaking. — Henry David Thoreau

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier. — Holly Black

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that. — Rob Roberge

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation - EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce - and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter - all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn's cat. I decided to kill myself. — Dan Simmons

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? — Augustine Of Hippo

Seventy-five percent of all Americans believe that angels are real. Which is amazing when you consider that forty percent of all Americans think DNA evidence is unreliable. — Richard Jeni

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. — Walt Mossberg

I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as "religious" or — Jonathan Haidt

You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive. — K.H. Rennie

Clergymen tend to be unreliable and pompous figures. Seldom Jewish rabbis, less often Catholic priests, but Protestant ministers tend to be ... not really very admirable. Not necessarily evil, but silly. And wrong, of course. — Charlton Heston

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do. — Ted Chiang

I wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse, and he's one of my heroes, so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable, and they've got brains the size of golf balls. — Sebastian Coe

However, for story reasons, we needed to represent them in certain ways. One of the things that sort of blew me away that I didn't know when we started is that memories are completely susceptible to change. And this is, you know, one of the many reasons why certain people are trying to get it taken out - eyewitness testimony in court cases because it's very unreliable. — Pete Docter

As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember and things we cannot remember. — Haruki Murakami

My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.

I am a crazy woman... That last part is true. — Brunonia Barry

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like "boof-boof" - just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible - except when we choose not to be. — Alan Bradley

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess. — H.G.Wells

With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings. — Robert Walser

If you're looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn't for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.
Still with me?
Too bad for you.
I can't wait to break your heart. — Christopher Buehlman