Unresolved Quotes & Sayings

Make amends to those you've hurt, and forgive anyone who has wounded you. If He does, then obey Him immediately. But then move on. Don't continue to beat yourself up over something that God has forgiven. True, you may still have to live with consequences related to your choices. But the Father doesn't want you to live with unresolved guilt, shame, or regret. Seek Him and be free. — Charles F. Stanley

Nothing is pending in the world ... nothing is finished, yet nothing is unresolved ... Everything is filled to the brim. — Carlos Castaneda

On the ghosts in Moorehawke & Into The Grey/Taken Away:
The ghosts ... are symbolic of those unresolved moments in history that linger, and affect the next generation. Sometimes this happens without that generation ever really knowing the truth of what has come before. This is so true of war, I think, where we are often only left the stories that the previous generation wanted us to hear ... How much harder would the truth be to deny were it lingering about as an actual manifestation of the past? — Celine Kiernan

There are issues that remain unresolved. Part of appreciating yourself just as you are is an appreciation for that which is unresolved. — Ellen Birx

My nature is a quagmire
of unresolved confessions. — Robert Creeley

Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial. — Eric Holder

It's like that sometimes for people who have had traumatic experiences in their past life. It's hard to move on, to belong, in one place when you have unresolved business in another. — Amanda Gray

The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles. — Charles S. Maier

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it - all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain. — Leslie Parrish

I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They're all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him. — Gary Oldman

I, like balloon animal hacks everywhere, can only make one animal so far. It is a LEGO version of the Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein I have brick-engineered a pig-camel, a dog-camel, and a camel with wheels. These monstrosities are quickly torn apart, and I wonder if I have some unresolved camel issues. — Jonathan Bender

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today. — Francine Masiello

Children bring an awesome responsibility. We are entrusted with the task of shaping the lives of real people, with all their potential to do good or harm. At times, it is highly inconvenient. They disturb our sleep; they interfere with our plans; they stir up dormant and unresolved passions. And yet, as we seek to teach them, they are teaching us. They teach us what sacrifice is all about. The total dependence of a baby upon us, their powerlessness to reciprocate what we do for them, their inability to say thank you, all lead us to become less selfish. We are forced to change, to grow up, to look at the needs of another, to raise our boredom threshold, to develop patience, to deal with our insecurities, to become more whole. We are learning to love. — Nicky Lee

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all. — Marcia Muller

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. — Carl Sagan

Suicide is a hasty unresolved death that slowly kills those close-by day by day. — Anthony Liccione

Behind every highly dramatic person lurks an unresolved trauma. Drama is his or her way of asking for love, and begging for help and understanding. — Doreen Virtue

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it. — Michel De Montaigne

I would say about 80% of my writing (including posts and blogs), has to do with unresolved anger and that's just fine with me — Lori Lesko

In life, unresolved issues always resurface, and usually at the most inopportune moments. — Toni L. Coleman Carter

My life has always somehow been played out in a minor key, unresolved. Art somehow resolves things for me. — Daphne Guinness

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good — Paul Kalanithi

One man can go where a group cannot, and manage on very little, particularly a rough adventurer such as he. More the point, he risks only himself when he goes: you much consider that in your charge is an inexpressibly valuable dragon, whose loss must be of greater importance than even this mission."

"Oh, pray, let us be gone at once," said the inexpressibly valuable dragon, when Laurence had carried the question, still unresolved, back to him. "It sounds very exciting to me. — Naomi Novik

Once, for Paul, as for his contemporaries, Israel's election
and the demand of the law stood side by side in unresolved tension. Now he found their resolution, not in some synthesis or new idea, but in an event: the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God. In Christ the demand of the law and the fulfillment of promise meet. — Mark A. Seifrid

Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided. — Michel De Montaigne

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Letter to a Young Poet, 1903 — Rainer Maria Rilke

I think the thing that music can do is be unsettling. It is abnormal - music that's perceived to be different in an unresolved or unusual way. — Bear McCreary

Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness ... Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? — Pema Chodron

Shakespeare knows that the tension between men as they are and men as they ought to be will forever remain unresolved. Man's imperfectability is no more an excuse for total permissiveness, however, than are man's imperfections a reason for inflexible intolerance. — Theodore Dalrymple

The gun issue is a big, unresolved issue in this country right now. I think it's out of control. — Nora Dunn

I think it's difficult to forget things that are unresolved. — Chris Van Allsburg

Writers and readers are still trying to work out unresolved problems between men and women, and that is why millions of women around the world are hooked on romantic fiction. So am I. — Charlotte Lamb

Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome. The last thing they need is for you to make matters worse by responding angrily. — Joel Osteen

The hardest thing about praying hard is enduring unanswered prayers. If you don't guard your heart, unresolved anger toward God can undermine faith. — Mark Batterson

We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict. — Justin Davis

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you're playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you're enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody. — Jake Gyllenhaal

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. — Robert Smithson

Midlife dynamically, for both straight and gay males, is often challenging as we face the reality that many of the dreams we had for our lives might not become a reality and unresolved conflicts come to the surface. For us to successfully transition in to the next phase of our lives we must find reconciliation of these issues. And for the gay male there is a sense that the gay self we have tried to keep in the closet or so many years begins to scream out. "Time is running out. When do I get to live?" You can't ignore that voice in the end, you can try and suppress it, and you can try and deny it, you can try and silence it by filling your life with other noises and diverting attention ... but that voice still exists. "Will my entire life be a lie? — Anthony Venn-Brown

After so many cases of terror attacks related to Islamic militancy remaining unresolved in the last few years, the government has no moral authority to stay in power. — Sheikh Hasina

Your subconscious's goal is to recreate unresolved childhood issues and then hopefully mend them. — Karen Salmansohn

It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age. — Jonathan Tropper

Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know. — Rainer Maria Rilke

You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. — Robert Gottlieb

If you like to argue just for the sake of being contentious, you shouldn't pick a job based on this unresolved emotional issue of yours, you should get counseling for it. — Tucker Max

The feeling of being 'offended' is a warning indicator that is showing you where to look within yourself for unresolved issues. — Bryant H. McGill

I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we - even the most sophisticated of us - overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us. — Arundhati Roy

The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down. — Colette Dowling

Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension. — Ben Aaronovitch

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Leaders who carry unresolved guilt are forced to hide a part of themselves from those to whom they are closest. They have a secret. They are forced to expend time and energy to ensure that no one finds them out. They know they are not completely trustworthy. Often they assume no one else is either. Guilty leaders have a difficult time trusting. Consequently, guilty leaders have a difficult time building teams. — Andy Stanley

There was still so much unresolved between them, but in this moment, she couldn't bring herself to care about the way their relationship had started, about all the mutual lies and betrayals. In this moment, she knew only that she loved him, that every part of her longed to be with him. — Anna Zaires

Ours was a ragged and uneven parting. Each of us had intended to see the other again. Each of us had had final words to say. My days with the Fool ended like a half-played game of Stones, the outcome poised and uncertain, possibilities hovering. Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered. It is like the anticipation that a clever minstrel evokes when he pauses, letting silence pool before sweeping into the final refrain of his song. Sometimes a gap can seem like a promise yet to be fulfilled. — Robin Hobb

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The best thing about knitting is its slowness," says Murphy. "It is so slow that we see the beauty inherent in every tiny act that makes up a sweater. So slow that we know the project is not going to get finished today--it may not get finished for many months or longer--and that allows us to make our peace with the unresolved nature of life. We slow down as we knit. — Carl Honore

Not really. It's called OCD and -
'Yes, yes, so my psychiatrist tells me.'
'You have a shrink?'
'Apparently, I have some repressed anger and unresolved abandonment issues after my experiences with God. — Suzanne Wright

Your unresolved issues will continue to call-in experiences to teach you what you need to learn. — Bryant McGill

I don't miss another opportunity to try to do my best to finish the things I have left undone. I could say: It's my unresolved karma that wakes me up in the morning. — Sharon Gannon

You look at your past and things that are unresolved and figure out what you need to do to move forward and fill a role with your family and in your community. — Greg Bryk

When I watch my kids, and I see the primal level at which the sibling relationships are formed, then I completely understand what these unresolved adult sibling problems are based on. You know, 'Mom liked you better' and, 'You got your own room and I didn't.' — Annette Bening

If we look at our history with honesty and clarity we will be forced to admit that our federal form of government has been, from the day of its birth, weakened in integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question. It is as if a political thalidomide drug taken during pregnancy caused the birth of a crippled nation. — Martin Luther King Jr.

When adults come together to form an intimate relationship, each person releases into it unresolved issues from their trans-generational pool of unconscious fantasies. Partners are often chosen to actualize certain potentialities for each other, and the unborn baby becomes party to their drama. — Joan Raphael-Leff

Our mornings were never "rise and shine." They were "rise and fight." They were loud and ravaging. They were heavy and unnerving, like the after-math of a war, with unresolved territorial disputes.
They were never serene, but they were beautiful. More beautiful than the smile you wear when you step out of the shower, more tempting than the sight of you brewing coffee from across the kitchen bar, more promising than a glorious victory, bigger than all our tumultuous past. Bigger than you. Bigger than I. — Malak El Halabi

In this fallen world, and in their fallen lives, those who are alienated from God are a part of this age, which is now passing. It has no future and there are intimations of that in the depths of human consciousness where a tangle of contradictions lie, for we are made for meaning but find only emptiness, made as moral beings but are estranged from what is holy, made to understand but are thwarted in so many of our quests to know. These are the sure signs of a reality out of joint with itself. This is what, in fact, points to something else. These contradictions are unresolved in the absence of that age to come which is rooted in the triune God of whom Scripture speaks. He it is who not only sustains all of life, directing it all to its appointed end, but who also is the measure of what is enduringly true and right, and the fountain of all meaning, purpose, and hope. — John Piper

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through past prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature. — Edmund Burke

Resentment has the potential to consume many who appear to be otherwise blameless. Unresolved caged resentment that one day breaks free and kills all of the delicate innocence in the yard. Acidic, rancorous resentment has gears for teeth that are perfectly oiled by bitterness and possess a judgment unable to discern the corrupted from the good. — Kenn Bivins

Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal - the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism. — E.B. White

Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor. The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved. — Clement Greenberg

We all have unresolved shame, because it is used as a tool to control behavior. — Christiane Northrup

We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically seperating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life. — B. Alan Wallace

It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis. — Damon Galgut

Kyle is my best friend. Why would I risk screwing that up?"
"Mackenzie Catherine Dobson, have you learned nothing from romantic comedies? Do I need to make a trip to the video store?" Tess set her fork down and sighed. "'We're just friends' is the oldest plot device in the book. All it really means is that you're just friends until one of you get the balls to do something about all the unresolved tension. — Kathleen Peacock

Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy cars - for most people one of the most costly things they will ever own - with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes. — Tom Vanderbilt

Living by faith isn't living with certainty. It's trusting God in spite of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts. — Rick Warren

It's inevitable that three drunk friends with unresolved sexual tension will play truth or dare. — Leah Raeder

A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage. — Vera Brittain

When parents don't take responsibility for their own unfinished business, they miss an opportunity not only to become better parents but also to continue their own development. People who remain in the dark about the origins of their behaviors and intense emotional responses are unaware of their unresolved issues and the parental ambivalence they create. — Daniel J. Siegel

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle ... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect. — Henry Moore

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future. — E. T. Bell

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I know why she cried like that. She cried because she wasn't finished grieving the loss of me. When someone has an exaggerated emotional reaction to something in the present, it's usually because they haven't resolved something in their past. — Kate McGahan

It is easier for the leaders to reject the prophecy and the prophet, particularly if there are some unresolved character issues in the life of the prophet. It provides a legitimate reason to reject the word in the eyes of the people, though not necessarily in the eyes of the Lord. Prophecy has a way of testing our true motives. — Graham Cooke

...we have chosen to speak of spirituality ultimately as the way in which we live out our response to God. Unless we find this personal, transformational meaning in its fullest sense, the struggle for wholeness will remain unresolved. As Augustine put it in the first paragraph of his Confessions, 'God created us for a relationship with him and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. — Janet O. Hagberg

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting. — Virginia Satir

It is given to all of Dostoevsky's characters to "think and seek higher things"; in each of them there is a "great and unresolved thought"; all of them must, before all else, "get a thought straight." And in this resolution of a thought (an idea) lies their entire real life and their own personal unfinalizability. If — Mikhail Bakhtin

Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place. — Ian McEwan

Frequently renew settled and holy resolutions. A soldier unresolved to fight may be easily defeated ... The weakness of our graces, the strength of our temptations, and the diligence of our spiritual enemies, require strong resolutions. — Stephen Charnock

Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody. — Woody Allen

I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by. — Timothy Hallinan

Love brings up our unresolved feelings . One day we are feeling loved , and the next day we are suddenly afraid to trust love .
The painful memories of being rejected begin to surface when we are faced with trusting and accepting our partner's love . — John Gray

Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around. You, on the other hand, were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around. Living unloved is like clipping a bird's wings and removing its ability to fly. Not something I want for you. Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly. And if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place. — William P. Young

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there ... — Stephen King

Any pain entailed in repentance will always be far less than the suffering required to satisfy justice for unresolved transgression. — D. Todd Christofferson

I look forward to the day when we can meet one another in our true nakedness, stripped free of unresolved emotions, pain-induced projections, the distortions of duality. For too long we have been on opposite sides of the river, the bridge between our hearts washed away by a flood of pain. But the time has come to construct a new bridge, one that comes into being with each step we take, one that is fortified with benevolent intentions and authentic self-revealing. As we walk toward one — Jeff Brown

A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible. — David Dosa

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense. — Joyce Carol Oates

Sinful habits are usually indicative of unresolved conflicts. — Erwin W. Lutzer

Marriage doesn't create problems. It reveals them. You bring unresolved stuff into it. — Rick Warren

I didn't grow up with my mother, and so losing her for real was like, some sort of latent childhood, some sort of unresolved issue. When she left for real, it was sort of like, I was done. — Billy Corgan