Unsuitable Quotes & Sayings

Nobody cared about Oma Kristel, about the way she had tried to keep herself attractive long after Youth had packed its bags and moved out of the aging tenement, about the way she always had some little gift for me, a sample bottle of unsuitable scent or a brooch made of sparkly paste. — Helen Grant

Like any other science, yoga is applicable by people of every clime and time. The theory advanced by certain ignorant writers that yoga is "dangerous" or "unsuitable" for Westerners is wholly false, and has lamentably deterred many sincere students from seeking its manifold blessings. Yoga is a method for restraining the natural turbulence of thoughts, which otherwise impartially prevents all men, of all lands, from glimpsing their true nature of Spirit. Like the healing light of the sun, yoga is beneficial equally to men of the East and to men of the West. The thoughts of most persons are restless and capricious; a manifest need exists for yoga: the science of mind control. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. — Terry Pratchett

Not anyone who says "I'm going to be
careful and smart in the matters of love,"
who says, "I'm going to choose slowly,"
but only those lovers who didn't choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible
and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable--
only those know what I'm talking about
in this talking about love. — Mary Oliver

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. — Mary Oliver

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you. — Jeanette Winterson

I love the alien in people, god I love the wildness, the wit, the lightning of the Other mind. A kind of sex-in-the-head, you know it's a rather Victorian affliction. Something to do with communication. I have had moments of communication with people, often totally unsuitable people, which had a truly unholy intensity... A sort of orgasmic meaningfulness and clarity, you know, all the old romantic stuff - two strangers stop and suddenly exchange glimpses of reality before moving on into the mists. — James Tiptree Jr.

It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?"
George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage bag heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tattering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue. — Margaret Atwood

I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer. — Maeve Binchy

How I go to the woods
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much. — Mary Oliver

To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him. — Maxim Gorky

When you're single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it--work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers... — Kate Bolick

When television producers say it is the parents obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption — Gregg Easterbrook

The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father. — Victor Hugo

The language 'It's too late' is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better. — Jeremy Grantham

Take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. — Marcus Aurelius

Female castration results in concentration of her feelings upon her male companion, and her impotence in confrontations with her own kind. Because all her love is guided by the search for security, if not for her offspring then for her crippled and fearful self, she cannot expect to find it in her own kind, whom she knows to be weak and unsuitable. — Germaine Greer

I know he isn't a serious candidate for anything long-term. Or even medium-term. But maybe that's precisely why he's so attractive to me, right now. Unsuitable is good. Temporary is good ... — Catherine Sanderson

Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that "each case be individualized." If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases. — Anton Chekhov

A good deal of childhood is strong stuff for adults and totally unsuitable for children. — Philippa Pearce

Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - always and, indeed then most truly, when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances. — Albert Schweitzer

Do you really know what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?" "Is there any other kind? — Helen Simonson

One of the many difficult things about women was that they tended to pick the most unsuitable times to tell you something they considered to be important, and then became irrationally upset when you failed to remember it. — Ruth Downie

Brendan's not the guy you use to figure your shit out, Brendan's the guy you hope you get once you have figured your shit out. — Nia Forrester

In London, she'd overheard more than one matron decrying what they considered Esme Byron's inappropriate eccentricities, aghast that she was allowed so much personal freedom and the ability to voice opinions they considered unsuitable for an unmarried young woman barely out of the schoolroom. But her family always stood by her, proud of her artistic talent and uniformly deaf to the complaints of any critics who might say she needed a firmer hand.
'What must Ned and Mama be thinking now?' Were they regretting that they had not listened to those critics? Wishing they'd kept a tighter rein on her activities rather than letting her venture out as she chose?
But she would have gone mad being constrained and confined the way she knew most girls her age were. She could never have been borne the suffocating restrictions, the smothering tedium of being expected to go everywhere with a chaperone in tow, or worse, being cooped up inside doing embroidery or playing the pianoforte. — Tracy Anne Warren

Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it. — Ludwig Von Mises

1. Insects and fungi are not the real cause of plant diseases but only attack unsuitable
varieties or crops imperfectly grown. Their true role is that of censors for pointing
out the crops that are improperly nourished and so keeping our agriculture up to the
mark. In other words, the pests must be looked upon as Nature's professors of
agriculture: as an integral portion of any rational system of farming.
2. The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders, and so
forth is unscientific and unsound as, even when successful, such procedure merely
preserves the unfit and obscures the real problem -- how to grow healthy crops." (An Agricultural Testament) — Albert Howard

A true personality ... is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable. — Gustav Mahler

Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love - or more correctly being fallen out of love with - every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above. — Howard Jacobson

The hospitality of listening, like that of the Epiphany, is hospitality in a stable, that is, in a place normally unsuitable for receiving kings, a hospitality caught short, because it has nothing else to offer than a vacant and unadorned place. Its deficiency is its nakedness and thus its perfection. — Jean-Louis Chrxe9tien

Luke moved as silently as fog, while Maryse's heels sounded like gunshots on the marble floor. Clary wondered if Isabelle's propensity for unsuitable footwear was genetic. — Cassandra Clare

My first marriage was totally unsuitable and shouldn't have happened. It was a whirlwind, rebound thing. I was 23 or 24 - a baby. — Carol Vorderman

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment. — Mahatma Gandhi

The plain white vinegar sold in gallon jugs in stores is particularly unsuitable for a health treatment, since it is made from petroleum and is completely synthetic. — Kim DeWalt

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours. — Rudyard Kipling

of unsuitable places. — Kathleen Baldwin

No subject is unsuitable for comedy. — Peter Baynham

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object. — Georg Baselitz

I don't like this."
"I know you don't, my little spaetzel. But I am too worn out to run from both the police and your murderous twin, and Damian's looking peaky, plus Christian did apologize for trying to kill us earlier."
"I wasn't talking about that. It's your lamentable habit of using completely unsuitable love names for me that gives me grief," Adrian groused. "I am not a lambypie, nor am I a spaetzel. — Katie MacAlister

Because there's someone else here in East Carmin. Someone hopelessly unsuitable. It's all a really bad idea and will lead to trouble of the worst sort. But no matter what, every minute in her presence makes my life a minute more complete. — Jasper Fforde

This is about objects, not motifs. The photo is only a substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as a picture in its customary sense. — Bernd Becher

He never had any sense of decorum ... always kissing his wife in the most unsuitable places!' "(Are you sure you kiss me in suitable places, Gilbert? I'm afraid Mrs. Gibson would think the nape of the neck, for instance, most unsuitable.) "'But, — L.M. Montgomery

I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks. — Mordecai Richler

She belonged to the class that wear their best clothes, however unsuitable to the occasion. Last year, you know, we had a picnic outing at Scrantor Rocks. You'd be surprised at the unsuitable clothes the girls wore. Foulard dresses and patent-leather shoes and quite elaborate hats, some of them. For climbing about over rocks and in gorse and heather. And the young men in their best suits. Of course, hiking's different again. That's practically a uniform, and girls don't seem to realize that shorts are very unbecoming unless they are very slender. — Agatha Christie

It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children. Children of seven, of nine and so on, and it was often difficult to know how to dispose of these natural, it seemed, young criminals who came before the juvenile courts. Excuses had to be brought for them. Broken homes. Negligent and unsuitable parents. But the people who spoke the most vehemently for them, the people who sought to bring forth every excuse for them, were usually the type of Rowena Drake. — Agatha Christie

If you voluntarily label a product as being unsuitable for kids and then turn around and market it directly to kids in contradiction of your ratings system, then you should be held accountable just like any other company in America that misleads consumers, .. That's not censorship. That's common sense. — Joe Lieberman

The Iraqi people are living a long-running tragedy because of the legacy of the old regime, the Americans and their actions that are unsuitable for Iraqi society, and the weakness of national resolve. — Ahmed Chalabi

My concept of a 'Doctor Who' girl was that you screamed a lot and ran around quarries in unsuitable footwear. Of course you fell over and twisted your ankle, because you had high heels on. — Sophie Aldred

The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work. — Voltaire

I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window. — Jeanette Winterson

As I don't consider myself exceptional, but simply a storyteller, each of my stories is really a period of my life. Deep down I feel that criticism of my work-which is the most sincere and authentic vision of myself-is unsuitable and immodest, whether it is favorable or unfavorable. — Federico Fellini

We got out. I glanced at Daniel.
He sighed. "Go on."
"You sound like you're giving a five-year old permission to play with an unsuitable friend."
"If the shoe fits ... "
I flipped off.
"Watch it or I won't marry you," he said. "Truck or no truck."
I laughed and jogged over to Rafe.
"Did he just say ... " Rafe began.
"Yes. And don't ask — Kelley Armstrong

First guitars tend to be like first loves: ill-chosen, unsuitable, short-lived and unforgettable. — Tim Brookes

Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. — John Steinbeck

Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse. — Hanif Kureishi

I'd like to rebrand the whole thing that's called 'disability'. It's an unsuitable title in the modern world — Viktoria Modesta

I have no opinion on 48 frames a second at all. I'd be completely unsuitable to talk about that. — Martin Freeman

The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that we really are the selfish tyrants that the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said we are? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? The way in which we answer this question depends on the way in which each one of us, individually, answers it. — Peter Singer

Where does the fragmentation of a dysfunctional family begin? I believe it begins before the family does. I believe the wounds are already there, waiting to be cut into existence by the meeting of two unsuitable people and the birth of the children they go on to create with a love that is potent in its powers of destruction. — Rachel Moran

She threw herself eagerly into the paths of unsuitable men. — Anne Taintor

Tis a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth: off with 't, while 'tis vendible; answer the time of request. Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out of fashion; richly suited, but unsuitable: just like the brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now. — William Shakespeare

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society. — Henry Adams

I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings. — Werner Herzog

Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind. — Herman Melville

I thank God that you know the art of tearing yourself apart - I mean the way to humble yourself truly by recognizing and realizing your faults. You are right in believing yourself to be as you describe and to be most unsuitable for any kind of duty; it is on this foundation that Our Lord will base the execution of His plans for you. — Vincent De Paul

The very thing that makes him a great killer makes him very much unsuitable for anything else. — Aleksandr Voinov

You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care - and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?"
"My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind? — Helen Simonson

The critic of the Adepts would form a truer opinion of their attitude if he did not look upon them as guardians of a treasure, grudgingly doling it out to applicants whose rights it was impossible to ignore or defy, but rather as trainers of racehorses, patiently trying beast after beast in the hope that one may ultimately be found that will win the Grand National. The Adept who accepts an unsuitable pupil is guilty of cruelty just as much as the rider who sends a horse at a fence it cannot take. — Dion Fortune

Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

I read a lot of highly unsuitable books for an 11-year-old. I was desperate to read as widely as possible. I thought, 'There are so many places I am never going to get the chance to visit, but I can if I read them.' And I did. I could go anywhere in the world - and off it - by reading. — Malorie Blackman

We fall in love or stay in love with people who are unsuitable or who no longer love us and, conversely, we feel no love towards people who would be very suitable. Love is involuntary, that's the problem. Our personal histories prepare us to be attracted to people who unconsciously evoke emotions from our childhood or adolescence. — Francois Lelord

To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat. — Peter Sellers

This mode of electioneering suited neither my taste nor my principles. I thought it equally unsuitable to my personal character and to the station in which I am placed. — John Quincy Adams

But this small episode is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. — Kazuo Ishiguro

By the way, my name's Rose Hathaway. I'm seventeen years old, training to protect and kill vampires, in love with a completely unsuitable guy, and have a best friend whose weird magic could drive her crazy.
Hey, no one said high school was easy. — Richelle Mead

I told him what my dad had said. That got him laughing and as we pulled into the school parking lot, even the sight of Rafe waiting for me only made him roll his eyes.
We got out. I glanced at Daniel.
He sighed. "Go on."
"You sound like you're giving a five-year-old permission to play with an unsuitable friend."
"If the shoe fits ... "
I flipped him off.
"Watch it or I won't marry you," he said. "Truck of no truck."
I laughed and jogged over to Rafe.
"Did he just say ... ?" Rafe began. — Kelley Armstrong

And I would have answered:
The knottier the branch, the more twisted and misshapen, the more bent people called it, the harder it is to find it a place among the smooth planks, the more people agree that it should be thrown on the fire, the more useless it is, the more unsuitable for anything except letting one's imagination run riot, the more I covet it, the more I yearn to weigh it in my hand, the more I long to let my whittling knife be guided by its knots and veins ... Yes, bring that piece to me ... — Sjon

Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable. — Pearl S. Buck

Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer. — Jacob M. Appel

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions. — Henry A. Kissinger

Hollywood has always seen Sondheim as a caviar brand unsuitable for a popcorn industry. — Richard Corliss

You better have had a baby, killed someone, or slept with a pure. Those are your three options. Anything less is unsuitable. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened. If people want to smoke cigarettes, to eat a lot of candy, to choose an unsuitable health care plan, or to fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise - or even make things hard for them. — Anonymous

By what judgment am I judged? What is the accusation against me? Am I to be accused of my own betrayal? Am I to blame because you are my enemies? Yours is the responsibility, the knowledge, the power. I trusted you, you played with me as a cat plays with a mouse, and now you accuse me. I had no weapon against you, not realizing that there was need for weapons until too late. This is your place; you are at home here. I came as a stranger, alone, without a gun in my hand, bringing only a present that I wanted to give you. Am I to blame because the gift was unwelcome? Am I accused of the untranslated indictment against myself? Is it my fault that a charge has been laid against me in a different language? Is my offense that I stood too long on your threshold, holding a present that was unsuitable? Am I accused because you, wanting a victim and not a friend, threw away the only thing which I had to give? — Anna Kavan

Her thoughts were in turmoil. He was telling her to be careful? But it was too late. She had just met her dear-departed mother's worst nightmare - an unsuitable man. — Dinah McCall

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain. — Samuel Johnson

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable. — Benoit Mandelbrot

Do you think that clothes have a life of their own, and maybe have unsuitable affairs with opposite styles? I mean - you look at some people - their clothes go on flirting long after the people inside them have lost interest. — Margaret Mahy