Vacillating Quotes & Sayings

It is not the young man who should be considered fortunate but the old man who has lived well, because the young man in his prime wanders much by chance, vacillating in his beliefs, while the old man has docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness. — Epicurus

This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy. — Franz Grillparzer

Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal! — Charles De Gaulle

Only then, after all these things had been accomplished within the first couple of hours of the coup, could the messages, which had been drawn up and filed, be sent out by radio, telephone and telegraph to the commanders of the Home Army in other cities and to the top generals commanding the troops at the front and in the occupied zones, announcing that Hitler was dead and that a new anti-Nazi government had been formed in Berlin. The revolt would have to be over - and achieved - within twenty-four hours and the new government firmly installed. Otherwise the vacillating generals might have second thoughts. Goering and Himmler might be able to rally them, and a civil war would ensue. In that case the fronts would cave in and the very chaos and collapse which the plotters wished to prevent would become inevitable. — William L. Shirer

What is time
a November leaf
a child's vacillating mouth
a rose
a left-over, half-drunk glass of water. — Ilhan Berk

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me. — Kim Gordon

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! — Salvador Dali

Without education ... what is man but a splendid slave, a reasoning savage vacillating between the dignity of an intelligence derived from God and the degradation of passion participated with brutes ... — Chukwudifu Oputa

Situations in life often permit no delay; and when we cannot determine the course which is certainly best, we must follow the one which is probably the best. This frame of mind freed me also from the repentance and remorse commonly felt by those vacillating individuals who are always seeking as worthwhile things which they later judge to be bad. — Rene Descartes

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths. — Aleksandar Hemon

Pursue your goals with all your heart, might, mind and strength. You are doomed to failure if you pursue them in a vacillating manner — Robert D. Hales

I can also tell in whose hands I am. Do these hands tremble? There can be no doubt: these are the hands of a military officer. Is it a firm pulse? I say without vacillating: these are the hands of a liberator. — Ricardo Flores Magon

Enough, my very noble husband. You had another of your vacillating consultations with your councilors. Fine advisors." With infinite scorn, "A herd of palsied purblind idiots hugging their sterile profits close to their sunken chests in the face of my father's displeasure. — Isaac Asimov

He was thinking of Marco, Daisy, Sono
Oguki, Madeleine, the Pontritters, and now and then of the difference between ancient and modern
tragedy according to Hegel, the inner experience of the heart and the deepening of individual
character in the modern age. His own individual character cut off at times both from facts and from
values. But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of
archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems. — Saul Bellow

You saw me vacillating between error and truth, loving them equally because unable to distinguish the one from the other; the hour marked out by God for my enlightenment has come: He has shown me the powerlessness of reason, and the necessity of faith. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertake.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them. — Leo Tolstoy

The foundations of some formerly strong lands became so riddled with termites of diminished purpose, so decayed with the decadence of smug moderation, and so emaciated with the vacillating aims of appears, that even when they saw the enemy coming and did resist, they were easily toppled when the Imperial Order finally pushed. — Terry Goodkind

Instead of a weak and vacillating Government, a single, purposeful, energetic personality is ruling today. — Hjalmar Schacht

Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal. — Ralph Ellison

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day. — Pablo Neruda

In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR ... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. — John Steinbeck

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks. — Mao Zedong

If Church history teaches us anything, it is that we cannot afford to be a vacillating Church. We minister to a people who are in great need of hearing truth, we dare not make any attempt to soft pedal that glorious truth. — Martin Luther

During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

What are stumbling blocks and defeat to the weak and vacillating are but stepping stones to victory to the determined soul. — Orison Swett Marden

For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good. — William Wordsworth

I think things are more confused now than in several years, and I think the reason is that the governor is vacillating on it. He's all for it, but he's not doing anything about it. I am certain that his behavior is at the center of the Twins' frustration. — Steven Schier

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success. — Steve Pavlina

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state ... Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Let it be ours to be self-reliant amidst hosts of the vacillating - real in a generation of triflers - true amongst a multitude of shams; when tempted to swerve from principle, sturdy as an oak in its maintenance; when solicited by the enticement of sinners, firm as a rock in our denial. — William Morley Punshon

A whole spectrum of possible relationships comes to light, beginning at one pole with the pious and inert quotation that is isolated and set off like an icon, and ending at the other pole with the most ambiguous, disrespectful, parodic-travestying use of a quotation. The transitions between various nuances on this spectrum are to such an extent flexible, vacillating and ambiguous that it is often difficult to decide whether we are confronting a reverent use of a sacred word or more familiar, even parodic playing with it. — Mikhail Bakhtin

Minerva drew unusual attention to herself on her very first evening, when she was revealed to be a Hatstall. After five and a half minutes, the Sorting Hat, which had been vacillating between the houses of Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, placed Minerva in the latter. (In later years, this circumstance was a subject of gentle humour between Minerva and her colleague Filius Flitwick, over whom the Sorting Hat suffered the same confusion, but reached the opposite conclusion. The two Heads of House were amused to think that they might, but for those crucial moments in their youths, have exchanged positions). — J.K. Rowling

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes. — Ayn Rand

Aggressive music has always been a liberator for me; however, hard tunes with no soul quickly wear thin. H.R. exhibited soul where it could not be found previously. His lyrics contributed an urgency fueled by spirituality and a call to social justice, which substantiated the ferocity of the Bad Brains' earth-shattering soundscapes. This included the instances when Bad Brains broke it down to a mesmerizing, skank-drenched reggae rhythm. H.R.'s vocal style was otherworldly; ever vacillating between combative and graceful expression; all the while thrusting forth a righteous dose of rebellion served with a side of hope. — Howie Abrams

My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided in his actions. — Ulysses S. Grant

But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day.
Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again. — George MacDonald Fraser

He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colourful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The lack of opportunity is ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind. Opportunities! Every life is full of them. Every newspaper article is an opportunity. Every client is an opportunity. Every sermon is an opportunity. Every business transaction is an opportunity, an opportunity to be polite, an opportunity to be manly, an opportunity to be honest, an opportunity to make friends. — Orison Swett Marden