When Its Wrong Quotes & Sayings

No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone. — Thomas Paine

In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was "a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace."
I may have been wrong about that," she conceded. "You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than ... ummph. — Tom Robbins

Take 15 minutes daily, thinking of pleasant scenarios regarding your body, with the sole intent of enjoying your body and appreciating its strength and stamina and flexibility and beauty. When you visualize for the joy of visualizing rather than with the intention of correcting some deficiency, your thoughts are more pure and, therefore, more powerful. When you visualize to overcome something that is wrong, your thoughts are diluted with the "lackful" side of the equation. In time, your physical condition will acquiesce to your dominant thoughts. — Esther Hicks

Do Stones Feel?
Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?
When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don't worry, I say, I'll bring you back, and I do.
Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it's not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong. — Mary Oliver

I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but ... — Leo Tolstoy

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who are also preachers ... Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, than it seemed to me that all the worst sins - hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust - came from the soul. But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body. — Wendell Berry

I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts. — Thomas Jefferson

The neuro-physiological organization which we call instinct functions in a blindly mechanical way, particularly apparent when its function goes wrong. — Konrad Lorenz

Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong. — Gerry Spence

That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride! For that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when I knew that was wrong, the very thing that was her undoing. I lifted not a finger to prevent it. And Madeleine, Madeleine, I let her come to that, when I should never have made her a creature like ourselves. I knew that was wrong! Well, I tell you I am no longer that passive, weak creature that has spun evil from evil till the web is vast and thick while I remain its stultified victim. It's over! — Anne Rice

Theres a process of self doubt when things go wrong. Whether or not its personal or a friend in trouble, looking at ones self isn't always the answer neither is seeking god. Just acception and the will to decide is a human condition, but the circle of choices flux with time. So fight my friend or choose your demise, because after all we are only human. — Adam Mickley Wood

Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all that is deleterious, that is, wrong, and absorbing after trial what is beneficial, that is, right. If so disposed, the Architect of the Universe, we must assume, might have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this life and our duties here. "To perform the duties of this world well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom," says Confucius, great sage and teacher. The next world and its duties we shall consider when we are placed in it. — Andrew Carnegie

It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question - why there is so much crime in modern society? - and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?
After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail - thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties - is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong). — Steven D. Levitt

Wrong is wrong. Wrong is out there and lives among us. When do you get tired of voting for the lesser of the two evils? Wrong cannot be fought unless you understand what you are fighting against. Wrong can be fought against by using its own energy against itself. Let the system destroy itself. Accelerate the process by backing your resources out of the system. The system may not collapse in your lifetime, but you have the ability to help set up future generations, your children's children, to have a better life even further away from the system. — Annie Berdel

When the legendary Steve Schwarzman's firm went public in 2007, I was convinced that this was merely an opportunity to take advantage of a huge spike in the stock market for the partners in Blackstone to cash out and ultimately call it a day. I saw the public offering then as an unworthy investment, which could only serve to fill the partners' pockets while they proceeded to 'mail it in' for their new shareholders. But I have been proven completely wrong. Blackstone's history since its public offering is a continued history of success stories, and I believe the current energy restructuring opportunity will be no different. Elsewhere in this book, I talk a bit about the deal it made with Linn Energy, with very advantageous terms for Blackstone. As a long-term hold, I can find no better (public) PE firm to invest in. — Dan Dicker

But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed. — Stacey Jay

I walk at night under a moonless sky. Only the terrain guides my steps, yet my footfall is as sure as if a dozen suns lit the way. I go to meet you under a leafless tree that never seems to grow or alter its shape. I am uncertain if it still lives or has learned to disguise its death. The same thought crosses my mind when I feel your cold fingers take my hand. It is not the tree I reflect upon.

'Do you still love me?' The words tumble clumsily out of the dark.

Hesitation is its own answer, but I reply 'I'm here' anyway as if my words were whispered comfort and not a weathered blade. They are taken wrong.

'I love you too.'

Your arms wrap me up and clamp tightly around my waist. An old, familiar kiss hardens my lips. I wonder why it is I return to this place every year where only memories remain fond. Perhaps it is because I keep hoping this leafless tree will either change or die. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Children used to be unknowing and innocent when it came to certain issues in life. But that innocence has been lost in today's electronic environment. Kids are exposed to ideas and content their minds and emotions are not ready to handle. And under the onslaught of this corrupt world with its wrong concepts, wrong desires, wrong deeds, and wrong attitudes, children come under all sorts of negative influences that end up bringing serious problems into the home. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Sometimes people freak out when you shoot 40 takes of something. They start looking at you like, "What did I do wrong?", and its like "No. It's not wrong. It's just that we are going to try something different." — David Fincher

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late. — Toni Morrison

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

The mind when it has an old experience will add that data into its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong answers. — L. Ron Hubbard

The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else's. So there's another god for you that's passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Armory's religion. (ch. 14) — John Le Carre

But a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge. — Michael Chabon

This is why I am not overly enthusiastic about the various "spiritual exercises" in meditation or yoga which some consider essential for release from the ego. For when practiced in order to "get" some kind of spiritual illumination or awakening, they strengthen the fallacy that the ego can toss itself away by a tug at its own bootstraps. But there is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost. — Alan W. Watts

That's the way it is with dreams. They scratch at your door. You see them through the peep hole: a stray dream looking for a home. You think it might go away if you ignore it. Wrong. It's still there when you open the door, smiling. Wagging its tail. — Monique Duval

A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true. — Criss Jami

It isn't a matter of what's rational or justified, it is a matter of signals. It was the wrong signal to give me. The reason wolves don't kill each other off is that the smaller and weaker wolf always surrenders. It rolls over, bares its throat and puts its paws in the air to signal that it is beaten. When that happens the winner is physically unable to attack anymore. If it were not that way, there wouldn't be any wolves left. For the same reason men don't usually kill women, or not by beating them to death. They can't. However much he wants to hit her, his internal machinery vetoes it. But if the woman makes the mistake of giving him a different signal by hitting him first. — Frederik Pohl

All this good fortune, all this fierce joy ... it was wrong. Surely the universe could not allow this amount of happiness in one man, not without presenting a bill. Somewhere a big dark wave was cresting, and when it broke over his head it would wash everything away. Some days, he was sure he could hear its distant roar ... — Terry Pratchett

A poem is never a put-up job ... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. — Robert Frost

I suppose what I mean is, I never felt like I was part of a gang. No, that's the wrong word. Part of a MOVEMENT! That's it. It feels like there's a swirling, shining wind of change sweeping right at you, sweeping over everyone, and you're inside it. It feels like there is something that transcends you, that goes beyond whatever you are, that is great and whole and good. Great, because when it all comes together it's so much more than all its individual pieces. Whole because you're part of it and if you weren't, then both you and it would be diminished. Good because at its core is pure talent and skill, like you know you'll never have yourself. — Simon Cheshire

There are two kinds of patriotism
monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:
the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism. — Mark Twain

The hour on stage is rarely a drag. In fact, I can't really say that its ever a drag. The few times that its been challenging has been when you don't have a sympathetic audience or there is the occasional strange corporate gig or something that you take or that you're not sure and you're like, "Wait a second. That's just the wrong venue". — Joel Plaskett

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,
the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I've fallen in love
On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?
On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.
the head does its best but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I am halfway across — Wendy Cope

You know," she said, pulling back from his neck. "I've always been wrong about something."
"And that is?"
"I thought there was nothing in the world more seductive than a troubadour singing his observations about his lady love. But I was wrong."
She trailed her fingernail down his arm, raising chills in its wake. "The most incredible seduction is when a knight who is renowned for his strength speaks from his heart. Not as a knave out to woo a woman because he can, but as a man who wants only to give of himself." Her gaze seared him as she stared into his eyes and he saw her innermost sincerity. "I love you, Stryder. I always will."
-Stryder and Rowena — Kinley MacGregor

Every relationship has its problems, but what makes it perfect is if you still want to be together when things go wrong. — Isabelle Peterson

Perhaps too much is said in universities about how "exciting" it is to think. Thinking undoubtedly has its excitements and satisfactions, but these feelings do not disclose its general character, and there is something very much wrong with the idea they should. We do not think in order to have fun but because life is troubling and problematic. We think because we are compelled to. And while thinking occasionally brings exciting discoveries, the periods in between these discoveries are likely to place heavy demands not only on the thinker's energies but on his patience as well. When thinking, we should not need to tell ourselves that it is an exhilarating experience; it should be enough to realize that we are behaving with the seriousness, the rationality, and the self-discipline that the human situation requires of us. — Glenn Tinder

Life is a journey, a journey that we are responsible to define its path; poor who define it wrong; when he reflect on his wrong doing path, he will find that his journey was just a one stop station that he never get to even start; however, time is not on his/her side any more !!! and he/she will continue till he dies in agony and despair for who he has been given a chance to live, he decided to not give his life one chance !!! SAD!! — Hisham Fawzi

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation. — C. G. Jung

At that moment, when you feel like you were born into the wrong society or culture, you have a few choices. You can ignore the gap between the world around you and what you feel within. There are lots of ways to do this, from TV to drugs to desperately trying to succeed within the world's big social inventions. Another way is to rail at the world for its failings, creating a narrative in which you are right and "they" are wrong. Or you can be humbled by trying to change the world around you just enough to realize your own potential. — Ron Davison

Shame is a virus that creates paralysis in its hosts. When you're busy telling yourself what a bad person you are, you expend most of your energy obsessing over your self- not what you may have done wrong, not what you can do to fix it. For this reason, shame creates a moat around girls' potential. It limits their ability or willingness to face challenges. It makes them want to be alone, isolating them from friends, their most important buffer against stress. Shame is therefore a major threat to girls' resilience. — Rachel Simmons

When you constantly hear the wrong things, the power of the truth you knew before loses its grip. — Sunday Adelaja

And if I failed to mention this detail in its proper place, it is because you cannot mention everything in its proper place, you much choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that's what counts, to be done, to have done. Oh I know, even when you mention only a few of the things there are, you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it's a change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn't matter, it's good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another a little further on, from time to time, fluttering you might say, like a butterfly, as if you were ephemeral. And if you are wrong, and you are wrong, I mean when you record circumstances better left unspoken, and leave unspoken others, rightly, if you like, but how shall I say, for no good reason, yes, rightly, but for no good reason, as for example that new moon, it is often in good faith, excellent faith. — Samuel Beckett

Such terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. — Walker Percy

So when people tell you, oh, you can't have the Ten Commandments on public property, they're just wrong. It's historically false. It's not true. Now, you can decide to invent a new America in which you shouldn't say "one nation under God" as part of the pledge because, after all, you will offend three atheists. But that's not the America you inherited. That's a different country. And I think it's a weaker country and I think it's a country that has no roots in terms of where its rights come from. — Newt Gingrich

Jesus' words are slightly less shocking when you consider that exclusive claims to truth are more common than we know. Truth is, by its nature, exclusive. Two differing claims cannot both be right. Math teachers make exclusive claims all the time. They will tell you that the multiplication table is not up for negotiation. There are right answers and wrong ones. A doctor's prescription is an exclusive claim as well. It excludes every medication except the one that is written on the prescription paper. A person who gives you their phone number is telling you to exclude dialing all other numbers except the digits they have provided you. — Jon Morrison

No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, 'You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.' He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right. — Bertrand Russell

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right. This putting right (the biblical word for it is "justice") is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus's followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it's what we need. — N. T. Wright

Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive. — Tony Blair

Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday? — E.A. Bucchianeri

One always has to worry when capitalism has a role in health care. If you're just using health care to make money, you will treat the wrong diseases. Capitalism has its limits. There is a role for governments, and this is one where they should be involved. — Richard J. Roberts

Time is the great healer. No matter how difficult the circumstances that cross our path, it takes time for our emotions, minds and spirit to process what's happened. Rushing to make choices too quickly can send us down the wrong fork in the road. It's normal and natural to feel overwhelmed, out of sorts and confused when a major change knocks on our door. While you may be forced to make some choices quickly, delay as many choices as possible until time has worked its magic. When you feel on solid ground again, you will be ready to make better choices about the future. — Don Shapiro

The abortion isn't what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking
about; they're really thinking about sex. They're really thinking
about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects - that is to
say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make
children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as
wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women's normal sexual
responses, to end them, really, when we've just had a couple of
decades of admitting them. — Grace Paley

Anything from making a mistake on an experiment that would ruin some scientist on earth's experiment - career, potentially - to doing something wrong with the satellite that a country was depending on for its communications, to making some mistake that could actually cost you and the crew either a mission or your lives. So there is a lot of pressure that's put on every astronaut to just make sure that he or she understands exactly what to do, exactly when to do it, and is trained and prepared to carry it out. — Sally Ride

When we have rejected the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, we allow Christians to depend on things other than the Bible as their guide to matters of life and faith. In particular, people begin to depend upon mysticism, upon ways of supposedly knowing God apart from the Bible. They look inward for intrinsic wisdom rather than outward to the Bible for its extrinsic wisdom. They forsake biblical reason in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for spiritual discernment must be founded upon God's objective revelation of himself in Scripture. We can only judge between what is wrong and what is right when we know what God says to be true. We can know this only from Scripture. — Tim Challies

When MSC Napoli grounded off a Devon beach in January 2007, its burst boxes of motorbikes, shampoo, and diapers attracted looters and treasure hunters. It was also a rare opportunity to compare what was declared on container manifests with actual contents. In 20 percent of the containers, the contents and weights were wrong. — Rose George

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it it is worth paying. When — C.S. Lewis

My stepmother is not only powerful because the people fear her, she is powerful because she can make them love her when she needs them to. We think that if we choose to do only good, then we are only good. We can make people happy. We can offer tranquility or contentment or love, and that must be good. We do not see the falsehood becoming its own brand of cruelty."
The ship trembled and their speed increased. Luna blurred beneath them.
"Once," Winter continued, pushing the words out of her lungs. "Once I believed with all my heart that I was doing good. But I was wrong. — Marissa Meyer

Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn't enforce its own laws because the color of a man's skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can't give them justice. — Malcolm X

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. — John Banville

I tried so hard to fix what I'd ruined. I tried every single day to be what they wanted. I tried all the time to be better but I never really knew how.
I only know now that the scientist are wrong.
The world is flat.
I know because I was tossed right off the edge and I've been trying to hold on for 17 years. I've been trying to climb back up for 17 years but its nearly impossible to beat gravity when no one is willing to give you a hand.
When no one wants to risk touching you. — Tahereh Mafi

(It's a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven't fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.) — Matt Haig

Shame is the proper reaction when one has purposefully violated the accepted behavior of society. Inflicting it is etiquette's response when its rules are disobeyed. The law has all kinds of nasty ways of retaliating when it is disregarded, but etiquette has only a sense of social shame to deter people from treating others in ways they know are wrong. So naturally Miss Manners wants to maintain the sense of shame. Some forms of discomfort are fully justified, and the person who feels shame ought to be dealing with removing its causes rather than seeking to relieve the symptoms. — Judith Martin

We are born male. We must learn to be men. Remember, strength is a force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong. Remember the words of Tao te ching. "The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear." Strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave. — Kent Nerburn

To live with integrity, it is important to know what's right and what's wrong, to be educated morally. However, merely KNOWING is not enough. Virtuous character matters more than moral knowledge. The reason is simple: like the self-confessing apostle Paul in Romans 7, most of those who do wrong know what's right but find themselves irresistibly attracted to its opposite. Faith idles when character shrivels — Miroslav Volf

The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'? — Christina Engela

Believe me when I tell you this: the easiest choice is always the wrong one. Choose the path that matters in the long term, the choice that would never hurt others. It might seem difficult at this point, but the right choice is the one that takes the most courage. Its the one that seems impossible at first. — J.C. Reed

Authors often say that their novels are like their children, and you want your novel, just like your children, to reflect well on you. When it goes out into the world, you hope that it will make you proud. But like a parent, an author must learn that her novel has needs of its own, and they are not the same as the author's.
Yes, you want your son's behavior toward women to reflect a loving relationship with his mother. However, if a woman is compelled to think about that relationship whenever they're in bed together, something has gone very very wrong. — Howard Mittelmark

C. S. Lewis introduced the phrase "pain, the megaphone of God." "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains," he said; "it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."3 The word megaphone is apropos, because by its nature pain shouts. When I stub my toe or twist an ankle, pain loudly announces to my brain that something is wrong. Similarly, the existence of suffering on this earth is, I believe, a scream to all of us that something is wrong. It halts us in our tracks and forces us to consider other values. — Philip Yancey

The Law of Attraction states that the more you complain, the more things will come that you will complain about. Think about this logic and consider the opposite. In its very essence, the Law states the more you are grateful for the things around you, the more things will come that you can be grateful for. So the first step in practicing gratitude is to stop complaining. When you dread your debt, the more debt will come. If you feel negative things with all of your attention, then the more negative things will come. Going back, stop complaining and put all your attention to the things that you should be grateful about. It's wrong to say that you have no blessings. As a matter of fact, you are abundant with blessings. You are a creature that is full of goodness, destined to prosperity! — John Van Horst

When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties. — Thomas Frank

So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics - that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world - that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind. — Helen Keller

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady. — Fay Weldon

Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally. — George Monbiot

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous. — Umberto Eco

I've always been intrigued, for example, by the way that many people use the analogy of a train to describe their companies. Massive and powerful, the train moves inexorably down the track, over mountains and across vast plains, through the densest fog and darkest night. When things go wrong, we talk of getting "derailed" and of experiencing a "train wreck." And I've heard people refer to Pixar's production group as a finely tuned locomotive that they would love the chance to drive. What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position - that driving the train is the way to shape their companies' futures. The truth is, it's not. Driving the train doesn't set its course. The real job is laying the track. — Ed Catmull

Africa is like a child that immediately cries for its babysitter when something goes wrong. Africa should stand on its own two feet. — James Shikwati

Squinting at him, I had to wonder if all of the booze had made him stupid. "After all the trouble I have being with you, do you really think I'd want another dick around me?"
Cooper grinned. "Is it wrong that my dick responded when you called its name?"
"Very wrong, perv," I said, laughing. — Bijou Hunter

Acquire knowledge. It enables its possessor to distinguish right from wrong; it lights the way to Heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in solitude, our companion when friendless; it guides us to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is an ornament among our friends and an armor against enemies. — Elijah Muhammad

A-tone-ment-its a chance to fix the unfixable and to start all over again. It begins when you forgive yourself for all you've done wrong, and forgive others for all they've done to you. Your mistakes aren't mistakes anymore, they're just things that make you stronger. — Glenn Beck

People of very different opinions
friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility
are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique. People who merely roll their eyes at hate crimes feel compelled to write jeremiads on declining standards when a newspaper uses the wrong form of its. Challenge my most cherished beliefs about the place of humankind in God's creation, and while I may not agree with you, I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. But dangle a participle in my presence, and I'll consider you a subliterate cretin no longer worth listening to, a menace to decent society who should be removed from the gene pool before you do any more damage. — Jack Lynch

For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee's power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn't lie. It can't. Every sip is proof of the artistry
technical as well as human
that went into its creation. — Howard Schultz

the Navy spread its influence, they were always bumping into each other. Then Wolfe had married Sarah, his sister, and the knots had strengthened even more. Until they had started working on the nuclear boats with the Americans at the Holy Loch. Looking back, it was hard to gauge the exact moment when things had started to go wrong. Jermain had returned from a long training cruise to find Wolfe beside himself with anxiety and despair. It had all seemed so confused and pointless. Sarah had left him, and it appeared that things had been bad for some time. When it became obvious that she had left him for another man, an American officer from the Holy Loch, Wolfe's bitterness had changed to an — Douglas Reeman

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. — Therese Anne Fowler

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others. — Jenkin Lloyd Jones

The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference ... Nature knows no ethics. There is no right and wrong in nature; the controlling realities are power and fertility. — Lesslie Newbigin

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict
appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of
shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment
is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the
very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed
of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a
creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted
an irreparable, an irremediable wrong. — Oscar Wilde

64. Surprising and Distressing Things
While one is cleaning a decorative comb, something catches in the teeth and the comb breaks.
A carriage overturns. One would have imagined that such a solid, bulky object would remain forever on its wheels. It all seems like a dream
astonishing and senseless.
A child or grown-up blurts out something that is bound to make people uncomfortable.
All night long one has been waiting for a man who one thought was sure to arrive. At dawn, just when one has forgotten about him for a moment and dozed off, a crow caws loudly. One wakes up with a start and sees that it is daytime
most astonishing.
One of the bowmen in an archery contest stands trembling for a long time before shooting; when finally he does release his arrow, it goes in the wrong direction. — Sei Shonagon

The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isn't wrong, when you know exactly how much he's fought those feelings. People can't control matters of the heart, Warren.
They can only control their actions, which is exactly what Ridge did. He lost control once for ten seconds, but after that, every single time temptation reared its ugly head, he walked in the other direction. The only thing Ridge has done wrong is fail to delete his messages, because by doing so, he failed to protect Maggie. He failed to protect her from the harsh truth that people don't get to choose who they fall in love with. They only get to choose who they stay in love with." I look up at the ceiling and blink back tears. "He was choosing to stay in love with her, Warren. Why can't she see that? This will kill him so much more than it's killing her. — Colleen Hoover

Multilate. Ha Ha Ha,' said Nusswan, avuncular and willing to pretend it was a clever joke. 'Its all relative. At the best of times, democracy is a see saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have to break a few democratic eggs. To fight fascism and other evil forces threatening our country, there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures. Especially when the foreign hand is always interfering to destabilize us. Did you know the CIA is trying to sabotage the Family Planning Programme? — Rohinton Mistry

We want to hear, we long to hear, "I screwed up. I will do my best to ensure that it will not happen again." Most of us are not impressed when a leader offers the form of Kennedy's admission without its essence, as in Ronald Reagan's response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which may be summarized as "I didn't do anything wrong myself, but it happened on my watch, so, well, I guess I'll take responsibility."3 That doesn't cut it. — Carol Tavris

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed? — Claudia Rankine

For a second his dark eyes are on mine, and he's quiet. Then he touches my face and leans in close, brushing my lips with his. The river roars and I feel its spray on my ankles. He grins and presses his mouth to mine. I tense up at first, unsure of myself, so when he pulls away, I'm sure I did something wrong, or badly. But he takes my face in his hands, his fingers strong against my skin, and kisses me again, firmer this time, more certain. I wrap an arm around him, sliding my hand up his neck and into his short hair. — Veronica Roth

When you marry a woman out of pity, then its a pity that you'll send her away very soon. — Michael Bassey Johnson

We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay - and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime - such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext. — Vinod Rai

The only way to maximize group creativity - to make the whole more than the sum of its parts - is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong. — Jonah Lehrer

Acquire knowledge, it enables its professor to distinguish right from wrong; it lights the way to heaven. It is our friend in the desert, our company in solitude and companion when friendless. It guides us to happiness, it sustains us in misery, it is an ornament amongst friends and an armour against enemies. — Anonymous

We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came. — Shirley Hazzard

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. — Anais Nin

If a great mansion is located in a wrong environment, it loses its real value! So it is, when a great and true genius fails to get the right stage, its real value is least seen! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah