Willy Nilly Quotes & Sayings
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Top Willy Nilly Quotes
The ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with - in the face of preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called 'Morals.' Most of us know the code is wrong, almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck. — Robert A. Heinlein
The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. — Stephen Crane
Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is - her weaknesses and meannesses and immodesties and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet and her eyes that have never seen the stars. But - and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever dazzled man; and, as the pole willy nilly draws the needle, just so, willy nilly, does she draw man. — Jack London
But, as an actress, you don't want to run into these scenes, willy-nilly. The couple that I did do were important for the character and essential to the plot, to show what was actually going on between each character. It is great to be able to have that, and to be able to say certain things and have certain passions. — Tamsin Egerton
I lived willy-nilly. Without any sense of being part of the order of things. I lived by fragments, pieces, scraps, in the moment, at random, from incident to incident, as if buffeted by ebb and flow. Oftentimes I had the impression that someone had torn the majority of pages out of the book of my life, because they were empty, or because they belonged not to me but to someone else's life. — Wieslaw Mysliwski
Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry. — Gerald Stern
Because I am eighteen I know a great many things; for example, I know that sticks and stones are indeed very effective mechanisms with which to break bones; however, a few poorly aim (or sadly, well-aimed) words can have some's metaphorical eye out and therefore one out not wave one's words about willy-nilly. — Alyssa Brugman
As it turns out, if you freeze improperly packed human remains (i.e. balling them up willy-nilly and jamming them under a couple frozen turkeys and a max pack of Hot Pockets,) just like with animal remains... — E.V. Iverson
My skin prickled and I looked back at the ocean. None of us ask for the things we inherit; they are thrust upon us, willy-nilly. Like The Marine, I suddenly understood. Mom and I weren't trespassing. This house was ours. This view was ours. And that seemed as absurd and unreal as the stories Sailor Hat had spun for me on the ferry. — Aimee Friedman
Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency" - the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why? — Steven Pinker
Alas! What are all these lives driven willy-nilly? Where are they going? Why are they like this? He who knows the answer to that, sees the darkness as a whole. He is alone. His name is God. — Victor Hugo
As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won't stand for it. They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a-brewing and swallow it you must. — Jack London
Jubal paused, surprised at himself. He had intended to make the usual agnostic approach . . . and found himself compulsively following his legal training, being an honest advocate in spite of himself, attempting to support a religious belief he did not hold but which was believed by most human beings. He found that, willy-nilly, he was attorney for the orthodoxies of his own race against - he wasn't sure what. An unhuman viewpoint. — Robert A. Heinlein
The legendary Tuatha De Danaan had come! And what did the grand Keltar laird do?
Fainted like a willy-nilly peahen. — Karen Marie Moning
Literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as "literally" did not happen at all. As in, "He literally jumped out of his skin." No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I'd suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting "literally" willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight - the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured — Tom Rachman
The unitive capacities of the spouses don't exist for nothing; they exist for motherhood and fatherhood. That is the matrix in which they develop, for children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness which is initiated by matrimony itself. — J. Budziszewski
You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating. — Bill Keller
Seconds ebb and wane. She's not afraid of her voice anymore, but she's not entirely sure she trusts it. She's seen the damage caused with a single word. Right now, each one is a weapon, a conduit of war, and she won't just throw them out there all willy-nilly. — Laura Kreitzer
In my view, the money is poorly spent and given willy-nilly to people unlikely to get on the winning rostrum. — Geoff Capes
Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority ... other than through the tragic logic of history ... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple. — Robert A. Heinlein
It was out of this river that the assassin's bullet came, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why. We accept, with the authorities, the guilt of the lonely psychopath because it tells a truth if not a fact. It dramatizes the refusal of Unreason to be silenced any longer by man's, Europe's,idea that he, Reason, rules the world. Humanism, however pretty, isn't for us because nature isn't human, and man willy nilly is of nature. Nature is unreason and God. It is the madness that runs through our lives and connects us to the stars in a way no rocket ship can ever duplicate. It connects us to all living things and to ourselves. To name this madness Holy doesn't promise peace or prosperity; it promises only a reason for being, a reinvestment of life into the dead matter of which the universe is now composed. — Alfred Chester
Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased. — Algernon Blackwood
You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die ... Willy-nilly. — Rumer Godden
He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger's name was Hope. Williams produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain. — Stephen King
Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something. — Eric Maisel
The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way. — Sonia Sotomayor
Prince Charles is very relaxed at the table, throwing his salad around willy-nilly. I didn't find him stiff at all. — Madonna Ciccone
There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly. — Henry Miller
Do you know what Bill Gates has to pull out of an old coat, to feel like I did with a $20 bill? First of all, the idea that Bill Gates has an old coat is preposterous. If he has an old coat, it's the coat Abe Lincoln was shot in and he wears it as a bathrobe - no underwear by the way. He lets his billionaire balls swing willy-nilly beneath the death cloak of the great emancipator. That's your 1%. — Gary Gulman
There were real reasons that you were attracted to somebody originally. The brain doesn't pick willy-nilly. Unless you part ways hating each other for some reason, that mechanism could get triggered again. You can literally fall in love again. — Helen Fisher
Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. — Wendell Berry
Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand. — Sun Tzu
It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. — Boris Pasternak
My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology. — Lynn Margulis
They [left-wingers] willy-nilly throw around the accusation of Nazism and comparisons to Hitler whenever confronted by any opposition, yet they are today's Nazis in their determination to shut down by threats or violence free speech and assembly. — Steve McCann
They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers. — Michael Lewis
My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there's not much deserving about the matter. — Orson Scott Card
(Kate) had found multiple titles by individual authors scattered willy-nilly through the collection. It made her want to pull her hair out. Obviously!- an individual author's body of work all belonged on one shelf, the works arranged, in turn, by whatever system was most suitable: by volume number, alphabetically by title, or by the year of publication, or, in case of playwrights, works grouped by genre- tragedies with tragedies, comedies with comedies, histories with histories, and so on. — Gaelen Foley
In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly. — Nathan Myhrvold
I respect your right to differ, but that doesn't change reality. I cannot have people thrown through windows willy-nilly in my county. — Ilona Andrews
immersed in a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts, coming willy-nilly one after another in rapid succession. — Jon Kabat-Zinn
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature. — Witold Gombrowicz
Isn't Bunson's training evil geniuses?"
"Yes, mostly."
"Well, is that wise? Having a mess of seedling evil geniuses falling in love with you willy-nilly? What if they feel spurned?"
"Ah, but in the interim, think of the lovely gifts they can make you. Monique bragged that one of her boys made her silver and wood hair sticks as anti-supernatural weapons. With amethyst inlay. And another made her an exploding wicker chicken."
"Goodness, what's that for?"
Dimity pursed her lips. "Who doesn't want an exploding wicker chicken? — Gail Carriger
Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it. — Germaine Greer
Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. — Omar Khayyam
People willy-nilly borrow for consumption. Civil servants willy-nilly borrow for consumption and then wonder why they don't have enough money at the end of the month. — Najib Razak
It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them. — Leo Tolstoy
As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used. — Robin Marantz Henig
The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself. — Jan Morris
We shouldn't be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community. — Tony Abbott
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be. — Marcel Proust
It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth. — Antonin Sertillanges
We live in a crowded and stifling world, my dear sir; just to be able to walk, we have to push and shove others willy nilly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan
A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself. — Kate Braestrup
People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable. — Carson McCullers