Quotes & Sayings About Wishes Gone Wrong

[Re: Rom 10:2] It is commonly said: "The intention is good, and the purpose is true, but the means are misused." The goal which they seek is correct; but the way is wrong by which they endeavor to reach the goal. They want to go east and instead they are going west. The arrogant zeal of good intentions does the same today. The Apostle expresses himself very mildly when he says "not according to knowledge." He wishes this to be understood in the sense that they set about with blind zeal, unwise urgency, and foolish purpose. That is the greatest danger; and it should serve us as an example that we may speak of the faults of the neighbor with mildness. — Martin Luther

Grant Allen once said that an Englishman's idea of God was another Englishman twelve feet high, and I suppose that is more or less everybody's idea of God- with the necessary geographical adjustment. Zenith Brown has an idea about God that pleases me. 'God,' says Mrs. Brown, 'is obviously a friendly enough Old Gentleman most of the time, Who wishes us well and tries to see to it that we are reasonably happy. It is equally obvious the He has an idiot brother who takes over the reins whenever God Himself goes fishing. It is when the idiot brother is in charge of things that the world goes wrong and we have wars, famines, and pestilences on earth. — Vincent Starrett

[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum ... If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue. — Steve Ballmer

As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I can not enter the ring on the money basis
first, because, in the main, it iswrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money. I say, in the main, the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects, in a political contest, the use of some, is both right, and indispensable. — Abraham Lincoln

They told us not to wish in the first place, not to aspire, not to try; to be quiet, to play nice, to shoot low and aspire not at all. They are always wrong. Follow your dreams. Make your wishes. Create the future. And above all, believe in yourself. — J. Michael Straczynski

...The same folks who believe this fantasy also believe that the sole motivation for modern man's practice of science is to disprove their beliefs. How despicably arrogant of them to circumvent their burden of proof! It is plainly there for all to see that science wishes to discover and prove the answers to the very same questions that religion claims to already have answers for, whether or not they disprove former assumptions by our ancestors. The religionists should be happy that that their claims might have the chance to be proven wrong, but instead they would rather fear them disproven. I don't know about you, but I smell a guilty conscience. If they were one-hundred percent certain that their claims were of truth, they wouldn't need "faith" in them, nor would they have to dread possible invalidation. — John M. Penkal

It is equally wrong to speed a guest who does not want to go, and to keep one back who is eager. You ought to make welcome the present guest, and send forth the one who wishes to go. — Homer

I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but that I had also actually noticed quite a bit of what was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism. But I had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to my friends, partly out of loyalty to "the cause", and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one's intellectual conscience over a minor point one doesn't wish to give in too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that maybe required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one's moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It's like being eager to throw good money after bad. — Karl R. Popper

If the infidels live among the Muslims, in accordance with the conditions set out by the Prophet - there is nothing wrong with it provided they pay Jizya to the Islamic treasury. Other conditions are . . . that they do not renovate a church or a monastery, do not rebuild ones that were destroyed, that they feed for three days any Muslim who passes by their homes . . . that they rise when a Muslim wishes to sit, that they do not imitate Muslims in dress and speech, nor ride horses, nor own swords, nor arm themselves with any kind of weapon; that they do not sell wine, do not show the cross, do not ring church bells, do not raise their voices during prayer, that they shave their hair in front so as to make them easily identifiable, do not incite anyone against the Muslims, and do not strike a Muslim. . . . If they violate these conditions, they have no protection .40 — Raymond Ibrahim

Some wishes come true. some wishes dont. sometimes you find out you were wishing for the completely wrong thing. — Kate Klise

Whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be. — David Levithan

No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression. My conscience is my own - my creators - not man's. I shall never sink the rights of mankind to the malice, wrong, or avarice of another's wishes, though those wishes come to me in the relation of client and attorney. — Abraham Lincoln

She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her. — Michael Cunningham

you know that feeling
when you look at him and think.. WOW I love him but we're just friends, or maybe when he looks at her it hurts sometimes. when your in love everything about him and he loves everything about her. you wasted all your 11 wishes on him. you kept it in for so long. no one knows how confused you. do you tell him you like him or do you keep it in as usually. or it's complicated is your answer when someone ask what is wrong. when you look at them together your eyes full up with tears because you love him so much and sometimes you just WISH HE KNEW. — Vivienne King

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies
but not before they have been hanged. — Heinrich Heine

A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one,
if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not. — Florence Nightingale

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along ... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. — Susan Sontag

The Handsome Prince Handbook is mute on the subject of chronic workaholism - Prince Charming, apparently, knew how to delegate - and I didn't know where else to turn for help. What do you do when life begins to go wrong and you've used up all three wishes? — Nancy Atherton

I am so far more secure and more grounded and more know who I am than when I was in my 20s. — Iman

Importance of dreams is not in using - importance is in having. You think dreams must mean something real, that fantasy bad for the soul. All wrong, all wrong. Fantasy just as important as reality. Reality is feeding body - finding food for keep alive. Fantasy feeds spirit. Soul need food same as body, and dreams, philosophies, stories, creations, all food for spirit, see? — Garry Douglas Kilworth

What kind of god is it, sir, wishes wrong to go forgotten and unpunished? — Kazuo Ishiguro

For a short period of time, I was like, I have these jokes and if people get them, they get them. And then eventually, I was like, Oh no. It's absolutely my job to convey to people why what I think is funny, is funny. The whole point of standup is to get the audience to understand your weird point of view. — Eugene Mirman

The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own. — Charles De Lint

Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days, but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law. There are a whole quiverful of offenses available to a policeman who wishes to pass the time of day with a citizen, ranging from Loitering with Intent through Obstruction to Lingering While Being the Wrong Color/Shape/Species/Sex. It occurred briefly to him that anyone not making a dash for it when they saw Detritus knuckling along at high speed behind them was probably guilty of contravening the Being Bloody Stupid Act of 1581. But it was too late to take that into account. Someone was running, and they were chasing. They were chasing because he was running, and he was running because they were chasing. — Terry Pratchett

I'm not so sure liberal democracy as we know it has reached its terminus. It's clear though, that many have genuinely lost confidence in the Australian political class. One reason is that we like to place enormous burdens of expectations on modern political leaders. To be sure such expectations aren't always honest. Just as we want better public services but object to paying the higher taxes that would make them possible, we often want leadership but only if there aren't hard choices with real consequences. — Tim Soutphommasane

The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. — Sigmund Freud

It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them. — Jeanette Winterson

Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

I did everything wrong," he said. "I misunderstood everything. Moon Child gave me so much, and all I did with it was harm, harm to myself and harm to Fantastica."
Dame Eyola gave him a long look.
No," she said. "I don't believe so. You went the way of wishes, and that is never straight. You went the long way around, but that was your way. And do you know why? Because you are one of those who can't go back until they have found the fountain from which springs the Water of Life. And that's the most secret place in Fantastica. There's no simple way of getting there."
After a short silence she added: "But every way that leads there is the right one. — Michael Ende

What was she to say? The prodigal has returned? The mutineer wishes to be reinstated? The subordinate, having gone to a great deal of trouble to prove her commander wrong, has come back and promises to be a good little subordinate hereafter, or at least until next time? — Robin McKinley

You must love him enough to trust his wishes, even if you disagree with them. You must respect him - no matter how wrong you think he may be, no matter how poor you think his decisions, you must respect his desire to make them. Even if one of them includes loving you. — Brandon Sanderson

Commonality can most easily be seen in the seven common traits that all explorers possessed: curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline, and perseverance. Explorers — Martin Dugard

Where the bedroom is wrong the whole house is wrong. — Margaret Kennedy

Desperation sends out the wrong messages, sends out the wrong vibrational output. — Stephen Richards

A poor child knew what it meant to be poor. We didn't ask for much, and sometimes we didn't even ask. — Da Chen

So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again. — Catherynne M Valente

I was no hero. The dearest wishes of my heart were for safety and tranquility. The world was a perilous place, wrong for the likes of me. — Gail Carson Levine

The price for using dark magic is death, so that goes a long way toward deterring users. — Devon Monk

First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place ... — Hippocrates

In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with. — Susan Sarandon

Throughout history every great empire has collapsed...there have been no exceptions. — Joe Barfield

What is it about our specific belief in God and His wishes that makes us so angry at the specific beliefs of another? What is it about the teachings of our respective deities that makes us more right than the next person? Or more wrong? — Chuck Austen

And at that point the realization suddenly burned me like a searing flame: For each person there was an "office," but for nobody was there one that he was permitted to choose for himself, to define, and to fill according to his own wishes. It was wrong to desire new gods, it was totally wrong to try and give the world anything! There was no duty for enlightened people, none, none, except this: to seek themselves, to become certain of themselves, to grope forward along their own path, wherever it might lead. - I — Hermann Hesse