Woefully Quotes & Sayings

Whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of a human. Take your pick; they're all woefully inadequate, but they're also all we have. — Marisa De Los Santos

Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality. — T.A. Barron

I have all this time between projects, and I'm not so sure that's a healthy thing. It's scary, because at 36 I'm woefully unqualified for anything else. — Jason Patric

Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart. — Lloyd Alexander

When people whom trouble is not a problem find themselves in a predicament, they are woefully unprepared ... I, however, considered myself a professional. — Nancy Wolfe

Eventually the real world intruded again, and Sophie had to return to campus - woefully behind on homework, but incandescently in love. — Molly Ringle

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine. — Gerald F. Lieberman

believe You're my healer. I believe You are all I need. I believe You're my portion. I believe You're more than enough for me. Jesus You're all I need. So I stood there with tears, hands raised, trusting Jesus to be enough. As I reduce, He is enough. As I simplify, He is enough. He is my portion where food and clothes and comfort fall woefully short. He can heal me from greed and excess, materialism and pride, selfishness and envy. While my earthly treasures and creature comforts will fail me, Jesus is more than enough. In my privileged world where "need" and "want" have become indistinguishable, my only true requirement is the sweet presence of Jesus. So I wrote my offering on an index card and left it: "All of me. — Jen Hatmaker

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?
We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar? — Louis L'Amour

Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian
and that woefully sketchy
but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were "born that way." It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society. — Maya Angelou

Our senses are woefully limited. Our brains are but tiny candles flickering in an infinity of darkness. Our only wisdom is to admit that we cannot understand, and since we cannot understand we must do the best we can with faith. which is our only talent. The greatest act of faith we are capable of is that of loving another more than we love ourselves, and occasionally we can be quite good at it. — Barry Hughart

I, on the other hand, am best friends with Wikipedia.'
'You know that site is woefully inaccurate a lot of the time, right? Because anyone can change the information.'
'Yep. I'm the girl changing the information to make it woefully inaccurate.'
'So half the high schoolers around the country have you to thank for their failing grades on research papers.'
'Yes, sir. I'm practically a celebrity. Or I would be if it wasn't anonymous. — Kody Keplinger

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop. — Rick Yancey

Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer.64 Yet our nation's public defender system is woefully inadequate. — Michelle Alexander

The women paused to regard the taxidermied creatures with awe.
Predictably, Pandora went forward with her hand outstretched.
"Pandora," Lady Berwick snapped, "if you molest the exhibits, we will not be returning to the museum."
Turning, Pandora gave her a pleading glance. "A giraffe is right there - it once roamed the African savannah - don't you want to know how it feels?"
"Indeed not."
"There's no sign that says we can't."
"The railing implies it."
"But the giraffe is so close," Pandora said woefully. "If you would look the other way for five seconds, I could reach out and touch it so easily . . . and then I wouldn't have to wonder anymore — Lisa Kleypas

Epictetus would reject this manner of dealing with insults as being woefully counterproductive. He would point out, to begin with, that the political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults: They will, as a result, feel the sting not only of direct insults but of implied insults as well. — William B. Irvine

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea. — Lauren Groff

When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three. — Jonah Goldberg

That our selves and all men are apt and prone to differ it is no new Thing in all former Ages in all parts of this World in these parts and in our deare native Countrey and mournfull state of England.
That either part of partie is most right in his owne eye his Cause Right his Cariage Right, his Argumts Right his Answeres Right is as woefully and constantly true as the former. And experience tells us that when the God of peace hath taken peace from the Earth one sparke of Action word or Cariage is too too powrefull to kindle such a fire as burns up Families Townes Cities Armies, Navies Nations and Kingdomes.
[Letter of Roger Williams to Town of Providence, March 28, 1648] — Roger Williams

The optimist pleasantly ponders how high his kite will fly; the pessimist woefully wonders how soon his kite will fall. — William Arthur Ward

Jesus took away all of our ugliness. Unlike a typical bride, we are all shabby, grotesque, and woefully unprepared moments before we walk down the aisle. But our Groom beautifies us when we look to Him in faith, and in that instant we become His cherished bride. — Francis Chan

I felt sad.
I felt cold.
I felt hurt.
I felt forsaken and lonely.
I felt doubtful and hesitant.
I felt scared and deeply worried.
I felt different, unknown, and unwelcome.
I felt empty and woefully neglected.
I felt weak and intimidated.
I felt withdrawn and shy.
I felt utterly hopeless.
Then you held my hand,
and I felt better. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction. — Damon Galgut

Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln - honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs - tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called "a shining city upon a hill" has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America's birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth. What follows is the story of Henry Sturges. What follows is the story of an American life. — Seth Grahame-Smith

National security is a place where the private sector could be helpful because the government is woefully behind the technology curve. But secondly, the bureaucratic processes that have been in place since 9/11 are woefully inadequate as well. — Carly Fiorina

From here on in, Harry, I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron. — J.K. Rowling

It is a moral travesty to give a woefully thirsty man a drink of water in a measuring cup. — Dennis Adonis

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age. — Stewart O'Nan

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum. — W. Somerset Maugham

The nature of Christ's salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a Saviour from Hell rather than a Saviour from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness. — Arthur W. Pink

Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? I am sure that an unhappy or suspicious stomach, constricted and uneasy with worry, cannot digest properly. — Julia Child

I'm woefully one-track-minded. — Daniel Day-Lewis

An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the very least completed course work in basic calculus, algebra and differential equations (the last being one about which most economists are woefully ignorant). This simultaneously explains why neoclassical economists obsess too much about proofs and why non-neoclassical economists, like those in the Circuit School, experience such difficulties in translating excellent verbal ideas about credit creation into coherent dynamic models of a monetary production economy. — Steve Keen

It is immature and lazy to imagine we know everything there is to know about someone before we know that someone. We don't know their stories, their histories, their real live human feelings. We don't know their favorite movies and best memories and what makes them afraid. It is unfair to take one fact, one thing they've said or we heard they said, or one thing they wrote, or someone else's experience, or a group they identify with and make a character sketch. If people did that to us, the picture would be so woefully incomplete, we wouldn't even recognize our own description. — Jen Hatmaker

I find the constant upkeep of the body woefully fatiguing, don't you? — Patrick DeWitt

Artemis said, "I don't like lollipops." It was a woefully inadequate response, and Artemis was instantly appalled with himself. Pathetic really. I don't like lollipops. No self respecting criminal mastermind would be caught dead using the word lollipops. He really would have to put together a database of witty responses for occasions such a this. — Eoin Colfer

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself. — Virginia Woolf

A national investment bank can invest to provide us with the foundations of shared and ecologically sustainable growth: renewing the U.K.'s energy, digital and transport infrastructure which lags woefully behind other major economies. — Jeremy Corbyn

A woefully corrupt and incompetent government is only a problem to the taxpayer. — Lee Broad

I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of "home-grown" Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection between repression and orgasmically violent action appeared woefully evident. — Christopher Hitchens

When absorbing the sadness of the loss, we must concentrate on bad guys to demonize, or black holes of sympathy in which we get to play the cosmic victim of terrible circumstances. Demonizing and victimizing are the sources of those stories in which we can get so woefully stuck — John P. Schuster

You ... you are so ... ' She couldn't even think of a suitable word.
'I know. Woefully primitive.' Laughter threaded through his voice. 'But I must be tolerated, because I'm a man and I really can't help it. — Lisa Kleypas

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness. — Billy Collins

I am waiting to write the poem that is something like a dance movie, the ones populated by fair haired ballerinas with just a little bit of singe to their tulle, not quite as dark as the Natalie Portman one, but girls woefully misunderstood by their parents or harboring dead mothers and sad pasts. — Kristy Bowen

Many Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity. — Sam Storms

I feel like I'm a disappointment to mankind," he remarked woefully as he placed the shirt through my arms and began to pull it down over my breasts. "Someone this gorgeous should be on display in a museum. — Karina Halle

And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the convergence of the wrong, of the right, and of the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep ... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of a doubt, which is which. — Neal Shusterman

Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it's able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept. — Rush Limbaugh

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with. — Brian Greene

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology. — R.C. Sproul

If a book did nothing else for you, other than to save you from the company of other people; if all it did was to deliver you from their gossip, and their dull affairs, and their appalling manners, and their rotten Arabic, and their stupid ideas, and their woefully misguided opinions, and above all, from the need to be polite to them; if a book did nothing more than that, it would still be the best friend you ever had. — Andrew Killeen

The U.S. ranks 25th in math and 21st in science. We are woefully behind. The only way to change this situation is through public-private partnerships. — Klaus Kleinfeld

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another. — Sydney J. Harris

Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages. — Matthew Quick

You know how it is Al- we got no choice when it comes to parents and some of them are woefully underqualified. — Rick Yancey

Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woefully small targets. — Patrick Rothfuss

that is Nature's way: she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and poetic aspirations to sing woefully out of tune, and not give him the slightest hint of it; and takes care that some narrow-browed fellow, trolling a ballad in the corner of a pot-house, shall be as true to his intervals as a bird. — George Eliot

I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people. — George Saunders

It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins. — Robertson Davies

Girl power reduces the theoretical complexity of feminism to a cheery slogan ("GIRLS KICK ASS!"); it represents the ultimate commodification of empowerment; it reinforces the simplistic conception of feminism as being, at heart, "all about choices." But most of all, it it grabbed the rhetoric from one of the most potentially powerful, yet woefully misunderstood, feminist uprisings of my generation, discarded every ounce of political heft, and reduced it to cheap iron-on letters on a baby T. — Rachel Fudge

According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in "crude psychiatric analysis," guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and "incestuous opinion citing," these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making "therapeutic lifers" out of their patients and ripping families apart. This — Elizabeth F. Loftus

Local brands evoke national pride, are seen as less profit-oriented, and are often formed on deep local insights. But quality worries persist, innovation is questioned, the information can be woefully inadequate, they are sometimes seen to be opaque and their advertising is clearly recognised as not being of a global standard. For local brands, quality, innovation and transparency are critical hills to climb. — Miles Young

I cannot prove that gods do not exist. Nor can I prove that the world and everything in it was not created by an entity or entities in the distant past. But I can tell you that in the millennia we elves have studied nature, we have never witnessed an instance where the rules that govern the world have been broken. That is, we have never seen a miracle. Many events have defied our ability to explain, but we are convinced that we failed because we are still woefully ignorant about the universe and not because a deity altered the workings of nature. — Christopher Paolini

While the word 'bisexual' was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate. — Charles M. Blow

The number of African Americans in my profession is woefully small; about two percent of architects in the country are black. I'd like to see more diversity. That's why whenever I'm asked to speak at middle and high schools I always say yes. — Philip Freelon

I share the skepticism that my friends have about NAFTA. It was woefully weak in protecting workers and on the enforcement side. The question is can we meaningfully build a trade regime that has as its North Star protecting American workers and American jobs through meaningful enforcement? I think we can. — Thomas Perez

High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study. — Kyle Chandler

Prisons are woefully ill-equipped for their current role as the nations primary mental health facilities. — Jamie Fellner

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop. — Caroline Knapp

Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public. — Steven D. Levitt

The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn't know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.
A new age would dawn, we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best. — Nescio

[People] are woefully underestimating this country and what it can achieve. — Boris Johnson

Look behind you now.
Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?
... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.
... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.
... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.
... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep ... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which. — Neal Shusterman

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. — George Eliot

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood. — Eugene Jarecki

American Christians have been woefully silent on important issues. I am an American citizens now, and I love this country, but I see symptoms in the United States that I saw in Austria in 1938 when the Nazi Germans were terrorizing Europe. — Maria Von Trapp

We are raising a generation that has a woefully small stock of ideas and interests and emotions. It must be amused at all costs but it has little skill in amusing itself. It pays some of its members to do what the majority can no longer do for themselves. It is this inner poverty that makes for the worst kind of boredom. — Robert McCracken

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar. -Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koonts pgs. 354-355 chapter 53 — Dean Koontz

My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits. — Nescio