Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Desultory. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Desultory Quotes And Sayings by 93 Authors including Samuel Johnson,Suzanne Collins,William Shakespeare,Natalia Ginzburg,Al Alvarez for you to enjoy and share.
There is no temper more unpropitious to interest than desultory application and unlimited inquiry, by which the desires are held in a perpetual equipoise, and the mind fluctuates between different purposes without determination.
a Quarter Quell. They occur every twenty-five years, marking the anniversary of the districts' defeat with over-the-top celebrations and, for extra fun, some miserable twist for the tributes. I've
Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair.
My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.
Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation, seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.
To despond is to lie ungrateful beforehand. Be not looking for evil. Often thou drainest the gall of fear while evil is passing by thy dwelling.
regret with dignity and grace.
An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
Dead. It sounds final but it's a word missing an ing.
When in doubt, you face the possibility of deception.. when you are decieved, you face the possibility of diversion... when you are diverted, you face the possibility of disobedience...and these are the D's to every man's Defeat.
Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.
Dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering ...
In the lottery of life there are more prizes drawn than blanks, and to one misfortune there are fifty advantages. Despondency is the most unprofitable feeling a man can indulge in.
There is nothing so dreadful as a great victory
except a great defeat.
Sour taste of obligation postponed,
Glory may be everlasting, yet it is fleeting as well - soon forgotten in the aftermath of even the most famous of victories if they lead to greater disasters.
Eventually I fall asleep, savoring the melancholy pleasures of victory. I wake with a start to a muffled sound: the wolves could not wait for us to withdraw; they are already devouring the bodies.
defenestration," which derives from "fenestra," the Latin word for "window," refers to the act of throwing something or someone out of the window. Knowing this, we can impress our friends with statements like, "Sally finished her apple and defenestrated the core.")
The fashions of human affairs are brief and changeable, and fortune never remains long indulgent.
[Lat., Breves et mutabiles vices rerum sunt, et fortuna nunquam simpliciter indulget.]
Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
Fortuitous circumstances constitute the moulds that shape the majority of human lives, and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all ordaining fate.
Hours dreadful and things strange, but this sore night Hath trifled former knowings.
kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine. - One of
Action is the parent of results; dormancy, the brooding mother of discontent.
Every existence contains its primal trauma, an event dividing life into a before and an after, a trauma so great that even the most furtive memory of it is enough to make an individual freeze in irrational, incurable, animal terror.
We are prisoners of the world's demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season.
Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.
Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.
It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.
What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things, ...
Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which
Throughout much of our lives, our association with the temporary has risen. This transitory body, a sack of bones and flesh, is considered erroneously as our true body and we have accepted this temporary condition as conclusive.
At the climax of failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.
Miseries of a birth.
The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Reason and right give the quickest despatch.
An unfinished feeling.
The furtive closing of a door is a sound the wind can make a dozen times in an hour. A flow of damp air from the lake can make any house feel empty. Such currents pull one's dreams after them, and one's own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things.
DESTINY (Determined Effort So Tanacious It Negates Yuck)
I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.
I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights - literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.
It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet.
Something of defeat, something of tragedy, can be a sacrament because it stops us and causes us to look deeper.
Dimly
at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream
she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.
Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.
To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. The
Suffering degrades, embitters and enrages.
If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.
We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable - except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny.
How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate!
There was never a cataclysmic moment in which things might have been, however briefly, etched in relief against memory, against things to come - a moment which, by its sheer magnitude, defined her history and her future. Instead, Kathryn thinks, she has disintegrated slowly over a number of years.
I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.
The disaster ... is what escapes the very possibility of experience - it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness
the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.
A tardiness in nature,
Which often leaves the history unspoke,
That it intends to do.
Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.
MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
Indescribably delirious!
To buried merit rise the tardy bust.
In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.
It is defeat that lives on and takes the years to smother.
For ever so our thoughtful hearts repeatOn fields of triumph dirges of defeat;And still we turn on gala-days to treadAmong the rustling memories of the dead.
To sigh, yet not recede; to grieve, yet not repent.
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
With the ambitious, the failure of one expedient is the suggestion of another; but with the irresolute, defeat usually occasions abandonment of purpose.
And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
In your present state, Chosen, Desecration lies ahead of you. It does not crowd at your back.
A defeat which opens the gates of victory for you is a wonderful defeat! A victory which opens the gates of defeat for you is a horrible victory!
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage,
Till pitying Nature signs the last release,
And bids afflicted worth retire to peace.
The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous.
After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
malady of reverie.
Sometimes there are accidents in our lives the skillful extrication from which demands a little folly.
Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.
The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.
Epochs later, the curtains grew dusty and brittle, the deep, vicious colour of a bruise. The floorboards creaked and we were civilized. We were no longer the wild, ravening voices of the world, howling our shame and indignation at the sky.
Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.
D'Artagnan was amazed to note by what fragile and unknown threads the destinies of nations and the lives of men are suspended. He
The storm before the calm.
The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
Defeat prefers reactionist.
Disappointment and feebleness imprint upon us a cowardly and valetudinarian virtue.
The discordant principals' duet is like the nocturnal emission of a cancerous horse tethered in its dolorous slumber to a barbed aluminum fence during an electrical storm.
Our passion and principals are constantly in a frenzy, but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.
Meanwhile spring arrived. My old dejection passed away and gave place to the unrest which spring brings with it, full of dreams and vague hopes and desires.
The wise unify their consciousness and abandon attachment to the fruits of action,
An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.
Umbed by disappointment and betrayal, like a child who had been awakened suddenly from a summer dream about christmas morning.
The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.
He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should've reassured him but didn't. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.
The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.