Calamity Quotes

“Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“Never curse a fall. The ground is where humility lives.”
― Yasmin Mogahed

“Ignorance and stupidity are the most dangerous viruses that jeopardize our living together. Calamity cannot be prevented nor cured, simply as a result of unawareness. (“High noon")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

“This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits}”
― John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams

“A calamity that makes you turn to Allah(God) is better for you than a blessing which makes you forget the remembrance of Allah (God).”
― Ibn Taymiyyah

“Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity.

Maybe she just doesn't like children.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“It was the music that finally roused Leo back to consciousness. “Hey. I like that old song,” he croaked, completely oblivious to the calamitous chain reaction of the previous 10 seconds. That is until he realized there was a dead body separating him and Kay.”
― Delora Dennis, Same Old Truths

“They share another long look. This one is reserved for ill-fated observers in the moments before impending, inescapable calamity, whether it be natural disaster or violent failure of humanity; a look of resigned melancholy and awe, unblinking in the face of a revealed, horrific, sacred truth. And they realize again, in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“At these words, the fathers of the fifty boys cried out aloud; the mothers repeated their exclamations an octave higher; whilst the rest, without knowing the cause, soon drowned the voices of both, with still louder lamentations of their own.”
― William Beckford, Vathek

“Altogether the pandemic killed between 50 million and 100 million people in less than a year. The First World War killed 40 million from 1914 to 1918.10”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“When one comes out to speak, it's NOT because they want to be pitied and told everything will be fine. We know everything will be fine but our tears and our words, and hidden messages on posts, our statuses is to let you know that we are still in search of happiness. To tell you we are trying to be strong, to remind you that there will always be time when even in the morning weeping still endures. Where our nights of tears are no different from the sun that was supposed to bring laughter. Everyone of us have a way of attaining relief. Our outcry is a way of hope.”
― Victor Vote

“I detest guilt as a motivating factor for anything, and as for the promises made between lovers, well, they are a blueprint for calamity, a writ of divorce rendered point by point.”
― Evan Fallenberg, The Parting Gift

“For thousands of years the answer to this
question remained unchanged. The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030.4 In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.5”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“If youth once falls under the influence of a shadowy terror, it imagines there will never be full sunlight again; its first calamity it fancies will last a lifetime.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Who the Devil is bent on destroying he first puffs up with pride, then blinds to reason, and finally deafens to advice – smooth ride to calamity.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“. . . calamity comes for every one of us, and assumes the shape that will be sure to hurt us most.”
― Dexter Palmer, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

“My father used to say it was cyclical, that prosperity would breed corruption, which would in turn breed calamity.”
― Kate Stradling, The Legendary Inge

“The critical nature of 'choices' -- [the] timing will prove to be an asset or liability; it will reward wisdom or expose stupidity. Either way, we learn from the path of suffering or satisfaction… by choice and by design.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“—Todo lo que conocemos de los horrores y temores tiene más que ver con la
guerra. El gulag estalinista y Auschwitz son recientes adquisiciones del mal. La
historia siempre ha sido un relato de guerras y de caudillos, y la guerra constituía,
digamos, la medida del horror. Por eso, la gente confunde los conceptos de guerra y
catástrofe. En Chernóbil se diría que están presentes todos los rasgos de la guerra:
muchos soldados, evacuación, hogares abandonados… Se ha destruido el curso de la
vida. Las informaciones sobre Chernóbil están plagadas de términos bélicos: átomo,
explosión, héroes… Y esta circunstancia dificulta la comprensión de que nos
hallamos ante una nueva historia. Ha empezado la historia de las catástrofes… Pero
el hombre no quiere pensar en esto, porque nunca se ha parado a pensar en esto; se
esconde tras aquello que le resulta conocido. Tras el pasado.
Hasta los monumentos a los héroes de Chernóbil parecen militares.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“...[W]e cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly... It may be that in the larger design of the universe this [calamity] is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal[th] of mankind.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“The way the elderly extol their good old days leaves the youth almost concluding that there were no rascals. The reality is the absurdity that they are the remnant of men who with impunity plunged humanity into the impurity of putridity and calamity.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“All the serious problems in the world today could have been solved when they were simple problems.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“let me read over again that fearful letter of yours, that I may get it by heart, and with it feed my distress, and make calamity familiar to me.”
― Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

“She has the feeling already that she will remember this night for a long time. But she feels this way often, a certain simmering. It is a habit of thinking she shares with her father--every ordinary moment holds a potential calamity, and you cannot know when one will rise.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The usual precepts collapse under the weight of the calamity: the terrible demands that we place upon ourselves; our own internal judging voice; the endless expectations and opinions of others. They suddenly become less important and there is a wonderful freedom in that as well.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“There are indolent styles of the spirits in which indisposed to talk ourselves, the talk of others is pleasant to our listless ears”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla