Calamity Quotes

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid. (Publilius Syrus)
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. View quote
Sydney Smith
He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles. View quote
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another. View quote
Joseph Addison
Often it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we have made. View quote
Bill Watterson
Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves. View quote
William Davenant
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. View quote
Charles Mackay
It is a persistent evil to persecute a man who belongs to the grace of God. It is a calamity without remedy to hate the happy. View quote
Cyprian
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. View quote
Robert Bly
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity. (Alafair Burke)
Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties - French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time. View quote
Frederick Rolfe
It is a melancholy but an undoubted fact, that, even in the most thriving countries, part of the population annually dies of mere want. Not that all who perish from want absolutely die of hunger; though this calamity is of more frequent occurrence than is generally supposed. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats. View quote
James Frazer
Aping Urbanity, Oozing with Vanity Plump as a Manatee, Faking Humanity Journalistic Calamity, Intellectual Inanity Fox News Insanity, You're a profanity Hannity. View quote
John Cleese
It was a saying of Demetrius Phalereus, that "Men having often abandoned what was visible for the sake of what was uncertain, have not got what they expected, and have lost what they had,-being unfortunate by an enigmatical sort of calamity." View quote
Athenaeus
Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity. View quote
Samuel Richardson
Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity. View quote
Publilius Syrus
Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations. The unjust State is doomed of God to calamity and ruin. This is the teaching of the Eternal Wisdom and of history. View quote
Albert Pike
Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. (George Monbiot)
There are only two categories of happy people in the material world: fools and transcendentalists. Fools are so oblivious that they manage to convince themselves they are happy in this material prison. Transcendentalists are happy because they can see above the material dualities, and know that their parole is at hand. Everyone else is essentially miserable. This is because calamity in the material world cannot be avoided, just as water cannot be avoided in the ocean. View quote
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm. View quote
Charles Caleb Colton
There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the anticipation of calamity. View quote
Sax Rohmer
I do not believe that our friends at the South have any just idea of the state of feeling, hurrying at this moment to a pitch of intense exasperation, between those who respect their political obligations, and those who apparently have no impelling power but that which a fanatical position on the subject of domestic Slavery imparts. Without discussing the question of right - of abstract power to secede - I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if, through the madness of Northern Abolitionists, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely. It [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred. View quote
Franklin Pierce