Besetting Quotes

I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? (Karen Joy Fowler)

The oil is a gift bestowed by God on the Arab nation, to use after centuries of poverty, backwardness and servitude - in raising its living standards, developing its economic, social and cultural conditions, and building up its own power to meet the challenges and conspiracies besetting it.

Saddam Hussein

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

Alfred North Whitehead

A sign that a peace association is going adrift is its exclusion of other political parties, with whom it could collaborate effectively on most of the problems besetting the cause of peace.

Fredrik Bajer

I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.

W. Somerset Maugham

An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists.

Freeman Dyson

Good nature and kindness towards those with whom they come in personal contact, at the expense of public interests, that is of those whom they never see, is the besetting sin of public men.

Henry Taylor

You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" "My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin.

Cassandra Clare

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness with others.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism.

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn

One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information. (Charles Stross)

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.

John Stuart Mill

The only way to solve the problems now besetting mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that this implies.

Che Guevara

From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

Bruno Bettelheim

But there is another danger besetting your path. I mean the error of regarding your own capacities instead of your work, of putting self-consciousness in place of God.

Joseph Barber Lightfoot

It is no easy task to pick one's way from truth to truth through besetting errors.

Peter Mere Latham

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

James Fenimore Cooper

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

Azar Nafisi

He had trampled through Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the border of Switzerland and rammed bloody defeat down Austrian throats before Marengo. Marshall André Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by God, he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the emporer's armies in Spain and Portugal.

Bernard Cornwell

...In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness-faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain. For to play a system requires money...

Jack London

Commonplaceness, the surrender to the average, that good which is not bad but still the enemy of the best That is our besetting danger. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action -- that the end will sanction any means.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual coat of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art-art is whatever the art world says it is. But it's also a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just describe Burke. In the process, don't we risk fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to be more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, but, to their credit, they don't sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian."

Mark Riebling

It is not a head in a charger that the dancers of our time ask, but the souls of them that sit at the feast. For in making them slaves, and leading them to unlawful loves, and besetting them with harlots, they do not take off the head, but slay the soul... For you will not surely tell me, that when full of wine, and drunken, and looking at a woman who is dancing and uttering base words, thou dost not feel anything towards her, neither art hurried on to profligacy, overcome by your lust... For though the daughter of Herodias be not present, yet the devil, who then danced in her person, in theirs also holds his choirs now, and departs with the souls of those guests taken captive.

John Chrysostom