Top 125 Capricious Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn't go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.

The concept known as bal tashchit--'Do no destroy'--has a special significance in Jewish tradition...We are constantly being warned in our faith that the capricious, thoughtless, wasteful destruction of the elements and creatures of the earth is wrong...We should remind ourselves daily of our responsibility to all aspects of creation.

It's such a capricious, strange existence, basing your life on the whims of others, and basing your ebbs and flows of confidence and lack of confidence on the fact that people either choose you or don't.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

For many people, God is a frightening idea. Asking God for help doesn't seem very comforting if we think of Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious, or judgmental. But God is love and He dwells within us. We are created in His image, or mind, which means that we are extensions of His love, or Sons and Daughters of God.

The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.

Actors have this amazing skill - we bond quite quickly but equally we move on quite quickly. There's nothing particularly cold or capricious about it - we're troubadours and lead a troubadour's lifestyle.

Emotional and psychological pain were to become, perhaps, the most powerful force in molding the course of my life. For some people, pain and hurt breed bitterness and cynicism. For others it causes them to look deeply into themselves and into life itself in an attempt to understand the meaning beneath seemingly capricious or arbitrary happenings.

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes fools and hypocrites.

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

A man's fate is his own temper; and according to that will be his opinion as to the particular manner in which the course of events is regulated. A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.

I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts." This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where, in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager.

Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her.

But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.

Ugly women may be naturally quite as capricious as pretty ones; but as they are never petted and spoiled, and as no allowances are made for them, they soon find themselves obliged either to suppress their whims or to hide them.

A lot of people don't trust the pitch. There's this kind of reputation it has for being untrustworthy and fickle and capricious and everything else, and those are words that big league managers and general managers and organizations aren't too fond of.

The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

Or is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region it takes place. The whole earth a point in space - and most of it uninhabited.

Insecurity must follow the transfer of responsibility from self to others, particularly when transferred to arbitrary and capricious government. Genuine security is a matter of self-responsibility, based on the right to the fruits of one's own labor and freedom to trade.

The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield. There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.

I take good care of my things. I put everything in a bag. I use soap. I put on a cream after training. People think it's capricious. To each his own. Doesn't mean you're more man or less man, more gay or less gay.

Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

Why consider debates in the English House of Commons in 1628 along with documents on American developments in the late eighteenth century? The juxtaposition is not capricious, because the Commons during this period generated many of the ideas that were later embodied in the government of the United States.

A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. ... his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favors of fortune.

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?

How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge?...Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?

The complaints of contemporary writes, who deplore the increase of luxury and deprevation of manners, are commonly expressive of their peculiar temper and situation. There are few observers who possess a clear and comprehensive view of the revolutions of society, and who are capable of discovering the nice and secret springs of action which impel, in the same uniform direction, the bland and capricious passions of a multitude of individuals.

We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

Cats are possessed of a shy, retiring nature, cajoling, haughty, and capricious, difficult to fathom. They reveal themselves only to certain favored individuals, and are repelled by the faintest suggestion of insult or even by the most trifling deception.

One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances.

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.

Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do.

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.

And what is the religion of many persons but a kind of demonism that delights in human sacrifices and causes them to look with horror on the greatest part of mankind? Plutarch, it is well known, has observed very justly that it is better not to believe in a god than to believe him to be a capricious and malevolent being.

I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.

I love the stories of changelings and the thought that the Fey were these ancient, capricious creatures who were tricky and dangerous. I've always preferred the Brothers Grimm faery tales to the Disney fairy tales.

I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

Opportunity can benefit no man who has not fitted himself to seize it and use it. Opportunity woos the worthy, shuns the unworthy. Prepare yourself to grasp opportunity, and opportunity is likely to come your way. It is not so fickle, capricious and unreasoning as some complain.

Imposition of the death penalty is arbitrary and capricious. Decision of who will live and who will die for his crime turns less on the nature of the offense and the incorrigibility of the offender and more on inappropriate and indefensible considerations: the political and personal inclinations of prosecutors; the defendant's wealth, race and intellect; the race and economic status of the victim; the quality of the defendant's counsel; and the resources allocated to defense lawyers.