Top 137 Predicament Quotes & Sayings

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

At the end of the day, we're defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.

Our present predicament comes from the fact that running the economy on blood is no longer fashionable. We can't end this depression with another war.

We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats - or Americans, whatever.

Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.

I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.

If you have no enemies you are apt to be in the same predicament in regard to friends.

The right wing is appealing to a shrinking, shrinking demographic of angry white people who blame their predicament in life on the fact that there are immigrants coming into the country; it's pretty ludicrous.

Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you're doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you'd give to another person in your predicament.

Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.

I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.

Whoever admits that he is too busy to improve his methods, has acknowledged himself to be at the end of his rope. And that is always the saddest predicament which any one can get into.

Looking in the mirror, staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.

For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.

Your dreams change. Initially the belly-buttons help establish the dreamer's predicament - the situation you are trapped in or held back by.

I have some cops in my family. I understand the predicament that they're in. Sometimes they go into it just to pay the bills or because they don't have other choices, or sometimes they just want to get the gun.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Life is adventure, not predicament.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in.

Someone who's asking questions of the clergy, that he doesn't have the answers to, I think that's a universal predicament.

Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.

She looked at me as if for a moment she would seek someone who would understand the dreadful predicament of a woman, in this world ruled by men.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving.

The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and tortoises).

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

it is only in statistics that people die by the millions. Each person dies individually, in his own predicament.

I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

When we are not any lengthier capable to alter a predicament, we're challenged to alter ourselves

The Republican Party is in a predicament that it made itself. It made its own bed, and now they don't want to lay in it.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, but the perpetual human predicament is that the answer soon poses its own problems.

Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.

there’s really nowhere else I can go, and even if there were, it wouldn’t make a difference because I’d just be running from myself, and you can’t do that no matter how hard you try, and trying hard is what got you in this predicament in the first place.

I do feel like all the people I meet, all the people I'm in discussions with, if I'm working with somebody, I sense the same energy that everybody is suffering from the same predicament.

Ageing is a privilege not a predicament.

predicament, n. The wage of consistency.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and one's self-image.

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question Have we anything to eat? will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

Well, I was lost but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!

Most people who are successful don't keep their money. One of the rarest things in the world is to maintain success and integrity - the kinds of things that seem so easy just starting out. But that's the human predicament.

Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.

I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.

It's a feminine universe, and every person who has ever tried to convince you otherwise is doing little more than pounding on his mother's breast, enraged by the predicament he faces as a leaf, dangling from the tree of life.

We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

Luckily, I haven't been offered any $300 million movies that I hate. So I'm not in that predicament just yet.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.