Top 415 Reluctant Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

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Last updated on April 22, 2025.
Living in a culture that prefers to shut out the dark, avoid shadows, and anesthetize pain means that many people are isolated. ... Family, friends, and co-workers, fearful of the dark, are reluctant to participate in our shadow experience and may urge us to be done with the dark before it is done with us.
First, in order to build a business, you have to be able to sell because Sales = Income. When income is lacking, it's usually because the owner doesn't like to, doesn't know how to, or is simply reluctant to sell. Without sales, however, you have no income.
As far as innovation goes, I can tell you that Korean students are reluctant to step out of line. If I ask questions, nobody raises their hands - not because they don't know the answers, but because they don't want to step out of line.
To be honest, I deliberately tend not to post things like 'I'm having a relationship' or where I live. I'm a bit reluctant to keep this kind of information up to date because people are inclined to see things like that as statements, and I rather keep a little bit of privacy, if possible at all.
'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.
I believe there are only one or two people in the world with whom one can have a true connection. When you've been fortunate enough to marry one of those people, you are reluctant to settle for less. One can have lovers, those are easily found, but true love rarely strikes twice.
Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
My dad, Winston, didn't say much. He was a very reluctant man. He came home from working at the foundry every day and then he'd go to the bookies, watch cricket on TV or go to the pub. He was like a Victorian dad, really. He didn't have much to do with us kids.
The Auditor-General has been complaining year in and year out that the municipalities have not paid auditing fees. It is not because they are reluctant but they don't have the money to pay the Auditor. So, you can't say that you are throwing money at somebody who doesn't have money. Lots of the things that the municipalities can't do are because resources are not there.
I think the experience forced me to consider how interested I was in political cartooning. After I was fired, I applied to other papers but political cartooning, like all cartooning, is a very tough field to break into. Newspapers are very reluctant to hire their own cartoonists when they can get Oliphant or MacNelly through syndication for a twentieth of the price.
Prayer is not a means for us to persuade a reluctant God to do something which is against His better judgment. Prayer, rather is coming to God for the fulfillment of His will, coming to a God who delights to answer prayer.
People associate feminism with hate - with man hate - and that's really negative. I don't think that's what feminism is about at all - it's really positive. I think that's why women became reluctant to use the word.
Traditionally it's been difficult for Africans to play over here, mainly because the African calendar is very different to that in Europe. Most of the coaches over here can't accept that we have to go back home to play at the Nations' Cup for a month while the season is still on over here. That made people reluctant to sign Africans.
Major international interventions are doomed unless the US is directly or indirectly involved. But if American politicians, officials and servicemen are to be put at risk of arrest and prosecution, the United States will be most reluctant to act in order to curb aggression or prevent genocide. So the effect of the court may well be to diminish, not increase, the numbers of (in the words of the UN Secretary General) 'innocents of distant wars and conflicts'.
If employees feel you don't trust them to do their jobs correctly and well, they'll be reluctant to do much without your approval. On the other hand, when they feel trusted, that you believe they'll do the right things well, they'll naturally want to do things well and be deserving of your trust.
This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception. Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud.
When I was told they wanted the show to be about doctors, I was a bit reluctant to sign on, you know? I thought, why have a show about doctors when we could have a show about the real heroes, you know, like me?
When you improvise on the spot, people are very reluctant to have soft moments or quiet moments or sad moments because they're trying to fill up the spaces. So they always go towards, "How come you're late?! You're supposed to have my shirt ready! You call this a dry cleaner?!" That's what happens. That's why improvising on the spot gets very dicey.
...convince all nuclear powers, including those which have been more reluctant up to now, of the necessity to respect the "vital interests" of all peoples and to become fully aware of the profound truth of the following conclusion which the United Nations approved by unanimity four years ago: "Mankind is confronted with a choice: we must halt the arms race and proceed to disarmament or face annihilation".
Especially with Instagram, I feel reluctant to make all the photos beautiful because I don't necessarily want to send this message that life is perfect and your avocado toast is always going to be beautifully lit. I want readers to feel like the Man Repeller page is real and kind of dirty. Messy.
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.
I feel like 'Gossip Girl' isn't really 'Gossip Girl' anymore when they're away at school because they don't go to NYU; they go to, like, Yale and Brown. New York City is just as much a character as anyone else in the books, and I was really sort of reluctant to show them off in their separate college worlds.
Someone like Boris Johnson is reluctant to answer questions about ambition because then the story becomes all about his ambition. Sure, he's got ambition - that's no secret at all. But also, he's very strongly motivated to try to get the kind of Brexit he believes in.
People don't turn away from an attorney sitting in a wheelchair. If the guy has got the reputation for being the best attorney around, that's who you go with. But in show business, for some reason they're still reluctant to say an attorney or a physician or an interior decorator can be in a chair, or on crutches, or blind or any of the other things.
Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.
Before Medicare, nearly half of American seniors were forced to go without coverage because insurance companies were reluctant to insure them - making the chances of having health insurance as a senior the same as getting tails on a coin flip.
I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.
I have a funny relationship to the British working class movement... I'm in it, but not culturally of it... I was aware that I'd come from the periphery of this process. I was reluctant to go canvassing for the Labour party. I don't find it easy to say, straight, face to face with an English working class family: 'Are you going to vote for us?'
I'm reluctant to get involved in science fiction, because I feel like I've done it and done it well, so unless something comes along that I feel has the potential to do something even more interesting, it seems a shame to sort of re-live something in half-measures.
The people who lost the elections do not want to admit that they really lost, that the one who won was closer to the people and better understood what ordinary voters want. They are absolutely reluctant to admit this, and prefer deluding themselves and others into thinking it was not their fault, that their policy was correct, they did all the right things, but someone from the outside thwarted them. But it was not so. They just lost and they have to admit it.
This is a private home." "And?" "And I can't enter without an invitation." She jerked her head up. "You're kidding me?" "No." "You don't live in a crypt and you can't turn into a bat, but you have to have an invitation to enter a house?" Abby hissed. A reluctant amusement softened the flat eyes. "You wanted me to be vampirish." "Not when it's inconvenient.
This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody's been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.
God is the original, master forgiver. Each time we grope our reluctant way through the minor miracle of forgiving, we are imitating his style. I am not at all sure that any of us would have had imagination enough to see the possibilities in this way to heal the wrongs of this life had he not done it first.
People are reluctant to talk about old age and death because they are afraid of emotion, and they willingly avoid the things they feel most emotional about, though these are the very things they most need to talk about.
When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me. The result is a brave and brilliant film that deserves the honor and recognition it has received. My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.
You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.
The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude.
Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources.
Seems to me we move the furniture, the French come in later and put the doilies on top of it...It's a simple fact they've always been reluctant to surrender to the wishes of their friends and are almost anticipatory in their urge to surrender to wishes of their enemies. And if they want to get their hands dirty now they're just gonna have to run 'em through their own hair.
One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on "going it alone." Somehow we've come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we're very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It's as if we've divided the world into "those who offer help" and "those who need help." The truth is that we are both.
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.
The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up … then down … then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name.
Too many companies are reluctant to share technical information about threats with each other, and most open platforms and tools don't see widespread adoption. As a result, lots of us are reinventing the wheel and solving the same problems without realizing that our neighbors have already built great solutions.
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.
The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.
The people who have wealth and the people who earn money are going to be a little reluctant to part with it, particularly if they earned it fair and square. So, what has to happen is that there has to be a drumming in of a critique that causes shame, a sense of look, my country and even I am in possession of stolen goods you might say and therefore, the government becomes the instrument to get some of those back.
We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?
I first got into acting when I was 14, coming back from a junior high school basketball game. My mom picked me up and she had been mentioning, prior to that, this community production of 'Godspell', a couple towns over. I was reluctant, at first, and she bribed me with some great dinner that was in that town, neighboring the theater.
The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.
At a recent conference, a colleague told one of us that in IPCC discussions, some scientists have been reluctant to make strong claims about the scientific evidence, lest contrarians "attack us". Another said that she'd rather err on the side of conservatism in her estimates, because then she feels more "secure."
Came to . . . see you.” “But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say good-bye.” “Don't know why you . . . say good-bye. I say . . . hello.” Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. “God you're a cheeseball. But seriously, R—
I know the von Trapps well. I've known them for many years and they are very reluctant to let anybody on to their property or to let anybody film them. They are constantly getting requests from all around the world to do shows about them or having news stories done and they're very private people.
There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation's social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for 'faith-based initiatives' . . . ?
Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.
I think there are white alumni out there who wouldn't mind having an African American president of their school, but would be reluctant to have an African American coach, because he represents the school so. I think it's just sheer backward racism.
It is wonderful how shy even liberal ministers generally are about trusting people with the plain truth concerning their religion. They want to veil it in a supernatural haze. They are very reluctant to part with the old idea that God has given to Jews and Christians a peculiar monopoly of truth. It is a selfish view of God's government of the world, and it is time that we knew enough to outgrow it.
I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide.
People sometimes think of 'queen' as a title that's shrouded with protocol and formality, and for that reason sometimes people are not easily saying what they want to say. They're reluctant to express their opinions, and I kind of find that frustrating because I want to know what people really, really think.
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