Resignation Quotes

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
― Noam Chomsky

“All right, then, I'll go to hell.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”
― Huey P. Newton

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I've made peace with myself.
Good for you. That's the hardest war of all to win.
Didn't say I won. Just stopped fighting.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?”
― W Somerset Maugham

“Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.”
― Kouta Hirano

“What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

“It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired -not really tired- yet. But I will be." The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness "And I think... when I get tired enough... I think I'll just sit down”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.”
― Ian McEwan, Solar

“A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mike at Wrykyn

“Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I have lived in this tree, in this same hollow," the owl said, "for more years than anyone can remember. But now, when the wind blows hard in winter and rocks the forest, I sit here in the dark, and from deep down in the bole, near the roots, I hear a new sound. It is the sound of strands of wood creaking in the cold and snapping one by one. The limbs are falling; the tree is old, and it is dying. Yet I cannot bring myself, after so many years, to leave, to find a new home and move into it, perhaps to fight for it. I, too, have grown old. One of these days, one of these years, the tree will fall, and when it does, if I am still alive, I will fall with it.”
― Robert C. O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

“La verdad, es que en el fondo soy un fatalista. Si a uno le llega la hora, da lo mismo un Boeing que la puntual maceta que se derrumba sobre uno desde un séptimo piso”
― Mario Benedetti, La muerte y otras sorpresas

“For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.”
― Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an

“Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“I never got to see a proper striptease. Not anything even remotely close. I was stupid and went to literary cafés and spent my time on artistic nonsense instead. Now it is too late. I am old and blind. I must content myself with hearing the garments fall. I dictated this.”
― Tor Ulven, Stein og speil: mixtum compositum

“And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better.”
― John Crowley, Endless Things

“Früher war selbst die Zukunft besser.”
― Karl Valentin

“Oh well, bears will be bears,” said Mr Brown.”
― Michael Bond, More About Paddington

“Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Life was what it was. She'd chosen this every step of the way. (Story: I Love My Husband, But...)”
― Scarlet Ibis James, Scarlet Yearnings: Stories of Love and Desire