Top 37 Besetting Quotes
#1. There are briers besetting every path,
Which call for patient care;
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer;
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee
Is happy anywhere
Alice Cary
#2. In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness
faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.
Jack London
#4. 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
#5. You ask a lot of questions, don't you?"
"My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin.
Cassandra Clare
#8. Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.
Ron Chernow
#9. Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well maybe She should have thought of that when She was besetting us with droughts and floods and poisonous snakes. Nature started the fight for survival and now She wants to quit because She's losing? Well I say 'Hard Chesse!
George Monbiot
#10. The besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.
John Stuart Mill
#11. 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 F. Cooper
#12. 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
#13. For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers - whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex - will be around for a long time.
Bill Keller
#15. For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Aldous Huxley
#16. The modern State's greatest single instrument of oppression, its murderous tax on drink ... accounts for nearly all the miseries besetting our once-merry land; football hooliganism, colour prejudice, industrial unrest, cynicism about politicians; the list is endless.
Auberon Waugh
#17. Bryony began laughing, with a great deal of bitterness to be sure, but still, laughter. That had always been her great gift and her besetting sin, that even in the darkest and most somber times, she had the urge to laugh.
T. Kingfisher
#18. Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
#19. You can use whatever term you want: besetting sin, shadow side, strength and weakness. The very thing that makes you you, that makes you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that, unchecked, will ruin you. For me, it's lust for life. It's energy, curiosity, hunger.
Shauna Niequist
#20. All my life I have been seeking to climb out of the pit of my besetting sins and I cannot do it and I never will unless a hand is let down to draw me up.
Seneca The Younger
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom.
Elizabeth Enright
#24. Prayer is the surest remedy against the devil and besetting sins.
J.C. Ryle
#25. Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
P. J. O'Rourke
#26. 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
#27. Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.
Freya Stark
#28. Spot the first risings of your besetting sin and kill it, till it is no more.
John Piper
#29. But what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue?
Washington Irving
#30. Without a sincere and diligent effort in every area of obedience, there will be no sucessful mortification of any one besetting sin.
John Owen
#31. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.
John Courtenay James
#32. The besetting evil of our age is the temptation to squander and dilute thought on a thousand different lines of inquiry.
John Herschel
#33. 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
#34. Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.
Aldous Huxley
#35. Hardening of the hearteries is the most serious affliction besetting marriage, and warm, good-humored, approving words are the only effective preventive.
Jo Coudert
#36. 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
#37. Cynicism is the besetting and venial fault of declining youth, and disillusionment its last illusion.
Francis Macdonald Cornford
