Consoling Quotes

#1. There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.

Paul Gauguin

#2. The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.

Irving Stone

#3. Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.

Steven Weinberg

#4. The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

Joyce Carol Oates

#5. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

Alain De Botton

#6. Hope is often just a consoling thought, our naive disclaimer, retracting the possibility of a certain reality that we don't have the power to change.

Kavita Kane

#7. Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing.

Heloise

#8. If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.

Simon Blackburn

#9. I doubted it. Some people say trying is all that matters, but unfortunately it's only the first step. Sometimes you're got to catch a break and win one, too. You've got to stand up on the bar and do the antler dance. Plus, as I now knew as well as anyone, people really suck at consoling themselves.

James Patterson

#10. Consoling a miserable soul, wiping the tears of a crying person is greater than any worldly achievement.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#11. So I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires

F Scott Fitzgerald

#12. A rich, vibrant, consoling, hard-won prayer life is the one good that makes it possible to receive all other kinds of goods rightly and beneficially. [Paul] does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself.

Timothy Keller

#13. When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.

James L. Brooks

#14. It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.

Frans De Waal

#15. And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit.

Pope John Paul II

#16. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

Gregory Maguire

#17. Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

Graham Greene

#18. I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling. But there's something about it that you can't turn away from.

Pico Iyer

#19. If it is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies [microbes], it is a consoling hope that Science will not always remain powerless before such enemies ...

Louis Pasteur

#20. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?

Virginia Woolf

#21. I'm not interested in provoking people, but only in trying to be consoling.

Martin Kippenberger

#22. Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.

Donna Lynn Hope

#23. When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.

Karen Armstrong

#24. Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

Meghan O'Rourke

#25. In times of hurt and discouragement, it may be consoling for all of us to recall that no one can do anything permanently to us that will last for eternity. Only we ourselves can affect our eternal progression.

Marvin J. Ashton

#26. There is no feeling more comforting and consoling than knowing you are right next to the one you love.

Oscar Wilde

#27. I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires
all for eighty dollars a month.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#28. It is consoling that he who must judge us dwell in us to save us always from all of our miseries, and to pardon us.

Therese De Lisieux

#29. Many people tried comforting us with words. But there are no consoling words! I really just wanted people to be quiet. I appreciated those who cried with me, hugged me, and offered a brief prayer, but words were unnecessary.

Shelley Ramsey

#30. Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

Richard Wright

#31. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#32. Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#33. People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.

Renata Adler

#34. That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature.

Terry Eagleton

#35. The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

Richard Dawkins

#36. He felt that the last couple of hours had somehow carried him along without him actually touching the sides, and for a moment he nursed the strangely consoling feeling that his life was totally beyond his control and whatever happened no one could blame him.

Terry Pratchett

#37. There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.

Honore De Balzac

#38. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.

Aleister Crowley

#39. Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Iris Murdoch

#40. Humour is ... the all-consoling and ... the all-excusing, grace of life.

C.S. Lewis

#41. Because Roen is a strong-minded woman, and there's something consoling in the regard of a woman. Roen never desires me, or if she ever does, it's not the same.

Kristin Cashore

#42. The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre.

Moss Hart

#43. Obviously there are exceptions, but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don't realize that non-belief is even an option.

Anonymous

#44. The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.

Evelyn Underhill

#45. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

Walter Lippmann

#46. How very beautiful and consoling our faith is! For the little work we do here on earth it promises in return all the joys of assured happiness.

Rose Philippine Duchesne

#47. It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say.

Michael Leunig

#48. There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully.

Anthony Trollope

#49. There are those who are awkward in the face of sorrow, fearing to say the wrong thing; to them, I say, there is no wrong in comfort, ever. A kind word, a consoling arm ... these things are ever welcome.

Jacqueline Carey

#50. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#51. Talking about your feeling with someone who is willing to listen can be enormously consoling, especially if that person has experienced a death similar to the one you are grieving.

Candy Lightner

#52. The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it's done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I'm not doing something strange.

Peter Zumthor

#53. Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.

Stefan Zweig

#54. False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

Richard Dawkins

#55. There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.

Paul Gauguin

#56. I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud).

Milan Kundera

#57. A "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.

David Foster Wallace

#58. I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork

Wolfgang Tillmans

#59. Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Don DeLillo

#60. If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Stanley Kubrick

#61. It's always consoling to know that today's Christmas gifts are tomorrow's garage sales.

Milton Berle

#62. Painting is a matter of finding the right balance between consoling and reassuring the eye and challenging and disturbing the eye.

Paul Kane

#63. The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

Northrop Frye

#64. Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

#65. It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.

Gillian Flynn

#66. The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

Susan Sontag

#67. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what the hell did that
mean anyway? Was it supposed to be a consoling thought,
understanding her mother was now nothing more than decaying flesh
and bones?

Christopher C. Payne

#68. I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea's consoling silence.

Cristina Garcia

#69. The cliche is that misery loves company. Another is that there is fellowship among thieves. But thieves do not seek the consoling presence of the fellowship of police officers. Sinful misery does not love the company of purity.

R.C. Sproul

#70. We have had good and bad Presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American Nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad Presidents cannot destroy it, and have been able to do no more than slightly to retard the public's advancement.

Henry Clay

#71. - then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about -

David Foster Wallace

#72. A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

Cesare Pavese

#73. The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false.

Iris Murdoch

#74. These studies are a spur to the young, a delight to the old: an ornament in prosperity, a consoling refuge in adversity; they are pleasure for us at home, and no burden abroad; they stay up with us at night, they accompany us when we travel, they are with us in our country visits.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#75. I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.

Joseph Conrad

#76. But if love were convenient there wouldn't be millions of songs and movies and books obsessing over it, or therapists and doctors consoling all the people falling in and out of it.

Katie Kacvinsky

#77. I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

May Sarton

#78. There are times when words are extra, like raindrops on drenched grass. There are times for holding. He held her ...

Bud Macfarlane Jr.

#79. That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.

Gore Vidal

#80. God understands everything. And even He made a mistake or two. Look at the size of avocado seeds - way too big. And pomegranates? Too many seeds. What a waist of fruit!

Robyn Carr