Top 65 Contrive Quotes
#1. For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation.
Douglas Adams
#2. There's nothing people can't contrive to praise or condemn and find justification for doing so, according to their age and their inclinations.
Moliere
#3. This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.
Aristophanes
#4. Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.
B.F. Skinner
#5. Whatever you lend let it be your money, and not your name. Money you may get again, and, if not, you may contrive to do without it; name once lost you cannot get again, and, if you cannot contrive to do without it, you had better never have been born.
Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling And Bulwer
#6. We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom - in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve - or could contrive - anything better.
J.B. Priestley
#7. Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.
William Empson
#8. I contrive,"' said Prudence softly. 'Do you know, sir, you puzzle me.' 'It has ever been my motto,' the old gentleman pointed out triumphantly.
Georgette Heyer
#9. We invent casuistical arguments for ourselves, we take a lesson from the Jesuits, and, for a time, contrive to allay our own doubts and convince ourselves that what we are doing is necessary, absolutely necessary, in a good cause. That is the way we are made; it is all as clear as daylight.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#10. I will tell my story, and my reader shall judge for me. I will tell my story, and so contrive to pass some few hours of a long eternity, become so worrisome to me.
Mary Shelley
#11. Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.
Daniel Clowes
#12. Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old.
Edmund Burke
#13. War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#14. Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.
Herbert Read
#15. We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.
E. M. Forster
#16. There is no limit to the defenses we contrive against the inbreak of truth into our lives.
Brennan Manning
#17. The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals
Cyril Connolly
#18. When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.
James Weldon Johnson
#19. I often think it's comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
W.S. Gilbert
#20. Electric light is just another instrument. I have no desire to contrive fantasies mediumistically or sociologically over it or beyond it.
Dan Flavin
#21. I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
#22. The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon.
Robert Fortune
#23. Where necessity ends, desire and curiosity begin; and no sooner are we supplied with everything nature can demand than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.
Samuel Johnson
#24. Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.
Walter Lippmann
#25. You would think," added Art, "that a wedding was a great thing."
"Well," replied Old Hector, "it's not a small thing, as a rule. They contrive, one way or another, to make a lot of it.
Neil M. Gunn
#26. Here will I stand till Caesar pass along,
And as a suitor will I give him this.
My heart laments the virtue cannot live
Out of the teeth of emulation.
If thou read this, O Caesar, thou mayest live;
If not, the fates with traitors do contrive.
William Shakespeare
#27. The smartest cavaliers at the command 'To horse!'
contrive to be in time for both a horse and whores.
Volodymyr Knyr
#28. What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?
Anne Carson
#29. I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and Twitter to contrive fiction.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
#30. Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
Thomas Carlyle
#31. The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed: - Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other, - cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?
Laurence Sterne
#32. In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
Edward Gibbon
#33. How can you contrive to write so even?
Jane Austen
#35. He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.
Samuel Johnson
#36. I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.
Samuel Johnson
#37. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
G.K. Chesterton
#38. Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.
Scott Westerfeld
#39. The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.
Gene Clark
#40. Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in way, contrive to avoid death at any cost.
Socrates
#41. A character to me can't be contrived. I don't like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth.
Jack Kirby
#42. Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
David Foster Wallace
#43. It's the problem with having a logical mind and giving women the same credit for ability as men, he mused as he dismounted. You can't contrive reasons to keep them safe.
Raymond E. Feist
#44. Above all, it behooves us to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.
George F. Kennan
#45. We have seen Indians in immense numbers, and all those on this coast of the Pacific contrive to make a good subsistence on various seeds, and by fishing.
Junipero Serra
#46. Intelligence is not measured by the mind's ability to compute, but by the heart's will to contrive.
Kimberly Adams Stedronsky
#47. A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.
Anton Chekhov
#48. None are as offended as those who contrive offense.
Kurt Hanks
#49. If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
P.D. James
#50. I, ever knowing the living beings Who tread the Path and those who do not In response to those who may be saved Preach to them a variety of dharmas, Each time having this thought: 'How may I cause the beings To contrive to enter the Unexcelled Path and quickly to perfect the Buddha-body?'
Gautama Buddha
#51. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.
Plato
#52. If you must commit suicide ... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.
George Henry Borrow
#53. It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#54. In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.
James Russell Lowell
#56. We contrive to make revenge itself look like religion. We call down thunder on many a head under pretence, that those on whom we invoke it are God's enemies, when perhaps we invoke it because they are ours.
Hannah More
#57. If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. A gentleman in Mr Norell's position with a fine house and a large estate will always be of interest to his neighbors and, unless those neighbors are very stupid, they will always contrive to know a little of what he does.
Susanna Clarke
#59. English life is nothing but a huge masquerade ball in which the participants contrive to conceal their feelings, their addresses, their hobbies, their incomes, their decorations, their sorrows, their talents, their achievements, and even their names.
Pierre Daninos
#60. It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.
Michael Chabon
#61. But as some muskets so contrive it
As oft to miss the mark they drive at,
And though well aimed at dock or plover
Bear wide, and kick their owners over.
John Trumbull
#62. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
Thomas Paine
#63. I hate how things must be classified. How this is applied to musicians implies that they somehow contrive their products and have studied the demographics of the audience.
Trevor Rabin
#64. I have loved you in every manner that my imagination could contrive. I have wanted you so deeply that my body sang with pain and pleasure. You have been my obsession, my passion, my philosophers' stone of fantasy. You are my desire, my longing, my spirit. I love you unconditionally. - Sabine Strohem
Nick Bantock
#65. Custom! that skillful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Marcel Proust
