Top 100 Frightful Quotes
#1. The frightful engines of ecclesiastical councils, of diabolical malice, and Calvinistical good-nature never failed to terrify me exceedingly whenever I thought of preaching.
John Adams
#2. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
H.P. Lovecraft
#3. I do not much believe in education. Each person ought to be his or her own model, however frightful that may be.
Albert Einstein
#5. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#6. The greatest, most frightful and destructive wars of all time have been those which were started in "defense" of God, as if "he" cared what man says or does.
Joseph Lewis
#7. A woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion.
"It's coming," she finally explained. "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#8. Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck.
Paul Verlaine
#9. But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it is of this suffering he must die
Hermann Hesse
#10. A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.
Anne Rice
#11. To be sucked down by this whirling stream is to fall into abysses of madness, more frightful than those of death; to expel the shades of this chaos and compel it to give perfect forms to our thoughts - this is to be a man of genius; it is to create, it is to be victorious over hell! The
Eliphas Levi
#12. If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject ...
William Graham Sumner
#13. Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?
Sarah Waters
#15. Oh the weather outside is frightful...
Lois Lowry
#16. There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber.
Samuel Johnson
#17. Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally- the way that driver beats his old horse until it dies. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.
Haruki Murakami
#18. There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#19. The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics ... restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this ... as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound.
John Pintard
#20. Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.
William Osler
#21. Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.
Honore De Balzac
#23. Consider too, how deep the abyss between life and death; across this, my power can build a bridge, but it can never fill up the frightful chasm.
Johann Ludwig Tieck
#24. It is essential that you realize that you are nothing in yourself. If you are rich and satisfied, you cannot receive anything from God. It is frightful to meet that spirit in a person. It totally hinders all spiritual growth and development.
Esther Smith
#25. Men are frightful nuisances at times; how much simpler life would be if we women did not have to make allowances for their little peculiarities.
Elizabeth Peters
#26. If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#27. For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.
Michael Dirda
#28. Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale)
Muse
#29. Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.
Roberto Unger
#30. My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think ... and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#31. Men scanning the surface count the wicked happy; they see not the frightful dreams that crowd a bad man's pillow.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#32. Physical diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally without distinction.
Charles Dickens
#33. We must live a genuine life in order to discover personal happiness and self-fulfillment. Understanding that a person is living a lie is the first step into realizing what is possible. No matter how frightful such a proposition is, we must dare to be an original self.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#34. Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it
thus!
Mary Shelley
#35. It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.
David Hume
#36. A lot of celebrities just want money, fame, power, fancy cars, houses all over the world and have people bow down to them. To me, that's frightful behaviour.
Shirley Manson
#37. Being alone in the dark - surrounded by silence, frightful. Thoughts breathe a life of their own; twisting and turning on each other as enemies unto themselves.
Veronica Purcell
#38. One thing I fear, that you Americans will do the same thing that you did after the last war. I mean that you will pull out of here and leave Europe, then Russia will have her way. Private enterprise and individual rights will be lost just as much as under a Nazi government. Frightful!
Hjalmar Schacht
#39. The writer's life is frightful. I have experienced deep dispair, mental ill and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#40. What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.
Alfred De Musset
#41. I don't believe in happy endings. Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things - what are they called? - hamsters: all die like flies. So there's no point avoiding it.
Raymond Briggs
#42. As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.
Arthur C. Clarke
#43. Death is not cold and frightful. Death is the sun in all its powerful intensity.
June Havoc
#44. At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally predictable from beginning to end.
Frederic Raphael
#45. A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood.
Hjalmar Soderberg
#46. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.
Mary Shelley
#47. Often, on the brink of finding the recipe for immortality, I get distracted by the frightful presence of death.
Hector Abad Faciolince
#48. There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.
Victor Hugo
#49. People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#50. There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
G.K. Chesterton
#51. I saw- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together ... Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
Mary Shelley
#52. Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Alexander Pope
#53. There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
Albert Camus
#54. I am not surprised that there are gambling houses, like so many snares laid for human avarice; like abysses where many a man's money is engulfed and swallowed up without any hope of return; like frightful rocks against which the gamblers are thrown and perish.
Jean De La Bruyere
#55. Slavery is an awful thing," stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice. "Frightful - the sufferings," grunted Carlier with conviction.
Joseph Conrad
#56. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
Hermann Hesse
#57. The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
Anatole France
#58. If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.
William Graham Sumner
#59. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Victor Hugo
#60. Gold gives an appearance of beauty even to ugliness: but with poverty everything becomes frightful.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
#61. I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes
of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe
it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts ...
I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#62. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advancesto his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#63. I may do some good before I am dead
be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
Thomas Hardy
#64. It's frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.
George Orwell
#65. Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. -
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
Mary Shelley
#66. No doubt, then, that a free curiosity has more force in our learning these things, than a frightful enforcement.
Augustine Of Hippo
#67. Everyone must become their own person, however frightful that may be.
Albert Einstein
#68. We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.
Mignon McLaughlin
#69. All the role models are being exposed and this is good because role models are shit. The quicker we exposed them the better. The whole concept of role models is frightful! You gotta make your own role.
William S. Burroughs
#70. in business doing nothing is often the hardest thing. (And not just in business. Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the Cuban missile crisis, mused then 'on the frightful desire to do something, with the knowledge that not to do anything was prob. the right answer'.)
Simon Kuper
#71. The cup of life was poisoned forever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.
Mary Shelley
#72. A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.
George Crabbe
#73. No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.
George MacDonald
#74. We're not a fragile people. We're not a frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don't look to be ruled.
Barack Obama
#75. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse.
Thomas More
#76. It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.
Victor Hugo
#77. I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#78. Professor Rumfoord said frightful things about Billy within Billy's hearing, confident that Billy no longer had any brain at all. "Why don't they let him die?" he asked Lily. "I don't know," she said. "That's not a human being anymore. Doctors are for human beings.
Kurt Vonnegut
#79. Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#80. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.
Henry Ford
#81. But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain - if, indeed, they went together. If
Sheldon Vanauken
#82. War has frightful beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.
Victor Hugo
#83. Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions.
Emile Zola
#84. He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn't see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. The weather outside certainly was frightful on Jan. 23, 1940, when 8.3 inches fell on the city, the most in Atlanta history, according to the National Weather Service.
Anonymous
#86. A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.
Thomas Carlyle
#87. If people were in the habit of refering to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#88. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.
Italo Calvino
#90. They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. They are afraid of the world and sleep is a way of dealing with their fear. Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance - that is, sleep. (29)
Stephen Dobyns
#91. All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.
'And all these are worlds,' said Hagen.
'Or else,' said Clements with a yawn, 'a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.
Vladimir Nabokov
#92. Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen.
Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert
#93. There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.
Agnes Repplier
#94. Father Abraham, send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. There is a frightful meaning in those words. May you never have to spell it out by the red light of Jehovah's wrath!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#95. The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
Jorge Luis Borges
#96. There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.
Soren Kierkegaard
#97. The Economic Problem ... the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.
John Maynard Keynes
#98. The fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follow that, and in its turn wretchedness and oppression.
Thomas Jefferson
#99. I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution.
Fanny Kemble
#100. When tempted, the shortest and surest way is to act like a little child at the breast; when we show it a frightful monster, it shrinks back and buries its face in its mother's bosom, that it may no longer behold it.
Francois Fenelon
