Precarious Life Quotes

#1. Precarious, life is. A flying leap. A sweep of hand. A star flung across the night. A lucky catch in this whirling juggling circus act.
From Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars

Rivera Sun

#2. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

Judith Butler

#3. In modern times, if the sole measure of what's out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#4. Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

Gerald Durrell

#5. Hopes have precarious life.
They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

George Eliot

#6. Life's temptations have the purpose of putting our spiritual integrity to the test. To yield to them, however, gives one a precarious and tormented satisfaction. But the worst temptations are those we give in to without getting anything in return except for the brutal discovery of our weakness.

Paolo Maurensig

#7. ...I found that much of the romance had left the trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs - a touch of romance.

Bruce Bairnsfather

#8. Life is precarious and improbable, a flame in matter, easily snuffed out. Nature shows no regard for the individual spark, in this creature or that, but only for the spreading of the fire, like an ember passed from cell to cell.

Scott Russell Sanders

#9. As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Iris Murdoch

#10. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Bill Watterson

#11. Freely the subject makes himself what he is, never in this life is the making finished, always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter.

Bernard Lonergan

#12. A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Hubert H. Humphrey

#13. I live in a world where school is in a precarious balance with social life, parties, and sports games. He lives in a world where school is all-consuming, and when his homework isn't, Star Wars and video games are.

Selena Brooks

#14. No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

James Bryce

#15. MTV has always given artists a platform to get their stories and music out to their fans and this series reveals the unknown side of T.I.-one of the world's greatest artists at the most precarious time in his life.

T.I.

#16. I'll no doubt just continue stumbling and bumbling through life, putting myself in precarious places, rising sadder if not wiser, as always.

Allan Weisbecker

#17. the only thing that lasts a whole lifetime is life itself, everything else is inevitably precarious, unstable, transient

Jose Saramago

#18. Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#19. Maybe in a way all living things are like flickering flames in a precarious night, always on the verge of being extinguished. Whether we kindle slowly but steadily, or go out in a brilliant burst of light and color, is our choice. Perhaps the most important choice we'll ever have.

Nenia Campbell

#20. In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

Marcus Aurelius

#21. I will not find myself, nor will I obtain any precarious morsel of life in giving all of life to myself. If I am ever to find these things, I must first be willing to give these things away at the very moment that I come into possession of them.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#22. There is a precarious balance to the life of a building. It has nothing to do with its age, or the beauty of its construction. A damaged building can always be repaired if it still has life, but a dead building will never be whole again.

Natsuhiko Kyogoku

#23. In this world we are in precarious position, balanced midway between material and spiritual hungers. We find heaven to be a delicate state of consciousness that can be lost in a single moment of forgetfulness.

Harold Klemp

#24. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jane Addams

#25. Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn't agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.

Elena Ferrante

#26. The world's my oyster. But it worries me, all this showing off about being happy. Life is so precarious, and I know terrible things can happen. At the moment, everything is happy.

Jerry Hall

#27. The life of a professional golfer is precarious at best. Win, and they carry you to the clubhouse on their shoulders. Lose, and you pay the caddies in the dark.

Gene Sarazen

#28. My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

Madeleine L'Engle

#29. Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don't presume you will have it tomorrow, and don't waste it today.

John Piper

#30. Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed

Judith Butler

#31. Love made things feel precarious, and, when you got right down to it, everything in life was tenuous and fleeting and ultimately tragic.

Emily Giffin

#32. We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse
knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent
construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social
exposure).

Lisa Adkins

#33. But life was precarious and opportunities were never guaranteed.

Lorraine Heath

#34. I think one who thrives on death may be defeated by life.
Elswyth, from A Precarious Journey Into Magic

Jenna Lindsey

#35. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.

Judith Butler

#36. Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious.

Kathleen Norris

#37. My life is quite physical anyway. When you are three-foot-six you kind of have to climb stuff now and again, and you find yourself in quite precarious situations just to manage in what is quite a big world.

Warwick Davis

#38. To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.

James Russell Lowell

#39. An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#40. Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#41. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.

Judith Butler

#42. Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.

Edward Gibbon

#43. My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.

Simon Newcomb

#44. Life balances itself on a precarious ledge, we can stay safe up high or propel off the edge.

Tarryn Fisher

#45. Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

John Wyndham