Top 100 Quotes About Precarious
#1. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
David Maraniss
#2. Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.
Norman Borlaug
#3. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
#4. Freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged ... the freest person is the one with the most hope.
Gabriel Marcel
#5. 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
#6. It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.
Albert Einstein
#7. It seems that the hurdle you have to jump over is everyone's informed opinion. When you're a young playwright, you're probably too precarious in your own technique to understand that when these seemingly informed opinions are contradicting each other, it becomes this paralyzing monolith.
Richard Greenberg
#8. Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
Charles Caleb Colton
#9. How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what way is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information?
Jonathan Crary
#10. All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. 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
#12. Life is precarious, and life is precious. Don't presume you will have it tomorrow, and don't waste it today.
John Piper
#13. Mothering is precarious. You try to do the right thing - you think you have - then wham.
Barbara Delinsky
#14. Some people are weak in their faith and testimonies but are not even aware of how precarious their situation is. Many of them likely would be offended at the suggestion.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#15. The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos.
Eric Voegelin
#17. Ometimes she felt like she was walking a fine line, precarious line between the two of them. Like there wasn't enough of her to be who she needed to be for them both.
Rainbow Rowell
#18. But, on the other hand, the occasional and precarious dripping of coppers has by no means a genial effect.
James Payn
#19. I stepped from plank to plank So slow and cautiously; The stars about my head I felt, About my feet the sea. I knew not but the next Would be my final inch, - This gave me that precarious gait Some call experience.
Emily Dickinson
#20. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
Diane Ackerman
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Overcome your guilt. Care, but not too much. Take responsibility, but don't blame yourself. Protect, save, help- but know when to give up. They're precarious ledges to walk. How do I do it?
Brandon Sanderson
#24. Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining its character. On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society.
Hilaire Belloc
#25. Acting is a precarious business. I have had periods where I felt like I couldn't get arrested, but you have to see it as a long game.
Ewen Bremner
#26. For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton
#27. 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
#29. But life was precarious and opportunities were never guaranteed.
Lorraine Heath
#30. I think one who thrives on death may be defeated by life.
Elswyth, from A Precarious Journey Into Magic
Jenna Lindsey
#31. Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You've erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control. That's why you feel threatened by me.
Philip K. Dick
#32. The situation in Iraq is dangerous but the regional situation is also very complicated and precarious.
Joschka Fischer
#33. 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
#34. I don't know if tea really helps when one feels precarious, but it does give one something warm to hold on to. A kitten would work just as well, but we don't have one at the moment. They will grow into cats.
Joanna Bourne
#35. We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population, that legislative measures occasion; displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus enlarge to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.
Frederic Bastiat
#36. If you have given up your militia, and Congress shall refuse to arm them, you have lost every thing. Your existence will be precarious, because you depend on others, whose interests are not affected by your infelicity.
Patrick Henry
#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. My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.
Albert Einstein
#39. Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?
Justina Chen
#40. At17, balanced on that precarious walkway between adolescence and adulthood, the world is a crazy obstacle course paved one day with broken glass, the next with apple blossom.
Joanne Harris
#41. At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, ghat our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#42. The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#43. I find that if I'm watching somebody upon television or in a movie that is on a window ledge or in some high precarious position my hand starts sweating and I get that crawling feeling in the soles of my feet.
Alan Moore
#45. The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.
Walter J. Phillips
#46. You don't know how precarious things are, how close this world is to falling back into ruin.
Victoria Aveyard
#47. Cricket is a most precarious profession; it is called a team game but, in fact, no one is so lonely as a batsman facing a bowler supported by ten fieldsmen and observed by two umpires to ensure that his error does not go unpunished.
John Arlott
#48. 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
#49. The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.
Lauren Groff
#50. Unless the Stream of their Importation could be turned ... they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have, will not in my Opinion be able to preserve our Language, and even our Government will become precarious.
Benjamin Franklin
#51. The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.
Herbert Marcuse
#52. 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
#53. The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
Aldous Huxley
#54. Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.
John Rhys-Davies
#55. Trust to a plank, draw precarious breath,
At most seven inches from the jaws of death.
Juvenal
#56. Out of the window , I could see a tree in the distance -little more than a sapling, really, stunted and fragile, it's slender, brittle branches burdened by a precarious layer of snow. It was not healthy; I only had to look at it to understand that.
Gary William Murning
#57. Hopes have precarious life.
They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
George Eliot
#58. 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
#59. My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.
Simon Newcomb
#60. I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
Will Durant
#61. Life balances itself on a precarious ledge, we can stay safe up high or propel off the edge.
Tarryn Fisher
#62. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work.
Robin G. Collingwood
#63. Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.
John Wyndham
#64. I think these are very precarious times for women, it seems. So many of your rights are under assault.
Richard Hanna
#65. I Lived on the street when i was a kid, i wasn't even at school, so i had a whole different set of experiences for those formative years. I was gone ... i was in a very precarious place when i was younger.
Jared Leto
#66. It is at the precise moment that I take something for granted that I have placed myself in the precarious position of losing that very thing. And if that thing I risk losing is liberty, taking it for granted is foolishness of the most foolish sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. This is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be paid for in full.
Clarence Day
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course)
Milan Kundera
#74. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
R. Scott Bakker
#75. [The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon
#76. The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.
David Levithan
#77. The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body; for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.
Hannah Arendt
#81. Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.
Norman Douglas
#82. Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#83. And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
John Crowe Ransom
#84. That's why I've never thought of retiring because I do it all the time whether on the stage or off. I found that in a precarious situation, a smile is the shortest distance between people. When one needs to reach out for sympathy or a link with people, what better way is there?
Victor Borge
#85. He'd already put a shirt on each leg and had stacked every shoe I owned into a precarious pyramid. The room looked like a small, overly curious tornado had torn it apart.
"You have got to be kidding me," I said. "Maybe I should give you to Shamus.
Devon Monk
#86. You had no place of your own in the world of adults. It was sink or swim for you - you couldn't help but be strong because your whole world was precarious. I've always felt your underlying fragility. I loved your fragility when you weren't afraid to let it show.
Andre Gorz
#87. A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#88. 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
#89. For peace is not simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men.
Pope Paul VI
#90. Happiness is a pretty precarious state, Randeep. I'm content. That's more than enough. That's more than most.
Sunjeev Sahota
#91. In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.
Ian McEwan
#92. Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
#93. There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.
John Negroponte
#94. The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.
Winston Churchill
#95. Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.
Isaac Newton
#96. Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other
James Thurber
#97. In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
Olaf Stapledon
#99. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done;
Margaret Atwood
#100. I think in certain areas the demand is greater than it has ever been, and my business is better than it's been in 30 years. The music business is so precarious, as you know-you've got to make it while you can make it, and that's exactly what we're doing.
George Shearing
