Top 68 Ruinous Quotes
#2. Golf is an ideal diversion, but a ruinous disease.
B.C. Forbes
#3. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, a new breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both.
Marya Mannes
#5. It is the circuit of the great ruinous deed when the name of the seventh is that of the fifth; when the third, even greater, the warlike stranger will take Paris, nor will Provence save her.
Nostradamus
#6. When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences.
Siri Hustvedt
#7. My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren't loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain.
Sara Baume
#8. I suddenly realized it's no coincidence the two middle letters of life are if. For every action we make, there is a reaction. The outcome often beyond our control, fragile and fraught with ruinous consequences. Like a soap bubble made real by a gentle breath only to be taken by it.
Michael Faudet
#9. But in after years he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the Void.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#10. An enemy's gift is ruinous and no gift.
Sophocles
#11. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Thomas Sowell
#12. Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps, and banisheth men from their houses, and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil.
Sophocles
#13. The real Muslim is the one who prefers speaking the truth even when it is ruinous to him over lying even when it benefits him, and who finds inner peace in doing so.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#14. But any war is harvest to such Governments, however ruinous it may be to a nation. It serves to keep up deceitful expectations, which prevent a people looking into the defects and abuses of Government. It is the "lo here!" and the "lo there!" that amuses and cheats the multitude.
Thomas Paine
#15. Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers
David Harvey
#16. Sing, goddess, of Achilles' ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey.
Homer
#17. The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it's almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.
Henry Rollins
#18. The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
Jonathan Swift
#19. I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.
Marilynne Robinson
#20. If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#21. I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.
Anne Lamott
#23. We desire the good of the world and the happiness of the nations that the bonds of affection and unity between the sons of men should be strengthened ... what harm is there in this? ... these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the 'Most Great Peace' shall come.
Baha'u'llah
#24. Accustomed, as it is, to think of man as a dualism of mind and body, and to regard the former as "sensible" and the latter as a "dumb" animal, our cultture is an affront to the wisdom of nature and a ruinous exploitation of the human organism as a whole.
Alan W. Watts
#25. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.
Thomas A. Edison
#26. Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment.
James Gould Cozzens
#27. Apart from direct mistakes, there is nothing more ruinous than routine play, the aim of which is mechanical development.
Alexey Suetin
#28. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
Annie Dillard
#29. The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did.
Pat Conroy
#30. The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.
Emil M. Cioran
#32. O thou that dost inhabit in my breast, leave not the mansion so long tenantless; lest, growing ruinous, the building fall and leave no memory of what it was!
William Shakespeare
#34. The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.
Thomas Sowell
#35. A writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.
Storm Jameson
#36. My position is such that there is no necessity for me to enter into competition with struggling humanity. As to expensive and ruinous pleasures, I am a sceptic who knows how much they are worth, or rather, knows that they are not worth anything.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#37. For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.
Soren Kierkegaard
#38. But the ruinous thing about growing up is that we stop creating mysteries where none exist, and worse, we usually try to deconstruct and deny the genuine mysteries that remain. We argue against God, against true romance, against loyalty and self-sacrifice.
Leif Enger
#39. For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.
Nic Pizzolatto
#40. Sweetly and subtly perfumed ... so soft it is best eaten with a spoon, a tenderness more appealing to gourmets than to those who have to pick, ship, handle and store it in constant fear of ruinous spoilage.
Waverley Root
#41. He feels the bleakness crawling into his skull; Franco breaths in steadily, trying to tune in all out, that pressure on your brain, eroding focus, diverting the flow of thought down old ruinous canals...
Irvine Welsh
#42. I most sincerely wish that the world in which we live be free from the threat of a nuclear holocaust and from the ruinous arms race. It is my cherished desire that peace be not separated from freedom which is the right of every nation. This I desire and for this I pray.
Lech Walesa
#43. Whoever is guided solely by his own judgment and decision will never climb up to the summit of perfection and will not fail to be the victim of the devil's ruinous power to delude.
John Cassian
#44. Terrible fires resemble terrible people. They are unpredictable. They are selfish. they are deadly and ruinous. And no matter where they are prowling, no matter what treachery they are cooking up, they have something in common. They can be stopped.
Lemony Snicket
#45. I shall easily show that it is impossible to tax further, ruinous to be always borrowing and not enough to confine ourselves to measures of economy.
Charles Alexandre De Calonne
#46. A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.
Edmund Burke
#48. Terrorism benefits the Arabs, it may lay waste the Yishuv and shake Zionism. But to follow in the Arabs' footsteps and ape their deeds is to be blind to the gulf between us. Our aims and theirs run counter: methods calculated to further theirs, are ruinous to us.
David Ben-Gurion
#49. With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.
James Russell Lowell
#50. But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth's might decays, the might of men decays,
Honor grows cold, dishonor flourishes,
There is no constancy 'twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love.
Sophocles
#51. Magic intensifies and concentrates passions, strengthening not only joy, but ruinous passions as well, and in this way they may become obsessions, and unbearable unless released. -Joseph Anders
Terry Goodkind
#52. In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.
Pankaj Mishra
#53. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
#54. It is admitted on all sides that we must equalize the revenue and expenditures. The scheme of borrowing to make up an increasing deficit must, in the end, if continued, prove ruinous.
John C. Calhoun
#55. Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.
John Barth
#56. Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.
Thomas Huxley
#57. Why do these dumb fucks keep guns around the house? They make the world as ruinous as they imagine it is.
Esme Raji Codell
#59. The whole life of man until he is converted to Christ is a ruinous labyrinth of wanderings.
John Calvin
#60. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.
Donna Tartt
#61. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
H.P. Lovecraft
#63. To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
Billy Collins
#64. Intemperance is a dangerous companion. It throws many people off their guard, betrays them to a great many indecencies, to ruinous passions, to disadvantages in fortune; makes them discover secrets, drive foolish bargains, engage in play, and often to stagger from the tavern to the stews.
Jeremy Collier
#66. There's more."
"Of course there is," Brishen said flatly. It had started badly; it turned worse and hinted at becoming ruinous.
Grace Draven
#67. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves
William Shakespeare
#68. Our marriage ended because I couldn't make him see me or hear me or do anything I wanted or needed. I could only be as selfish and mean as he was to get his attention. And that was ruinous.
Susan Rieger
