Top 100 Troubling Quotes
#2. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.
Frederick Douglass
#3. Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.
Robert Kennedy
#4. One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
Loren Eiseley
#5. I don't know that human beings were meant to mate for life or be monogamous. But, for me, the aspect of marriage that is troubling is that it's a contract that is governed by the state, and I don't want the state to have control over my personal affairs.
Laura Wasser
#6. The movie industry is very competitive, and if you're like me and you suffer from your own insecurities about whether or not you're any good, that can be troubling.
Guy Pearce
#7. At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts
William Styron
#8. Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.
Charles Yu
#9. The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.
Jeanette Winterson
#10. It occurs to me that if I don't sort myself out soon I will die of meaninglessness. That is the price of avoiding the things I find troubling.
Kyo Maclear
#11. They forgot their lives for a moment, abandoned all fear, every thought and troubling notion carried away on the back of the breathtaking melody.
Shawn Mihalik
#12. I like acting. I really like acting. The career, it can keep you interested. With 'Entourage,' the characters are living a lifestyle that is kind of troubling. But the challenge is to make Shauna a person.
Debi Mazar
#13. It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in 'The Practice' than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.
Michael Emerson
#14. I will resign as party leader to take full responsibility for troubling the public and party supporters.
Seiji Maehara
#15. If this goes on . . ." fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved.
Ray Bradbury
#16. We've had crooks from the beginning of time ... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.
Henry Paulson
#17. Our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq thus far has been deeply troubling, and our intelligence-gathering process needs thorough and unbiased investigation.
Adam Schiff
#18. I think to be a movie critic is troubling from one major respect. If you are forced to watch ten movies a week, it's really only something you can do for a few years. After a while, it's a bit too much.
James Gray
#19. The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
W.B.Yeats
#20. We are either part of the problem, or part of the solution...what are we doing each day to try and solve the most troubling human problems?
Tim Spiess
#21. Might contain images or ideas that could be troubling, and also suggests that if you are mature (whatever that happens to mean)
Neil Gaiman
#22. There is no knowledge that is wrong. Only knowledge that is difficult, troubling, enlightening, liberating, and intoxicating.
Omar Saif Ghobash
#23. Oppose vigorously any tendency to sadness ... You must persevere. By means of sorrow the enemy tries to make us weary of good works, but if he sees that we don't give them up and that being done in spite of his opposition they have become very meritorious, he will stop troubling us.
Francis De Sales
#24. As a Korean War Veteran, I know too well the troubling nature of war. This is why I will always support a diplomatic answer before military intervention.
Charles B. Rangel
#25. His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.
Kevin Wilson
#26. THE soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
Depart, before the host has slid
The bolt upon the door,
To seek for the accomplished guest,
Her visitor no more.
Emily Dickinson
#27. If we want any hope of reversing troubling church trends, especially among young people, we must focus not on tribal heritage, denominational branding, theological hair-splitting, or pharisaical purity. We must focus on Jesus - and his sacrificial love for us and all people.
Thom Schultz
#28. I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#29. Alone, I am satisfied with myself. With others, I am beset by troubling comparisons.
Mason Cooley
#30. I grew up as a Catholic, and there was so much that was beautiful there, and also so much that was troubling. The whole patriarchal thing, the whole male-dominated approach, really bothered me.
Patty Griffin
#31. Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
Tao Lin
#32. Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
Judith Butler
#33. The lover as baby is a less troubling idea than the baby as lover.
Mason Cooley
#34. It's disingenuous and wrong to say that the attorney general's expanded powers in the Patriot Act come with adequate oversight by the courts, ... In reality, the most troubling provisions in the law make judges little more than rubber stamps in Justice Department investigations.
Anthony Romero
#35. No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit.
Anne Bronte
#36. Is it a good life, Daddy? Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#37. The Boy came to me in the autumn of 2009. He was in a corner of my mind, choking on his own bad dreams, begging a man not to have him do the thing again.
I didn't want to know what the thing was, so I hid The Boy in a crowd of less troubling voices.
Magaly Guerrero
#38. To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato
for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius
without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.
Muriel Barbery
#39. There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
Harold Prince
#40. So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
Samuel E. Morison
#41. Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.
J.K. Rowling
#42. There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.
Skeet Ulrich
#43. Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done.
Alan Bradley
#44. The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.
James Hollis
#45. What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.
Barney Frank
#46. Religion may indeed inspire acts of great kindness and courage. But it also trains people to believe things for which there is no evidence. This makes religion's intrusion into the political sphere all the more troubling.
Ron Reagan
#47. So it was surprising that I killed it as a babysitter. Er, maybe "killed it" is a wrong and potentially troubling way to express what I'm trying to say.
Mindy Kaling
#48. If people choose to live their life in a way that does not confront the more troubling aspects of their experience, that's fine, if it works for them. But it will probably make them uncomfortable if they come up against somebody like me. So they just shouldn't! They shouldn't read my work!
Joyce Maynard
#49. We are in the midst of a protracted wage slump, ... a troubling trend that is largely going unnoticed by policymakers.
Jared Bernstein
#50. By gad, is that you, Ainswood? I haven't seen you in a dog's age. How's the gout? Still troubling you?
Loretta Chase
#51. You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.
Arthur Eddington
#52. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself - our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.
Nicholas Carr
#53. If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche
#54. An example is often a deceptive mirror, and the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts, is not always found written in things past.
Pierre Corneille
#55. In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn't want to simplify? Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence.
Gary Ross
#56. The idea that corporations have the same First Amendment protections of free speech as people is troubling. Corporations are not people. They don't attend our schools, get married and have children. They don't vote in our elections.
Hank Johnson
#57. For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again.
Alice Sebold
#58. W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.
Vernon Reid
#59. What's troubling is that because the camera is 3D, the northern part of the screen isn't necessarily north anymore. So the jungle transforms into the true meaning of a jungle. For someone with no sense of direction like myself, I get lost in the caves every time.
Hideo Kojima
#60. The truth is the justice system does need review, there are troubling questions that need to be answered, law enforcement needs to respect the community and the community needs to respect law enforcement.
Mario Cuomo
#61. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling.
David Geffen
#62. His [Donald trump] views on Vladimir Putin, I think, are troubling. And I don't think he fundamentally understands exactly who Vladimir Putin is or exactly what he's trying to do. So, these are the kinds of things that I think in detail you need to begin to understand.
Marco Rubio
#63. Stepping beyond the domain of our best model, with its tantalizing mix of solid evidence and troubling difficulties, we enter the realm of speculation. Why is our universe just as it is?
Trevelyan
#64. There's the animation ghetto of feature films in this country. There's this flavor at DreamWorks, and Pixar does their own thing, and generally they're safe. But if you look at Walt Disney's original films, at the time and in the context, they weren't safe. They were really dark and troubling.
Henry Selick
#65. Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I'm glad that's not me. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.
Haruki Murakami
#66. If you can laugh your way through life, you can have a good time as you're going through the sometimes troubling time that we have in our lives.
Mehmet Oz
#67. The safe haven that al-Qaida has found in Pakistan is very troubling.
Hillary Clinton
#68. I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.
Howard Zinn
#69. All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of star.
Francis G. Thompson
#70. In recent weeks we learned that scientists have created human embryos in test tubes solely to experiment on them. This is deeply troubling, and a warning sign that should prompt all of us to think through these issues very carefully.
George W. Bush
#71. He's an intimate betrayer. That's what's so troubling. Judas turned in his own teacher.
Elaine Pagels
#72. It's troubling for me as a Catholic to be at odds with the church.
Andrew Cuomo
#73. I wasn't the only one that saw Sarah Palin vacillate between glorious highs on the campaign trail - and, you know, while she was speaking and at the convention - to really troubling lows when she seemed stumped in interviews.
Nicolle Wallace
#74. What's most troubling is the open water swim. It's windy, the waves are getting in your face and the water is a bit dirty. And there's silly things like you can't touch the bottom if you swallow a mouthful of water.
Greg James
#75. I voice my opinions on social media and I have people threatening me with violence. It is troubling but I can fight back, which is good.
Margaret Cho
#76. Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
P. J. O'Rourke
#78. As a cure for worrying, work is far better than whiskey. I always found that, if I began to worry, the best thing I could do was focus upon doing something useful and then work very hard at it. Soon, I would forget what was troubling me.
Thomas A. Edison
#79. As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well.
Alain De Botton
#80. The Internet, in general, I find troubling. The anonymity has made us all meaner and dumber. This thing that was supposed to bring us closer together, I see it doing the opposite.
Aaron Sorkin
#81. It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.
Romesh Gunesekera
#83. Be open-minded and available to everything and not just saying it's Jesus Christ or bust. So much of the world will do that. I find it troubling ... Don't be dogmatic.
Joe Carnahan
#84. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
Cormac McCarthy
#85. When we throw ourselves off the power seat and allow Jesus to fill our soul, heart and mind - our whole life - with His leadership, the troubling, painful and fearful circumstances of our life lose their power over us.
Lynn Donovan
#86. Antidepressants can have troubling side effects and are addictive for some people.
Irving Kirsch
#87. [My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
P.D. James
#88. The Chinese had a saying that had been in her mind for a while, troubling her: Society prepares the crime; the criminal only commits it.
James Patterson
#89. Heaven: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound on yours.
Ambrose Bierce
#90. One question keeps troubling me: Why? ... The short answer: I don't know. and yet that single word, why, remains the consummate human query. By nature, we're curious. We want to know.
Don Piper
#91. I don't believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of 'fairness' is what's troubling to me.
Aaron Sorkin
#92. [L]uxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish. You're free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)
Anne Leckie
#93. Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead.
Julian Castro
#94. phenomenon has reappeared in a more troubling form with the holy alliance between the believers and what they can borrow or steal from the world of science. Here is Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, a distinguished professor
Christopher Hitchens
#95. Collectors Have A Troubling New Way To Get
Anonymous
#96. Power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.
Gertrude Atherton
#97. Life is a big collaboration - and when you're tackling something that is painful and troubling and is causing you such desperate grief that you think life's not worth living - you need to reach out. To people who will reach back.
Tim Gunn
#98. Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like," Porfiry Petrovitch began again, "but I can't resist. Allow me one little question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I want to express, simply that I may not forget it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#99. Martin Greer Galton had ceased troubling his fellow man in 1964, when a cerebral aneurysm achieved what most of his acquaintances and business associates would have dearly loved to have had a hand in.
Lawrence Block
#100. A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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