Quotes about comfortable
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“The truth is, if we become comfortable with who we are rather than who we think we should be, then we will be less insecure.”

Daniel Gottlieb (1939–2010) French rabbi

Source: Learning from the Heart: Lessons on Living, Loving, and Listening

Joyce Carol Oates photo
Paulo Coelho photo
William Wordsworth photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Julian of Norwich photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“There is real comfort in being quiet.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Kate DiCamillo photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Variant: I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.
Source: Brave New World

Neal A. Maxwell photo
Jim Butcher photo
Denis Diderot photo
Julia Child photo
John Wyndham photo
Bram Stoker photo
Joyce Meyer photo

“[T]he Christian is unable to sin and not care… They may sin, but they cannot do so comfortably and continually. They are very much aware of their wrong actions, and they are very miserable.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You

Jane Austen photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Khaled Hosseini photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Dorothy L. Sayers photo
Jack Kerouac photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Gail Carson Levine photo
Jane Austen photo
Erica Jong photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Brené Brown photo

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Dean Karnazes photo

“Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.”

Dean Karnazes (1962) American distance runner

Source: Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

David Levithan photo
Billy Graham photo
Daniel Defoe photo

“Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have.”

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 9, A Boat.
Context: I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that He has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.

Cassandra Clare photo
Anna Akhmatova photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.”

Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16<!-- p. 228-->
Source: Brave New World (1932)
Context: I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.

Thomas Wolfe photo
Marjane Satrapi photo

“I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”

Marjane Satrapi (1969) Artist

Source: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Carson McCullers photo
Ian McEwan photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Carl Sagan photo

“Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

“Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: One Last Thing Before I Go

Chuck Palahniuk photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Jean Vanier photo
Roberto Bolaño photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
David Levithan photo
Sarah Dessen photo
James Herriot photo

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) veterinary surgeon and writer

Source: [Herriot, James, James Herriot's Cat Stories, 1994, 0-7181-3852-X] (in the introduction and in "Moses Found Among the Rushes")

Jeanette Winterson photo
Edith Wharton photo
Gillian Flynn photo
Thomas Gray photo

“Behind the steps that Misery treads
Approaching Comfort view:
The hues of bliss more brightly glow
Chastised by sabler tints of woe,
And blended form, with artful strife,
The strength and harmony of life.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Source: Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=oopv (1754), Line 35

Don Marquis photo

“there is always
a comforting thought
in time of trouble when
it is not our trouble”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

comforting thoughts
archy does his part (1935)

Nile Kinnick photo
Finley Peter Dunne photo
William H. McNeill photo
Sara Teasdale photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Hugh Plat photo
Jamie Lee Curtis photo

“People get real comfortable with their features. Nobody gets comfortable with their hair. Hair trauma. It's the universal thing.”

Jamie Lee Curtis (1958) actress, author

Quoted in Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women by Bill Adler p. 36

Brian Cox (physicist) photo
Warren Buffett photo

“We're more comfortable in that kind of business. It means we miss a lot of very big winners. But we wouldn't know how to pick them out anyway. It also means we have very few big losers - and that's quite helpful over time. We're perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, as quoted in "Why Won't Buffett Invest in Tech Stocks?" at Motley Fool (6 March 2000) http://www.fool.com/boringport/2000/boringport000306.htm

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo
Sienna Guillory photo

“Worn with tights it is not an issue, although there is something deeply unfeminist about not being able to sit down in one comfortably.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

Something deeply unfeminist about a miniskirt Article http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article432962.ece. Cinemania. May 27, 2004.
Guillory speaks in response to the question, How old is too old for a micro-mini?

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“92. A Father is a Treasure, a Brother a Comfort; but a Friend is both.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1747) : A Father's a Treasure; a Brother's a Comfort; a Friend is both.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Derren Brown photo

“(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
C. D. Broad photo

“Those who, like the present writer, never had the privilege of meeting Sidgwick can infer from his writings, and still more from the characteristic philosophic merits of such pupils of his as McTaggart and Moore, how acute and painstaking a thinker and how inspiring a teacher he must have been. Yet he has grave defects as a writer which have certainly detracted from his fame. His style is heavy and involved, and he seldom allowed that strong sense of humour, which is said to have made him a delightful conversationalist, to relieve the uniform dull dignity of his writing. He incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answers. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument: and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing. The result is that Sidgwick probably has far less influence at present than he ought to have, and less than many writers, such as Bradley, who were as superior to him in literary style as he was to them in ethical and philosophical acumen. Even a thoroughly second-rate thinker like T. H. Green, by diffusing a grateful and comforting aroma of ethical "uplift", has probably made far more undergraduates into prigs than Sidgwick will ever make into philosophers.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

Gloria Estefan photo
Walter Raleigh photo

“Bestow therefore thy youth so, that thou mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter II

Gerard Manley Hopkins photo

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Dorothy Day photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Chris Hedges photo