Quotes about lack (1849 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“She, perhaps, with a consciousness that many of us in adulthood lack or simply lost, would associate that so much water falling on our fat and heavy heads was due to the crying of some poet who was walking by.”

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

Adulthood , Water , Cry

“I believe that academics do not flow naturally with this world, since, many times, the Academy, from those all-knowing egos, which are not lacking, turns the literary into a mere object lacking spirit.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Fuente: https://portal.ucm.cl/noticias/academico-la-ucm-presento-segunda-antologia-hijo-perra-otros-cuentos

World , Time , Nature

“Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. My privacy has always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue.”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

Statement to the press (23 November 1991), the day before his death, as quoted at The Biography Channel http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/338:294/1/Freddie_Mercury.htm.

Truth , World , Disease , Hope

“How could Reagan live in a White
House, which has a lot of rooms, and there be homelessness? And he's talking about helping. I don't believe that there is anyone that is going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them. It is by people not knowing where or how to get this help. Why can't he take people off the street and put them in his White House? Then he'll have people from the streets to help him with his ideas. Not helpless! Homeless! Not helpless They haven't been homeless forever. They've done things in society. The White House would be tainted because he doesn't want to get dirty.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Source: Resurrection, 1971-1996

People , Idea , Help , Housing

“I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.”

Meryl Streep (1949) American actress

Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed

Love , Life , Hate , Friendship

“From an ethical point of view the price difference is grotesque and from a political point of view, it represents a lack of respect, as though a sick Brazilian is inferior.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945) Brazilian politician, 35th president of Brazil

"Brazil to break Aids drug patent" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6626073.stm, BBC News, 4 May 2007

“The rationale for springing out our bed each morning is a sense of purpose. Purpose is the compass that guides us through the decision-making process and aids in the development of our behavior and actions. Lacking a sense of purpose is the equivalent of a feather thrown into a gusty wind.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1988

Spring , Decision , Sense , Behavior

“It is without doubt, nowadays, that many students lack the ability to know or find their true passions in life; after all the criticism they went through. Whether it is at school, college, university or any learning environment.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Learning , Universe , Passion , School

“to live means to lack something at every moment”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

love , Friendship , Cute , Valentine's Day

“196. "Look on the bright side, suicide
Lost eyesight I'm on your side
Angel left wing, right wing, broken wing
Lack of iron and/or sleeping
Protector of the kennel
Ecto-plasma, Ecto-skeletal
Obituary birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery!" ~”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Angels , Birthday , Suicide , Sleep

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

"Introduction: The Missing Ink", in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2002), p. 2

Feeling

“Gaining the sense of immortality or eternal life will make you appear like a god, prophet or saint before those who lack self-knowledge.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

God , Knowledge , Appearance , Sense

“For it falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
While it was ours.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women (1978)

Love , Hate , People , Feeling

“So long as we believe in our heart of hearts that our capacity is limited and we grow anxious and unhappy, we are lacking in faith. One who truly trusts in God has no right to be anxious about anything.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

God , Faith , Heart

“Of course there are dangers in the present situation, and not only that of dogmatism, not only that of weakening the ties with the masses midway in the great task. There is also the danger of weaknesses. If a man thinks that dedicating his entire life to the revolution means, that in return he should not have such worries as that his son lacks certain things, or that his children's shoes are worn out, or that his family lacks some necessity, then he is entering into rationalisations which open his mind to infection by the seeds of future corruption.
In our case we have maintained that our children should have or should go without those things that the children of the average man have or go without, and that our families should understand this and strive to uphold this standard. The revolution is made through man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit day by day.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Life , Children , Family , Shoe

“The. manager must never be lacking in knowledge of the special profession which is characteristic of the undertaking: the technical profession in industry, commercial in commerce, political in the State, military in the Army, religious in the Church, medical in the hospital, teaching in the school, etc. The technical function has long been given the degree of importance which is its due, and of which we must not deprive it, but the technical function by itself cannot endure the successful running of a business; it needs the help of the other essential functions and particularly of that of administration. This fact is so important from the point of view of the organization and management of a business that I do not mind how often I repeat it in order that it may be fully realized.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 68 ; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 6-7

School , Business , Knowledge , Success

“You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Death , War , Heart

“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Way , Imagination , Thinking

“Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

People , Truth , Fear

“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Love , Sex

“Dogs are my favorite role models. I want to work like a dog, doing what I was born to do with joy and purpose. I want to play like a dog, with total, jolly abandon. I want to love like a dog, with unabashed devotion and complete lack of concern about what people do for a living, how much money they have, or how much they weigh. The fact that we still live with dogs, even when we don't have to herd or hunt our dinner, gives me hope for humans and canines alike.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Love , Money , People , Dogs

“We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Time

“The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.”

Frantz Fanon book The Wretched of the Earth

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

People , Education , Decision

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Wisdom

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Books

“There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Life , World , Soul

“If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Life , Imagination

“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface
Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

Men , Truth , Sense

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Not Disraeli but La Rochefoucauld; it is Maxim 308 in his Reflections.
Misattributed

Men , People

“If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do.”

Albert Bandura Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency

[Albert Bandura, 1982, Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency, American Psychologist, 37, 2, 122-147, 10.1037/0003-066X.37.2.122, 0003-066X] (p. 127)

People

“Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle.
That which is affected at the periphery, however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central point.”

John Dee (1527–1608) English mathematican, astrologer and antiquary

Theorem II
Monas Hieroglyphica (1564)

Way , Support

“Learning is to a man as the leaves and branches are to a tree, and it can be said that he should not be without it. Learning is not only reading books, however, but is rather something that we study to integrate with our own way of life.
One who is born into the house of a warrior, regardless of his rank or class, first acquaints himself with a man of military feats and achievements in loyalty, and, listening to just one of his dictums each day, will in a month know 30 precepts. Needless to say, if in a year he learns 300 precepts, at the end of that time he will be much the better.
Thus, a man can divide his mind into three parts: he should throw out those thoughts that are evil, take up those ideas that are good, and become intimate with his own wisdom… I would honor and call wise the man who penetrates this principle, though he lacks the knowledge of a single Chinese character. As for those who are learned in other matters, I would avoid them regardless of how deep their knowledge might be. That is how shallow and untalented this monk is.”

Takeda Shingen (1521–1573) Japanese daimyo of the Sengoku period

William Scott Wilson, ‎Gregory Lee. Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors, 1982. p 95

Life , Wisdom , Books , Way

“The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Charles Dickens (1939)

Truth , Books , Education , Law

“Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities. These disruptions can, with minimum expense, have considerably destructive consequences. Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.”

Jürgen Habermas book Philosophy in a Time of Terror

Habermas (2004) in: Giovanna Borradori (2004) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: : Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. p. 34

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Variant translation: A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days...
Harvard University address (1978)

Life , World , Courage , Support

“Each factory will be making Robots of a diťferent color, a different nationality, a different tongue; that they'll all be different — as different from one another as fingerprints; that they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and … we, we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory… Thunder, we'll make Black Robots and Swedish Robots and Italian Robots and Chinese Robots, and then let someone try to drive the notion of brotherhood into the noggin of their organization…”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Death , Hate , People , Color

“There are wars in this world, not because wars are the will of God but because of greed and arrogance, the lust for power and domination. There is hunger not merely because there is lack of food, but because of political and economic policies that foster inequality of the distribution of resources, because of one-sided control of world markets by powerful nations who refuse to enter seriously in the search for a more just, equitable, and sustainable economic order.”

Allan Boesak (1946) South African anti-apartheid activist

Source: Comfort and Protest (1987), p. 67

Hunger , God , War , World

“The name of the Congress is mud. There is utter lack of leaderdhip in the state.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

In a letter to Nehru when he resigned from a minster's post from the Sampurnanand ministry in 1952 in UP, p. 196
Profiles of Indian Prime Ministers

“What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Dated 16 October 1928
Diary excerpts

People , Religion

“I don't sit around complaining about the lack of good roles. I will play Raj 85 times and still make him different.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Malavika Sangghvi

Time

“Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Imagination , History , Understanding , Question

“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friends—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human

Love , Pain , Friendship , People

“It is not lack of self-restraint but care for others which makes me dine in Lent before the hour of evening.”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Quoted in Notker's The Deeds of Charlemagne (translated 2008 by David Ganz)

“If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 188.

Men , Fear , Soul , Intelligence

“There is no pain worse than ignorance and lack of intelligence.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 165

Pain , Intelligence

“A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

XI. Language, Confusion, and Jam. p. 193
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

Faith , Communication , Science , Dependency

“It was queer. All over England young men were eating their hearts out for lack of jobs, and here was he, Gordon, to whom the very word 'job' was faintly nauseous, having jobs thrust unwanted upon him. It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3

Men , World , Heart

“He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with his youth; and when wisdom was his, youth would have been spent buying it.”

Jack London book A Piece of Steak

"A Piece of Steak" in The Best Short Stories of Jack London (1962) ISBN 0-449-30053-6

Wisdom , Youth , Way

“Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God , Fashion , Time

“About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

In A Man Without a Country (2005) p. 80–81 Vonnegut makes a very similar statement:
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)
Context: About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."

Parting , Personality , Dead

“Your lack of common sense (can be well judged from the fact) that the evidence of two women is equal to one man, that is a proof of the lack of common sense, and you spend some nights (and days) in which you do not offer prayer and in the month of Ramadan (during the days) you do not observe fast, that is a failing in religion.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Sahih Muslim, Book 001, Number 0142
Sunni Hadith
Context: It is narrated on the authority of 'Abdullah b. Umar that the Messenger of Allah observed: O womenfolk, you should give charity and ask much forgiveness for I saw you in bulk amongst the dwellers of Hell. A wise lady among them said: Why is it, Messenger of Allah, that our folk is in bulk in Hell? Upon this the Holy Prophet observed: You curse too much and are ungrateful to your spouses. I have seen none lacking in common sense and failing in religion but (at the same time) robbing the wisdom of the wise, besides you. Upon this the woman remarked: What is wrong with our common sense and with religion? He (the Holy Prophet) observed: Your lack of common sense (can be well judged from the fact) that the evidence of two women is equal to one man, that is a proof of the lack of common sense, and you spend some nights (and days) in which you do not offer prayer and in the month of Ramadan (during the days) you do not observe fast, that is a failing in religion. This hadith has been narrated on the authority of Abu Tahir with this chain of transmitters.

Women , Religion , Sense , Night

“Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939); Paraphrased variant: Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Context: If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger — and that in effect is what Mr Russell is saying — have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Age , Religion , Universe

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)
Context: The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

World , Understanding , Evil

“At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 38
Context: My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. … At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.

Men , Feeling , Thinking , Learning

“I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success.”

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player

People , Success

“Jewry is a Folk with a racial core that is not wholly unitary. Nevertheless, as a Folk, it has special intrinsic characteristics which separate it from all other Folks living on the globe. Jewry is not a religious community, but the religious bond between Jews; rather is in reality the momentary governmental system of the Jewish Folk. The Jew has never had a territorially bounded State of his own in the manner of Aryan States. Nevertheless, his religious community is a real State, since it guarantees the preservation, the increase and the future of the Jewish Folk. But this is solely the task of the State. That the Jewish State is subject to no territorial limitation, as is the case with Aryan States, is connected with the character of the Jewish Folk, which is lacking in the productive forces for the construction and preservation of its own territorial State.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Future , Reality , Communication

“He has never broken a racket in anger. It would be showing a lack of respect to people who actually have to buy the equipment to play the sport.”

Rafael Nadal (1986) Spanish tennis player

Uncle Toni Nadal on nephew Rafael. http://nadal-rafael.tripod.com/id9.html

Sport , Anger , People

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

John Green book Looking for Alaska

Miles "Pudge" Halter about Alaska Young, p. 88
Looking for Alaska (2005)

Courage , Sleep , People , Sex

“The pursuit of success is marked by numerous characteristics; including, perseverance, commitment, education, and wisdom, to name a few. The road to failure can also be described with countless personality traits, including, unreliable, indolence, ignorance, and ineptitude.
However, during my thirty years as an administrator I have witnessed the most significant rationale for failure that cannot be described in a single word. It is a characteristic some people possess, often referred to by psychologists as the, need-to-be-liked-syndrome. Unfortunately, for some, their existence is predicated upon pleasing others, and seeking approval and recognition. They have become an inmate or prisoner to the thoughts and opinions of others.
In other words, they lack self-value, and therefore must receive it from others. When you do not value yourself, then it will be difficult to obtain joy and contentment in one’s life. Remember; you have worth and value.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1997

Success , Personality , People , Failure

“Selfishness comes from too little self-love, not too much, as we compensate for our lack. There’s no such thing as caring for the self too much, just as there’s no such thing as too much genuine affection for others. Our world suffers from too little self-love and too much judgment, insecurity, fear, and mistrust. If we all cared about ourselves more, most of these ills would disappear.”

Anita Moorjani (1959) writer

“Purify your actions and words, so that you will not add more fuel to those who lack these attributes within them.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“The Light failed; but the Darkness that followed was more than loss of light. In that hour was made a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with being of its own: for it was indeed made by malice out of Light, and it had power to pierce the eye, and to enter heart and mind, and strangle the very will.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book The Silmarillion

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Light , Loss , Heart

“We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”

Douglas Adams book Last Chance to See

Source: Last Chance to See

“It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer book Truth and Method

Source: Truth and Method

Way , Nature , Sense , Universe

“That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves”

C.G. Jung book Symbols of Transformation

Source: Symbols of Transformation

“I believe in integrity. Dogs have it. Humans are sometimes lacking it.”

Cesar Millan (1969) Mexican - American dog trainer and television personality

Dogs

“The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Love , Jealousy

“Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love , Pleasure , Joy , Dependency

“Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“The love of money is the root of all evil."

The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Children About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Don't

Love , Money , Evil

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Hate , Imagination

“Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Interesting Times: The Play

Life , Question , Nature

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

As quoted in Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1987) by Robert Byrne, #40

For women , Women , Men

“As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Star , Knowledge

“It is not night when I do see your face,
Therefore I think I am not in the night;
Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company,
For you in my respect are all the world:
Then how can it be said I am alone,
When all the world is here to look on me?”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

World , Thinking , Night

“Human subtlety…will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Richter II p. 126 no. 837 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=A7dUhbBfmzMC&pg=PA126
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Beauty , Nature

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Faith , Thinking

“We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Variant: We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.
Source: Human, All Too Human

“The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Books , Nature , Joy

“She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Variant: She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.
P. 97 http://books.google.com/books?id=iGS8q_odsKAC&q=%22Wo+die+Liebe+herrscht+da+gibt+es+keinen+machtwillen+und+wo+die+macht+den+vorrang+hat+da+fehlt+die+Liebe+Das+eine+ist+der+Schatten+des+andern%22&pg=PA97#v=onepage
The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)

Love

“Vimes's lack of interest in other people's children was limitless.”

Terry Pratchett book Snuff

Source: Snuff

Children , People

“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

This appears in Twain's posthumous The Refuge of the Derelicts (1905), but it had already been published by other writers.
The earliest citation found in Google Books is a 1872 article by Richard Bowker: "Our Crime Against Crimes" https://books.google.com/books?id=YZgBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA68&dq=The+lack+of+money+is+the+root+of+all+evil&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWi5DE1crLAhUI3mMKHeSdB0YQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=%22lack%20of%20money%22&f=false, in The Herald of Health, vol. 19 no. 2, New York: Wood & Holbrook, February 1872. The saying is placed within quotation marks, perhaps indicating that it was already well-known.
A precursor is found in an article from 1859 https://books.google.com/books?id=gpdEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=The+lack+of+money+is+the+root+of+all+evil&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWi5DE1crLAhUI3mMKHeSdB0YQ6AEINTAD#v=onepage&q=%22lack%20of%20gold%22&f=false: It is very well to repeat, parrot-like, the old axiom that “the love of gold is the root of all evil;” but it is very certain that in truth—the lack of gold is the great incentive to crime.
Disputed

Money , Evil

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Source: Twilight of the Idols

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Title of poem (1942)
1940s

Happy , Happiness

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Passion

“Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

People , Business , Affliction

“Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

World , Thinking , Sense , Personality

“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Truth

“It's a lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

As quoted in 101 Best Ways to Get Ahead (2004) edited by Michael E. Angier, with Sarah Pond, p. 59

Faith , People , Faith

“Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.”

Terry Pratchett book Moving Pictures

Source: Moving Pictures

Understanding

“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1960s
Source: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)
Context: The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Passion