Quotes about poisoning

A collection of quotes on the topic of poison, poisoning, use, people.

Quotes about poisoning

Hatake Kakashi photo
Frédéric Chopin photo

“I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness.”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

As quoted in Chopin.
Variant translation: I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness. And yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.
Variant: I wish I could throw off the thoughts that poison my happiness, and yet I love to indulge in them;
Source: Chopin's Letters

Jane Goodall photo

“Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Source: Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating

Paracelsus photo

“All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.”

Paracelsus (1493–1541) Swiss physician and alchemist

Paracelsus - Doctor of our Time (1992)

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Anne Sexton photo

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States
Arthur Conan Doyle photo
Thich Nhat Hanh photo
John Chrysostom photo

“Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Do you see that from drunkenness comes fornication, from fornication adultery, from adultery murder? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing? Do you make the anteroom of birth the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the woman who is given to you for the procreation of offspring to perpetrate killing? That she may always be beautiful and lovable to her lovers, and that she may rake in more money, she does not refuse to do this, heaping fire on your head; and even if the crime is hers, you are the cause. Hence also arise idolatries. To look pretty many of these women use incantations, libations, philtres, potions, and innumerable other things. Yet after such turpitude, after murder, after idolatry, the matter still seems indifferent to many men–even to many men having wives. In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks, invocations of demons, incantations of the dead, daily wars, ceaseless battles, and unremitting contentions.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

St. John Chrysostom, Homily 24 on the Epistle to the Romans [PG 60:626-27] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/10/contraception-early-church-teaching-william-klimon.html

D.H. Lawrence photo
John Locke photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Alfred Nobel photo

“Worry is the stomach's worst poison.”

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) Swedish chemist, innovator, and armaments manufacturer
Martin Luther photo

“And I must speak plainly. If I were a judge, I would have such a poisonous, syphilitic whore tortured by being broken on the wheel and having her veins lacerated, for it is not to be denied what damage such a filthy whore does to young blood, so that it is unspeakably damaged before it is even fully grown and destroyed in the blood.”

Source: Table Talk (1569), pp. 552-554 (1566); cited in Susan C. Karant-Nunn & Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks [editors and translators], Luther on Women: a Sourcebook, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 157-158)

“Lost touch with my soul…
I had no where to turn…
I had no where to go.
In My Fear,
I Unearthed My Backbone.
In Deep Pain,
I Discovered My Strength.
In My Denial,
I Detected My Durability.
I crashed down, and I tumbled…
But I did not crumble.
I got through all the Anguish…
I was not meant to be broken.
I did Not Vanquish.
I'm Still Here.
I was not meant to be broken.
From the Nightmare
I was never Awoken.
It took all I had in Me.
I was not meant to be broken.
To become the person I was meant to be.
Put through a whole lot of stress.
Entangled in this Mess.
I was not meant to be broken.
They watched as each blow hit.
Oh how I shall never forget.
Hit me harder with a smile on your face.
Wish for me to fall lower
in place.
Rock Bottom is awefully low for Me.
I'll fight you harder
and then you will see…
I was not meant to be broken.
I tried so hard to make you see.
But all you said to me was leave.
I was not meant to be broken.
They say doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the sign of insanity.
You never looked at the results.
You destroyed My Vanity.
Never prepared for the Hell that I would see.
Never taught how to Be Me
in your
Twisted World.
Can't you see?
I was not meant to be broken.
The Green Eyed Monster.
Evil childhood wishes.
Come alive before your eyes
like a Snake that Hisses.
The sad thing is this…and this much I'll say.
They will never come back again the Days
you have Missed.
It could have been sweet.
It should have been bliss.
But instead all I got was a poisoned kiss.
I was not built to break.
I was not meant to be broken.”

Vladimir Nabokov photo
Hazrat Inayat Khan photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
C.G. Jung photo
Martin Luther photo
John Green photo

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

John Trudell photo
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs photo
John Henry Newman photo

“Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of CHRIST as in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it. Whether this very apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, we cannot know; but at any rate this apostasy, and all its tokens, and instruments, are of the Evil One and savour of death. Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison! Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Tract 83 http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract83.html (29 June 1838).

G. K. Chesterton photo

“I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Superstition of Divorce (1920)
Context: I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.

Marilyn Manson photo
Henri Barbusse photo
Gillian Flynn photo

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

Source: Sharp Objects

Fernando Pessoa photo

“The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Colette photo
William Shakespeare photo
August Strindberg photo

“There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.”

August Strindberg (1849–1912) Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“Reflection poisons desire.”

The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness

Aldo Leopold photo
Jawaharlal Nehru photo

“Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

The Unity of India : Collected Writings, 1937-1940 (1942), p. 280
Context: Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

Christopher Paolini photo
Oscar Wilde photo

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.”

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

William Shakespeare photo

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?". - (Act III, scene I).”

Shylock, Act III, scene i.
Source: The Merchant of Venice (1596–7)
Context: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Lewis Carroll photo

“if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”

Variant: If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Oscar Wilde photo
William Shakespeare photo
Saul Bellow photo

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”

Source: Herzog

Emily Brontë photo
Christopher Paolini photo

“The poison dart hidden in the raisin tart….”

Source: Eldest

Saul Bellow photo
Adam Smith photo

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: The Wealth of Nations

Stefan Zweig photo
Rich Mullins photo
Socrates photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach photo

“Vanity rejects all healthy nourishment and lives exclusively on the poison of flattery.”

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) Austrian writer

Die Eitelkeit weist jede gesunde Nahrung von sich, lebt ausschließlich von dem Gifte der Schmeichelei und gedeiht dabei in üppigster Fülle.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 35.

Barack Obama photo
Pablo Picasso photo
Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Aleksandr Pushkin photo
Stefan Zweig photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Bertrand Russell photo
George Carlin photo

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Pope Gregory I photo
Antonin Artaud photo
Thomas Mann photo
Peter Mere Latham photo

“Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.”

Peter Mere Latham (1789–1875) English physician and educator

Desk Reference of Clinical Pharmacology - Page 1 by Manuchair S. Ebadi - Medical - 2008.
Collected Works

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice … "Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal" — that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, "never make the unequal equal".”

Expeditions of an Untimely Man, §48 Progress in my sense (Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen §48 Fortschritt in meinem Sinne). Chapter title also translated as: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation, and Raids of an Untimely Man, Richard Polt translation
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Original: (de) Die Lehre von der Gleichheit! ... Aber es giebt gar kein giftigeres Gift: denn sie scheint von der Gerechtigkeit selbst gepredigt, während sie das Ende der Gerechtigkeit ist... "Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches - das wäre die wahre Rede der Gerechtigkeit: und, was daraus folgt, Ungleiches niemals gleich machen."

Yukteswar Giri photo
Justin Bieber photo

“I try to read all of my fan mail. A lot of them send me candy, which I'm not allowed to eat 'cause my mom says it might be poisonous.”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

Interview with TIME, as quoted by SugarScape http://www.sugarscape.com/main-topics/lads/506576/justin-biebers-mum-thinks-fans-are-trying-poison-him, May 2010

Socrates photo
Oscar Wilde photo

“The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there”

Pt. V, st. 30
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Context: The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

Thomas Paine photo
Thomas Mann photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Emile Zola photo
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius photo

“When she [Philosophy] saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely, and said she, "Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto."”
Quae ubi poeticas Musas uidit nostro assistentes toro fletibusque meis uerba dictantes, commota paulisper ac toruis inflammata luminibus: Quis, inquit, has scenicas meretriculas ad hunc aegrum permisit accedere, quae dolores eius non modo nullis remediis fouerent, uerum dulcibus insuper alerent uenenis? Hae sunt enim quae infructuosis affectuum spinis uberem fructibus rationis segetem necant hominumque mentes assuefaciunt morbo, non liberant.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Prose I, lines 7-9; translation by W.V. Cooper
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book I

Stig Dagerman photo
Henry A. Wallace photo
Max Scheler photo
Heinrich Heine photo

“My songs, they say, are poisoned.
How else, love, could it be?
Thou hast, with deadly magic,
Poured poison into me.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Lyrical Intermezzo, 57; in Poems of Heinrich Heine: Three Hundred and Twenty-five Poems (1917) Selected and translated by Louis Untermeyer, p. 73

Kurt Vonnegut photo
Terry Pratchett photo
William Glasser photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote.”

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

In Kenneth Harris Talking To: Bertrand Russell (1971)
Attributed from posthumous publications

Natalia Nordman photo

“Vegetarianism is necessary for the very rich and the very poor. The poor need it because it is cheap and nourishing. The rich, in order to cleanse all the poisons from the corpses that have accumulated in their overfed organism.”

Natalia Nordman (1863–1914) Russian author

Povarennaia kneiga dlia golodaiushchikh. Quoted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), vol. 108 https://books.google.it/books?hl=it&id=I7ZkAAAAMAAJ, ed. by Jessica Menzo (Gale Group, 2002), p. 169.

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Equality (1943)
Context: We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut — whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred.”

Essay 1, Section 7
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Context: As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.