Quotes about stumbling

A collection of quotes on the topic of stumbling, use, way, life.

Quotes about stumbling

“Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”

Pericles (-494–-429 BC) Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens

As translated by Richard Crawley (1951)
History of the Peloponnesian War

Way, Thinking

“I'm looking for the face i had before the world was made. I was the primordial flaring forth, the gravitational waves, the whirling galaxies, and the exploding supernovas that would become stars and planets. I was the steaming planet Earth, the bacteria awash in the sea, and the early eukaryotes and multicellular animals. I exploded in the Cambrian explosion, stumbled onto land, walked with dinosaurs, saw trees and flowers appear, walked upright in Africa, and walked on the moon. I felt the embrace of gravity. I was one with all that had been and all that was to be. I experienced subjective mystical communion with the evolutionary, emergent universe. I was the universe. We know not where the journey leads, nor whether a final destination is even a meaningful concept. The attraction is the inherent thrill of participating in a grand creative endeavor for which participation is its own reward”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14108295.alexis_karpouzos

World, Star, Flowers, Tree

“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Variant: Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall.
Source: Romeo and Juliet

Deep

“The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Women, Way

“Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' … doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace”

Martin Luther book On the Bondage of the Will

Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 217

Men, God, Health, Age

“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On Stanley Baldwin, as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 322 ISBN 1586486381 Also quoted by Kay Halle in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill's Wit http://books.google.com/books?id=b0MTAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Occasionally+he+stumbled+over+the+truth+but+hastily+picked+himself+up+and+hurried+on+as+if+nothing+had+happened%22&pg=PA133#v=onepage (1966). The 1930s Variant: Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Truth

“I remember thinking I just want more. This isn't it. Fame is not the goal. Money is not the goal. To be able to know how to get peace of mind, how to be happy, is something you don't just stumble across. You've got to search for it.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Money, Happiness, Peace, Search

“It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

“I have no way and therefore want no eyes
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen
our means secure us, and our mere defects
prove our commodities.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

Way

“There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.”

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

Dependency

“A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

“Focus on giants - you stumble.
Focus on God - Giants tumble.”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: Cast of Characters: Common People in the Hands of an Uncommon God

God

“Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

“The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked upon.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

1
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Way

“For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.”

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

Source: Letter to Lord Grey de Wilton (3 October 1873), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 5 (1920), p. 262.

Thinking, Country

“He reminds me of that excitement when De Niro and I stumbled upon a way of working together - a similar kind of energy to the actors in the 1970s. It’s very rare for me to find that kind of connection again. Leo will give me the emotion where I least expect it and could only hope for it about three or four scenes. And he can do it take after take.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

Martin Scorsese http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes About

Hope, Way

“For Christians above all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force…it is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

On the Priesthood http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf109/Page_41.html, Book II

Men, God, Law, Evil

“But since, if the usefulness of the legislation, and the sequence and beauty of the history, were universally evident of itself, we should not believe that any other thing could be understood in the Scriptures save what was obvious, the word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offences, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not, through being drawn away in all directions by the merely attractive nature of the language, either altogether fall away from the (true) doctrines, as learning nothing worthy of God, or, by not departing from the letter, come to the knowledge of nothing more divine.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 4, ch. 2, par. 15
On First Principles

God, Law, Beauty, History

“The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious; it is something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature… like a traumatic event constructed backwards.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

190
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World, Nature, Universe, Time

“Life is suffering.
Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated.
Truth is the handmaiden of love.
Dialogue is the pathway to truth.
Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn.
To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small.
So speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place,
so that we can all humbly learn,
so that truth can serve love,
so that suffering can be ameliorated,
so that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Banned lecture at Linfield College: Ethics and Free Speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKHuxVvA7T8 Other

Love, Life, Truth, Way

“I may not be walking with you all the way, or even much of the way, as I walk with you now. Don’t be angry with me if I am not there in person, alive and well, when you need me. I would like nothing more than to be with you always. Do not feel sorry for me if I am gone. When we were together, I loved you deeply and you gave me so much happiness I can never repay you. Camera, wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.”

Arthur Ashe (1943–1993) American tennis player

Message to his daughter Camera, p. 341
Days of Grace: A Memoir (1994)

Love, Life, Happiness, Smile

“over zealous in the feat
And stumbling on a peril unaware.
Was captive, "trammelled in his proper snare,"
They phrase it, "taken by his own intrigue"”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

“The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Help

“America has never come easy. Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress: to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice and fairness and equality under the law, so that the words set to paper by our founders are made real for every citizen. The America we want for our kids -- a rising America where honest work is plentiful and communities are strong; where prosperity is widely shared and opportunity for all lets us go as far as our dreams and toil will take us -- none of it is easy. But if we work together; if we summon what is best in us […], with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow, I know it's within our reach. Believe it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Sixth State of the Union Address (January 2014)

Fear, Justice, Law, Dreams

“The Road of life is rocky and you may stumble too,
so while you talk about me, someone else is judging you.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Song lyrics, Judge Not (single, 1961)

Life

“When I was 15 or so, I stumbled on literature related to Indian spirituality, and instantly felt that there was something that held essential keys. I read several of the great masters, something of India's ancient literature, and finally decided that Sri Aurobindo's view of life and the world was what I was looking for. It was not a passing craze or a 'New Age' fad; it not only satisfied the intellect but also touched the core of the being.”

Michel Danino (1956) Indian writer

On Sri Aurobindo, as quoted in " The Sarasvati was more sacred than Ganga http://www.rediff.com/news/report/interview-with-michel-danino/20100522.htm", Rediff (22 May 2010)

Life, Age, World, Literature

“In the evening you hear the scream of bats,
Two black horses jump in the meadow,
The red maple rustles.
To the traveller the small inn appears by the wayside.
Wonderful the taste of young wine and nuts,
Wonderful: stumbling drunk into darkening wood.
Through black branches painful bells sound,
On the face dew drips.”

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) austrian poet

"Towards Evening My Heart," Poems (1913)
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/29/wild-heart-turning-white-georg-trakl-and-cocaine/

Pain, Travel, Appearance, Wine

“I always wanted to be a comedian and actor, […] I basically stumbled into the music medium, though. I'm OK, but that's about it. I like to think I'm good enough not to negatively affect the performance.”

Bo Burnham (1990) American comedian, musician, and actor

Source: [Joseph P., Kahn, Joseph P. Kahn, Nonfamily humor, straight from home, y, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/02/13/nonfamily_humor_straight_from_home/, The Boston Globe, P. Steven Ainsley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 2008-02-13, 2009-01-25, Irreverent songs win Hamilton youth a cult following]

Music, Thinking

“America, I know the road will be long, but I know we can get there. Yes, we will stumble, but I know we’ll get back up. That’s how a movement happens. That’s how history bends. That's how when somebody is faint of heart, somebody else brings them along and says, come on, we’re marching.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

History, Heart

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly”

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

1910s, Citizenship in a Republic (1910)
Context: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

Strong, Courageous

“In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good,a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)
Context: It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.

Truth, Beauty, Way, Mathematics

“Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him.”

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

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him.

Chance, Help

“Easy there," Zach said when I stumbled into him. "Now's probably not the time to get handsy. You might want to control yourself.”

Ally Carter Out of Sight, Out of Time

Source: Out of Sight, Out of Time

Time

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake….”

Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984) Scottish writer

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

Joy

“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Life, God, Lovers

“… A man can only stumble for so long before he either falls or stands up straight.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

World

“It's like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music & starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you'd once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Music, Learning, Heart

“There's another problem," Percy said. "I'm not good with air travel. It's dangerous for a son of Neptune."
"You'll have to risk it… and so will I," Frank said. "By the way, we're related."
Percy almost stumbled off the roof. "What?”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Way, Travel, Problem

“Stop running, you fools!" Kronos yelled. "Stand and ACKK!"
That last part was because a panicked Hyperborean giant stumbled backwards and sat on top of him. The lord of time disappeared under a giant blue butt.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Fools, Time, Parting

“She never stumbles,
she's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
the law can't touch her at all.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Law

“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Variant: Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch.1

“A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.”

Tobsha Learner (1959) British writer

Source: The Witch of Cologne

Life, Knowledge, Past, Future

“Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. We found the little kingdom of our passion that all can share who walk the road of lovers. In wild and secret happiness we stumbled; and gods and demons clamoured in our senses.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Source: The Poems of Wilfred Owen

God, Happiness, Secret, Way

“He let her get almost all the way there, just staring, before he stumbled towards her. They ended in a rush and then fell to the ground together, arms locked around each other, each holding on as tightly as possible. Niether of them said a word.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Dark Reunion

Way

“I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.”

Paullina Simons book The Summer Garden

Source: The Summer Garden

Life, Stupidity

“I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Love, Life, People, Beauty

“You all right, man?'
This should be my name. I could be like a super hero: You All Right Man.
Ah…' I stumble.
Don't bug Craig,' Ronny is like. 'He's in the Craig zone. He's Craig-ing out.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and”

Robyn Davidson (1950) Australian writer

Source: Tracks

Fear, Learning

“… what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Swan Thieves

Source: The Swan Thieves

Pleasure, Books

“Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Help

“Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

“Look, I need to tell you something,' I continued. The words came stumbling out of me. 'I couldnt stand it if… I dont want you to---'
Percy?' she said. 'You look like you're going to be sick.'
And that's how I felt.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“I stumble through a carnival of horrors”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

Source: The Vampire Lestat

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Variant: I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Source: Doctor Zhivago

Life, People, Beauty

“We may run, walk, stumble. drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey, or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.”

Gloria Gaither (1942) American gospel songwriter, author & scholar

Way, Chance, Flying

“I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

“Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession - celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet”

Philip Reeve book Fever Crumb

Source: Fever Crumb

World, Time

“I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people if they are sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the biggest stumbling block in our world today.

~Jessop”

Agatha Christie book Destination Unknown

Source: Destination Unknown

People, World

“Only those who never step, never stumble.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: Lost December

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Life, Motivational, Back To Work, Moving On

“One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice (1813)

“To be a saint is the exception; to be a just person is the rule. Err, stumble, commit sin, but be one of the just.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Personality

“How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni book The Mistress of Spices

Source: The Mistress of Spices

Forgiveness

“life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.”

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

Life, Suffering

“Derek picked the spot? Had he been hoping I'd be blinded by the morning sun and stumble off the edge?”

Kelley Armstrong The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Hope, Sun

“things which in my mind blossom will
stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear
capable of fragility and indecision”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Appearance, Indecision

“At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Fear, Beauty

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

Fear, Failure, Hell, Cooking

“I thought I'd stumbled on Sleeping Beauty and her ugly sister,' said another voice, 'waiting for the kiss of true love to wake them from their slumbers. Forgive me if I didn't oblige.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Kings of Clonmel

Love, Beauty, Forgiveness, Kiss

“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Reality

“You will be leaving, of course."

"Or I could help you."

"I've had a bit of practice bathing myself and I think I can stumble my way through this.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night

Way, Thinking, Help

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Life, Way

“She stumbled back a step. “Carlos was the…?”
“Panther, aye.”
“He’s a cat?” And her boss was a dog. She shook her head. Was her next door neighbor a goldfish?”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: The Vampire and the Virgin

Dogs, Cats

“All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, wile calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Part II, Chapter 8
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Feeling, Time

“To satisfy your curiosity, I can explain very plainly. But since Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit, and God's primary object of this dispensation is Christians (it is His will that we lead Christians first because they are the ones who have been keeping the promise of the Second Coming), it is our mission to tell them first, whether they refuse or accept. If I explain everything plainly about the birth of Jesus, it may put a stumbling block in the way of many Christians accepting God's new dispensation. Therefore, I don't want to explain everything too plainly here.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Master Speaks (1967) Part 7: Bible Interpretation http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Books/sm-mast/MSTRSP-7.htm (transcriptions of Q&A sessions in March-April 1965)

God, Way, Birth

“The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 17 (p. 401)

Life, People, Books, Beauty

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“On the September 26, 2008 broadcast of CNN's "Situation Room", while sitting next to Wolf Blitzer, Cafferty directly highlighted Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's abysmal interview performance with Katie Couric earlier in the week. Cafferty stated, prior to playing a particularly embarrassing segment of the interview in which Palin stumbles across a murky, confused, ambiguous answer to Couric's query regarding the pending economic bailout package, "There's a reason the McCain campaign keeps Sarah Palin away from the press." After the clip's conclusion, he then went on to say, "…Did you get that? If John McCain wins, this woman will be one 72 year-old's heartbeat away from being president of the United States, and if that doesn't scare the Hell out of you, it should…I'm 65 and have been covering politics as you have [addressing Blitzer] for a long time, and that is one of the most pathetic pieces of tape I have ever seen for someone aspiring to one of the highest offices in this country. That's all I have to say." Blitzer responded in a light-hearted, seemingly forced defense of Palin, stating, "Yeah, but she's cramming a lot of information…" Cafferty interrupted, "There's no excuse for that. She's supposed to know a little bit of this, you know. Don't make excuses for her - that's pathetic."”

Jack Cafferty (1942) American journalist

Blitzer replied, "It was not her best answer. I agree with you on that," and the segment came to a close.
[CNN, Jack Cafferty on Sarah Palin, 26 September 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc]
2008

Hell, Light, Wolf, Time