100 Dismal Quotes

Following is our list of dismal quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about how to explain.

Quick Jump To

Famous Dismal Quotes

Unfortunately, pessimism is self-fulfilling. — Naval Ravikant

PESSIMISM- philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. — Ambrose Bierce

You will be melancholy, if you are solitary. — Ovid

Pessimism is self-fulfilling. — Naval Ravikant

On a very gloomy dismal day, just such a one as it ought to be, I went to see Westminster Abbey. — Karl Philipp Moritz

The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lonely mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate. — Robert W. Service

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! — John Milton

Despair often breeds disease. — Sophocles

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant. — Rex Stout

Pessimists are second rate people. They do not believe in life. ... All they want to do is drag you down and appease their own feelings of mediocrity and fear. — Uell Stanley Andersen

Pessimistic visions about almost anything always strike the public as more erudite than optimistic ones — Joseph A. Schumpeter

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive. - George Eliot

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive. — George Eliot

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for. — Haruki Murakami

False hope really makes you cynical. — Sayings

Short Dismal Quotes

  • Iran has a dismal record on human rights. — Howard Berman
  • I am wrapped in dismal thinking. — William Shakespeare
  • We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life. — Northrop Frye
  • How dismal is progress without publicity. — Theodore Dreiser
  • The fact is that the New Deal was, overall, a dismal failure. — Mark Levin
  • It's a dismally lonely business, writing. — Toni Cade Bambara
  • The winter will be long and bleak. Nature has a dismal aspect. — Charles Nodier
  • I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal. — Dick Cavett
  • Truly environmentalism has displaced economics as the dismal science. — Steven F. Hayward
  • Economics never was a dismal science. It should be a realistic science. — Paul Samuelson

Dismal Image Quotes

Flow Quotes

While people are struggling unhappily in the cities against the cruel authorities, a waterfall happily and cheerfully flows in the nature; there is happiness only if there is freedom! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When you move like a jellyfish, rhythm is nothing. You go with the flow. You don't stop. — Jack Johnson

Music is a science, it heals depression, it awakens, most people don't know, they just take music for an entertainment, something to dance to, and enjoy yourself and you go to bed and forget it tomorrow, music must never be forgotten, it's like a fountain that keeps on flowing — Peter Tosh

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. - Bible Proverbs

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. — Bible Proverbs

My main goal in life is to just be happy. I don't compromise my happiness for anything. If I find what makes me happy I'm going to do that. That's really going with the flow of life. As far as like the mainstream stuff, if my destiny takes me there and I end up going that route, then that's fine. — Jhene Aiko

If yet your blood does not rage, then it is water that flows in your veins. For what is the flush of youth, if it is not of service to the motherland. — Chandra Shekhar Azad

All religions are true. God can be reached by different religions. Many rivers flow by many ways but they fall into the sea. They all are one. — Ramakrishna

The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me. — Zaha Hadid

Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer. — Wendell Berry

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come. — Leonardo da Vinci

How To Explain Quotes

I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone. — Dan Howell

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher. — Jean Piaget

In order to win, you must play your best golf when you need it most, and play your sloppy stuff when you can afford it. I shall not attempt to explain how you achieve this happy timing. — Bobby Jones

I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them. — Anne Sullivan Macy

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows. — Emily Carr

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me. — Raymond Carver

The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is. — Ernest Hello

No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? — Albert Einstein

I know this is a bit redundant, but it is really hard to explain just how loud Tiger Stadium is when you're standing on the field. The crowd is moving and swaying so much, and in so many directions, it makes the stands look blurry, like a pointillist painting. — Wright Thompson

So, like I asked, what’s with the nightie?” “It smells like what I always think mothers smell like,” I tell him honestly, knowing I don’t have to explain. He nods. “My mum has one just the same and you have no idea how disturbing it is that it’s turning me on. — Melina Marchetta

Help Poor Quotes

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like. — Saint Augustine

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. — John F. Kennedy

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. — Abraham Lincoln

Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim. — Clement Attlee

If you don't want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying that you want a country based on Christian values. Because you don't! — John Fugelsang

There's a lot of money in wars, except in the war on poverty. Can't make any bread helping the poor. — Lenny Bruce

The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them. — Reverend Ike

... a bad attitude, that the love of money is the root of all evil and the rich are evil and greedy and all that stuff. It’s basically socialism and communism. — Robert Kiyosaki

No one is so rich that he does not need another's help; no one so poor as not to be useful in some way to his fellow man; and the disposition to ask assistance from others with confidence and to grant it with kindness is part of our very nature. — Pope Leo XIII

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them. — Mother Theresa

People Writing About Dismal

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant
quotes on money, happiness and life

583 1
Read quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce
quotes on war, love

957 7203
Read quotes by Ovid

Ovid
quotes on love, death

714 3612
Read quotes by Karl Philipp Moritz

Karl Philipp Moritz
quotes on education, war and leadership

22 319
Read quotes by Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service
quotes on leadership

34 668
Read quotes by John Milton

John Milton
quotes on love, death and freedom of speech

780 4024

More Dismal Quotes

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. — Murray Rothbard

If bottled water is bad for the environment and isn’t healthier than tap water, does it at least taste better? Probably not, although it’s wholly subjective. Blind tastings have even shown that tap water scores higher than most mineral waters. The wine magazine Decanter ran a famous blinded taste comparison with twenty-four bottled waters in London in 2007 using wine-tasting experts. Good old London tap water came in at third, costing less than 0.1p per litre. The losers included New Zealand bottled water, which ranked a dismal eighteenth place despite coming from an extinct volcano and costing 50,000 times more than tap water. — Tim Spector

Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels. He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest. — Kahlil Gibran

The heavy rain beat down the tender branches of vine and jessamine, and trampled on them in its fury; and when the lightning gleamed, it showed the tearful leaves shivering and cowering together at the window, and tapping at it urgently, as if beseeching to be sheltered from the dismal night. — Charles Dickens

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. — Walter Benjamin

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. — James Joyce

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.' — Antonin Scalia

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. — Christopher Hitchens

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it. — Albert Bandura

Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally. — John Galsworthy

About midnight the fog shut down again denser than before. One could almost "stand on it." It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on the straw in the midst of the elements. — Joshua Slocum

The Hellish and dismal cloud of...Coal...perpetually imminent over (London) ...that her inhabitants breathe nothing but impure and thick mist...corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies; so the Catarrhs,...Cough, and Consumption, range more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides. — John Evelyn

Now and then we hear the wilder voices of the wilderness, from animals that in the hours of darkness do not fear the neighborhood of man: the coyotes wail like dismal ventriloquists, or the silence may be broken by the snorting and stamping of a deer. — Theodore Roosevelt

There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment. — M. F. K. Fisher

The BEST training program in the entire world will be a DISMAL FAILURE if people fail to hold up their end of the deal. The success of ANY training program is ultimately the trainee's responsibility. — Mark Rippetoe

Because I have confidence in the power of truth and in the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind. Affirmation of the world and of life contains within itself an optimistic willing and hoping which can never be lost. It is, therefore, never afraid to face the dismal reality and to see it as it really is. — Albert Schweitzer

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life. — Henry Van Dyke

In winter, when the dismal rain Comes down in slanting lines, And Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines. — Alexander Smith

In the books I read the sinners are always more interesting than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull. I've no desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy. A short life and a gay one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary. — Louisa May Alcott

Is our situation not dismal? Wonderland is so discombobulated that lady bugs have turned belligerent and enlisted in the queen's army! Punish their conversion! — Cheshire Cat

Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all. — Julian Baggini

The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it. — Ludwig von Mises

people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume. — Nancy Mairs

the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation. — Edgar Degas

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. — Henry David Thoreau

When you are lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety. — W. S. Gilbert

Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long. — Shawn Colvin

This possibility bothered me as I thought it was not advisable to remain in one academic environment, and the long dark winters in Edinburgh could be rather dismal. — Paul Nurse

Without conjuring up fantasies of bygone eras with family games and long, leisurely meals, the question arises: isn't there a better family life available than this dismal, mechanized arrangement of children watching television for however long is allowed them, evening after evening? — Marie Winn

I find it funny that people who didn't think there was any inflation in the pipeline are now talking about stagflation. This is nothing like the 1970's, which was a pretty dismal period and not just because of polyester and disco. — Barry Ritholtz

Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough. — Charles Dickens

....chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life. — John Diamond

It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning. — Charles Dickens

Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them. — Joel Spolsky

At first a golfer excuses a dismal performance by claiming bad lies. With experience, he covers up with better ones. — Lee P. Brown

Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars, I stand in the dark and answer to My life, this shirt I want to take off, which is on fire . . . — Charles Wright

Suddenly reminded, she clapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh- Simon!" "No, I'm Jace," he said patiently. "Simon is the weaselly little one with the bad haircut and dismal fashion sense. — Cassandra Clare

To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature. — Hermann Hesse

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of dismal quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about dismal to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of dismal quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage