139 Unsettling Quotes

Following is our list of unsettling quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about unsettling feeling.

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Famous Unsettling Quotes

Having our fundamental assumptions about life challenged is never a comfortable thing. — Maajid Nawaz

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. — Banksy

Feeling uncomfortable about a situation is oftentimes the indicator that growth is about to take place. — Isaac Mashman

Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear. — Ovid

Discomfort challenges us to question our assumptions and expand our perspectives. — Michael Easter

What uneasiness lies in being loved. — Osamu Dazai

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable! — Jillian Michaels

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do. — Sally Mann

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. - Charlotte Bronte

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. — Charlotte Bronte

If we are to better the future we must disturb the present. - Catherine Booth

If we are to better the future we must disturb the present. — Catherine Booth

Restlessness is a fickle catalyst; it can drive you to achieve or it can coax your demise, and sometimes the choice isn't yours — Slash

Discomfort is a sign that we are pushing ourselves beyond our current comfort zone. — Michael Easter

A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change. — Megyn Kelly

It is your restlessness that causes chaos. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Short Unsettling Quotes

  • Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable? — Tom Hayden
  • The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes. — Anthony Giddens
  • A question settled by violence, or in disregard of law, must remain unsettled forever. — Jefferson Davis
  • My wild and free side unsettled some, and unwedged others. — Sayings
  • There are a lot of things you can practice to unsettle teams that defend deep. — Didier Deschamps
  • Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world. — Karl Kraus
  • It's pretty physically unsettling, living life on a visa. — Sayings
  • My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. — Robert M. Hutchins
  • People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • How good it is for us when the Lord unsettles our lukewarm and superficial lives. — Pope Francis

Unsettling Image Quotes

Most Unsettling Quotes

Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all. — Mark Kingwell

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers. — H. G. Wells

For many people a job is more than an income - it's an important part of who we are. So a career transition of any sort is one of the most unsettling experiences you can face in your life. — Paul Clitheroe

Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order? — Ugo Betti

It's always very pure, that last moment before an ugly, unsettling truth hits someone. The most stark of before-and-afters. — Sarah Dessen

You have to overcome enormous self-consciousness, but nudity is about the strongest thing you can do in an acting performance. It's the most unsettling or the most comic or the most sexual. — John Lithgow

The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. — Edwin Percy Whipple

It is this kindness of his that unsettles me most. I can dodge a blow or block a knife. I am impervious to poison and know a dozen ways to escape a chokehold or garrote wire. But kindness? I do not know how to defend against that. — R.L. LaFevers

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. — Douglas Adams

Unsettling Feeling Quotes

A good trader has to have three things: a chronic inability to accept things at face value, to feel continuously unsettled, and to have humility. — Michael Steinhardt

I'd like them [people] to leave thinking about the challenges women face in the workforce, but more importantly to really feel the emotional highs and lows of those challenges - to have really experienced that unsettling place where ambition crosses over into something else entirely. — Meera Menon

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out. — Tullian Tchividjian

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream. — J. G. Ballard

The press gave me a voice too quickly, and that could have unsettled a man who had every right to feel he should be in control of the thing he had created. — Alison Moyet

I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that. — Richard Rodriguez

Getting on stage and performing and standing under lights is such an unsettling experience - in a good and bad way - but it's the only place I can go to feel comfortable. — Matt Berninger

Every 20 minutes you've got to have a bump, you've got to have a change in course, you've got to unsettle the audience. It can't be too predictable so something has to happen. I think that was something that Hitchcock did very well too. You couldn't let an audience feel too settled in. — Barbara Broccoli

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little. — Sarah Waters

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake. — Dana Spiotta

Unexpected Thoughts Quotes

Black Swan theory tells us that things happen that were previously thought to be impossible – or never thought of at all. — Chris Voss

Love can make you do things that you never thought possible - Phil Collins

Love can make you do things that you never thought possible — Phil Collins

The first thing we ever filmed was, we had to eat off people's plates, like we just walked over and took something. We thought we would get punched. — Joe Gatto

In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities. — Edward O. Thorp

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible. — Asger Jorn

I do not think it is logical to try and outsmart the smartest people. Instead, my weapons are irony and paradox. The joy of life is partly in the strange and unexpected. It is in the constant exclamation 'Who would have thought it?' — Hugh Jackman

I thought I knew everything about love and relationships in my 20s, the ignorance of youth is bliss. As you get older, you start to realise that you don't really know anything and life is a great traveling journey. Life is unexpected...you just never know whats going to happen. — Reese Witherspoon

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts. — Paul Valery

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied. — Robert Graves

Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought. — Edwin Percy Whipple

Unfortunate Event Quotes

Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It. - Byron Katie

Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It. — Byron Katie

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear. — Daniel Handler

At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey. — Daniel Handler

I didn't realize this was a sad occasion. — Daniel Handler

They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so. — Daniel Handler

A people fired ... with love of their country and of liberty, a zeal for the public good, and a noble emulation of glory, will not be disheartened or dispirited by a succession of unfortunate events. But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible. — Abigail Adams

Beginning in 1939, there were events well to the east of Istanbul that seems to have started a progressive sequence to the west. The question is, will the sequence continue further ... Unfortunately, we think the answer is yes. — Thomas Parsons

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so. — Daniel Handler

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. — Daniel Handler

Every unfortunate event does not give rise to lawsuit. — Mills Lane

Unnerving Quotes

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. — Abraham Lincoln

The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit! — J. K. Rowling

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. — William James

You know, for an actor to come into the midst of that, it's - It can either be difficult and somewhat unnerving, or it can be very embracing and like, kind of stepping into a nice hot tub. — Keith Carradine

I love cats. I love their grace and their elegance. I love their independence and their arrogance, and the way they lie and look at you, summing you up, surely to your detriment, with that unnerving, unwinking, appraising stare. — Joyce Stranger

There’s a reason we are drawn to the light. A reason why we fear darkness. It’s important to be terrified and unnerved about certain things. That way we will choose another path. The path that leads us to truth and love. — Ted Dekker

The kiss. There are all sorts of kisses, lad, from the sticky confection to the kiss of death. Of them all, the kiss of an actress is the most unnerving. How can we tell if she means it or if she's just practicing? — Ruth Gordon

Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to Nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos. — Alfred Rosenberg

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”? — George Carlin

From Bourbon Street to Baton Rouge, the freaks come out at night in Louisiana. And nowhere are they more raucous and unnerving than at Tiger Stadium. — Pat Forde

Disconcerting Quotes

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. — Pierre Bourdieu

I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. — Toyohiko Kagawa

Dreams, puns, elisions, plays on words and similar tricks that we ordinarily think of as frivolous, all play a surprising and somewhat disconcerting role in the communication of important and serious feelings. — Milton H. Erickson

I think it is funny that we were freer about sexuality in the 4th century B.C. It is a little disconcerting. — Angelina Jolie

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously. — Lance Morrow

The shock of the way I mix patterns and fabrics can be disconcerting, but what I am trying to do is provoke new ideas about how pieces can be put together in different ways. I think this is a more modern way to wear clothes that in themselves are fairly classic. — Jean Paul Gaultier

What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe? The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable. Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation. — Robert Jastrow

The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience. — Evelyn Underhill

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. — Penelope Lively

Every role I've played, that could've happened. It's nice, it happens, but it is rather disconcerting when a young child comes up to at the airport and starts doing your lines, it happens. — Michael York

Uncanny Quotes

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. - Isaac Asimov

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate. — Isaac Asimov

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant. — Jorge Luis Borges

Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysteriously useful omen every day of your life. — Rob Brezsny

Vanity is a factor, but it is more a question of control. It is easier to trick others into perceiving you as beautiful if you can convince yourself you are beautiful. But mirrors have an uncanny way of telling the truth. — Marissa Meyer

I have a passion for big cats, I like big snakes. There is something about snakes that is so wise, they have this uncanny perfection. I'd like to get inside their reptilian heads. — Anton Szandor LaVey

The generation of atmosphere, the aura of the uncanny, is one of the most important secrets of magic. It contributes to the willing suspension of disbelief, the feeling that, within the circle, or in the presence of the magical shrine, anything may happen. — Doreen Valiente

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread. — William Barrett

I think there's something extraordinarily nice about seeing the dawn up before one goes to bed, [] there's something uncanny about it. — Nick Drake

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials. — Stanley Kubrick

Cinder twisted up her lips. "Do you think it could have a virus?" "Maybe her programming was overwhelmed by Prince Kai's uncanny hotness. — Marissa Meyer

People Writing About Unsettling

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Read quotes by Michael Easter

Michael Easter
quotes on leadership, life and education

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Read quotes by Sayings

Sayings

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Read quotes by Maajid Nawaz

Maajid Nawaz
quotes on life, love and education

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Read quotes by Banksy

Banksy
quotes on art, graffiti and advertising

124 2005
Read quotes by Ovid

Ovid
quotes on love, death

714 3612
Read quotes by Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai
quotes on love, life

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More Unsettling Quotes

A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that? — Oscar Romero

Learn to commit every situation to God, and trust Him for the outcome. God's love for you never changes, no matter what problems you face or how unsettled life becomes. — Billy Graham

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies. — Stephen King

Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side. — Robert Greene

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. — Michael Sandel

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible. — Robert Maynard Hutchins

Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties never grow. — James Hollis

Some men never seem to grow old. Always active in thought, always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable with foggyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied, settled, yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is, are the first to find the best of what will be. — William Shakespeare

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning. — Matthew Scully

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling. — Stephen King

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. — Edith Wharton

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step toward it. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Have no fear for the unsettlement or the disturbance of the Kingdom of heaven. It began in eternity, it will go on through everlasting; there is no panic in the divine personality. God is peace, God gives peace, God gives rest. — Joseph Parker

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement. — Benjamin Cardozo

When the seasons change, we experience a sympathetic internal shift. All life-forms open themselves up to receive cosmic redirection from nature during these crucial seasonal transitions, so we are likely to be more vulnerable and unsettled. — Maya Tiwari

I heard Joby Talbot's Hovercraft piece for orchestra and felt its immediate physical impact - visceral, unsettling, hungry and direct. These short five minutes became our keystone to unlocking a strangely seductive score that tensions the aggressive force of the White Stripes with the enigmatic beauty of Talbot's own compositions. — Wayne McGregor

There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion. — Alan Watts

The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky. — Eric Maisel

The worst crime of all would be that a mistake happens and no one talks about it or learns from it. So, as unsettling as it is to think about, these mistakes, complications and unexpected outcomes get discussed openly, and everyone hopefully gains something from it. — Sanjay Gupta

Federal government shutdowns are unsettling, because you realize how little you depend on it compared to the money you give in taxes. — Roosh V

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him. — P. G. Wodehouse

The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf. — Lewis Mumford

When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing. — Melissa Rosenberg

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character. — P. G. Wodehouse

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives. — Marlon Brando

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English. — James F. Cooper

One thing I hold against Americans is that they have no flair for the rain. They seem unsettled by it; it's against them: they take it as an assault, an inconvenience! But rain is so wonderfully cleansing, so refreshing, so calming... — Diana Vreeland

How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30) — Craig Silvey

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene. — Seneca The Elder

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