As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
Adam Hochschild
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
Albert Camus
My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.
Albrecht Durer
I was painfully shy, and I had tremendous difficulty making friends. So, lacking friends, I watched other people. Watching is something all writers must do, and it was in junior high that I learned to do it.
Alex Flinn
My overall message for labor members is... that we understand that the benefits of trade are clear, but the disruption and the dislocation are painfully concentrated and we can't ignore them.
Alexis Herman
Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.
Alissa Quart
The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.
Amanda Foreman
In high school, I was so painfully self-aware that how I thought of myself was probably very different from what other people thought of me. I thought of myself as just painfully awkward and dorky. I had a lot of hair and was kind of weird. I sang a lot in the hallways.
Amy Adams
In school I was painfully shy. But as soon as I had to get up in front of the class and give a book report, it was alarming - I'd suddenly be very articulate.
Andrew Bird
Globalisation has made us more vulnerable. It creates a world without borders, and makes us painfully aware of the limitations of our present instruments, and of politics, to meet its challenges.
Anna Lindh
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
Bill Bryson
I have a to-do list and I have a farm I care for, and things I like to do for fun - going to movies and all that stuff. It's a painfully normal life!
Brad Paisley
I think you've got to like people. There are MPs who are either painfully shy or who don't like public speaking or don't socialise very well, and you just think this must be the worst job in the world for them.
Charles Kennedy
I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I've probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour's drama workshop, I was transformed. I went in really shy, and I came out full of confidence.
Christian Cooke
Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.
Cynthia Ozick
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
D. H. Lawrence
I do feel blessed to have small ears - I've never felt self-conscious when my hair is swept back. My feet are a different story - I grew up being painfully aware of them because they are so long.
Darcey Bussell
As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
David Bowie
I would never complain about 'One Day' taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.
David Nicholls
As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.
Dominic Cummings
I was, at times, painfully shy as a kid and all the way through college.
The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.
My mom is painfully sweet; she's from Nebraska.
For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.
In my 20s and early 30s, I was very much a man lost at sea, with very little direction in life, and painfully immature.
You might as well enjoy the day - you never know when and how painfully it could all end.
As a painfully shy kid, my fun time was locking myself away and watching movie after movie after movie. Watching a good performance, to me, was like getting a new toy.
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men who were being called to serve were World War II veterans participating in Ready Reserve units.
Stage-persona notwithstanding, I'm extremely shy and quiet. Almost painfully shy. People misinterpret that as being above it all or not interested.
As a child, I studied violin. My sister, who's 10 years older, was the actress in the family. I was painfully shy.
K. Thiagarajan is a painfully shy young man. But he is the human personification of the idiom 'Still waters run deep.'
But you see, that's the gilded prison of fashion. We're riding in private jets, and meantime I was so incredibly, painfully sad and lonely.
If you're extremely, painfully frightened of age, it shows.
Yes, the mainstream media is painfully biased.
Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. I enjoy a lot of mystery.
I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the 'Guardian' hating me. I like it when I read they want me to die painfully. Then I think I've really got under their skin. It's like annoying a teacher. Once they've shown signs of weakness, you really can go for them.
If a friend got a big promotion, I would outwardly congratulate them, but inside I would painfully compare myself with them and think that their success was a reflection on my failings.
I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.
I was painfully self-obsessed and self-aware. I wanted people to love me but at the same time I was terrified of them.
The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions.
Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.
Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.
'Point Omega' starts in an art gallery, where an unnamed man is watching, day after day, a 24-hour version of 'Psycho,' an installation that was created by the Scottish artist, Douglas Gordon. In it, the events and the minutiae of Hitchcock's film are painfully slowly reproduced; the watcher is obsessed with the detail revealed.
I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion - the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I'm more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought.
I know my strengths. Painfully aware of the weaknesses. There's many. I love sports. So working towards a common goal, that's exciting to me.
I was painfully shy as a child; I was dyslexic. I had a single mother who's an immigrant. I just didn't believe acting was something that people like me could do on a professional level.
I'm so weird and quirky, and painfully awkward sometimes.
Something that I've cared about deeply my whole career is getting to work with filmmakers and inventors of stories that are hysterical because they are just so painfully true.
