Bleakness Quotes

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. (Martin Luther King Jr.)
Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not "discovered” in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us-questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain-her answers unframed in human terms-then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and impossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature's independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. Arren found himself unwilling to stay on these cold summits. He said after a little while, "I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent; they kill because they must.” "That is why nothing else can resist us. Only one thing in the world can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it.”. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
"Anita,” he asked, "are there really werewolves?” "Yes,” she told him. "Your werewolves are down there.” And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world. View quote
Clifford D. Simak
Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. View quote
Nick Hornby
I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar. View quote
George Saunders
When I think of Hungarian films, I think of despair and bleakness, and what's more, despair and bleakness of indefensible duration. View quote
Tibor Fischer
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. View quote
John Steinbeck
Rus! Rus! I see you, from my lovely enchanted remoteness I see you: a country of dinginess, and bleakness and dispersal; no arrogant wonders of nature crowned by the arrogant wonders of art appear within you to delight or terrify the eyes... So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from the sea through your entire expanse?... And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born? View quote
Nikolai Gogol