Quotes about complaining

23 quotes · 18 authors

Quotes

  1. Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.

  2. The world is full of people who, if they got to Heaven, would complain about the tune of the harps and the dampness of the clouds.

    p. 207

  3. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power.

  4. Men love to complain about their wives and lords ... Those without wives complain twice as much about their lords.

  5. It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

    p. 318

  6. Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionised the face of our planet and societies.

    But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."

  7. Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out."

  8. Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.

    p. 139

  9. Don't complain; just work harder.

  10. It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained there were too many prehistoric toads in it.

  11. People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don't deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I don't recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.

  12. At worst... the present moment is treated as if it were an enemy. When you hate what you are doing, complain about your surroundings, curse things that are happening or have happened, or when your internal dialogue consists of shoulds and shouldn'ts, of blaming and accusing, when you are arguing with what is, arguing with that which is always already the case. you are making Life into an enemy and Life says, “War is what you want, and war is what you get.”