As a matter of policy, increasing taxes on the most economically productive group, which already generates 60 percent of the nation's federal revenues, during a sustained period of economic doldrums is a wretched idea.
I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.
One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.
But if you are a poor creature--poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels--saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion--nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends--do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all - not least yourself.
Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low.
Wretched un-idea'd girls.
Better to accept the wretched truth than struggle, twisting to make a wish a reality.
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.
Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.
War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.
A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it.
Muhammad was a jackass. People who believe in him are stupid. Let us call a spade as spade. These people must be laughed at. They, and their screwball prophet have to be ridiculed not respected. Let them cringe, let them wince, let them agonize. We must demolish this fetish and break the shackles of these wretched people. They must be set free and the only way to do that is to demolish their fetish.
O friendship! thou fond soother of the human breast, to thee we fly in every calamity; to thee the wretched seek for succor; on thee the care-tired son of misery fondly relies; from thy kind assistance the unfortunate always hopes relief, and may be sure of--disappointment.
Where does the ego get its energy? The ego feeds off your desire to be something else. You are poor and you want to be rich - the ego is absorbing energy, its life-breath. You are ignorant and you want to become a wise one - the ego is absorbing energy. You are a wretched nobody and you want to become powerful - the ego is absorbing energy.
The species of anti-Enlightenment religion we find among evangelical protestants is far more impoverished, anti-intellectual and downright wretched.
Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are wretched creatures, is broken on every occasion in which their own interests are concerned; but fear is sustained by dread of punishment which will never abandon you.
The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.