Quotes about Instability

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

But as a mountain erodes and crumbles and a rock is dislodged from its place,

Like a broken tooth or a foot out of joint is confidence in a faithless man in time of trouble.

How unstable you are, constantly changing your ways! You will be disappointed by Egypt just as you were by Assyria.

Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.

Faith is like a rock; feelings are like waves.

Everything around us seems unscrewed, loosened, and out of joint. The fountains of the great deep appear to be breaking up. Ancient institutions are tottering and ready to fall. Social and religious systems are failing and crumbling away. Church and state both seem convulsed to their very foundations, and what the end of this convulsion may be no one can tell.

This old world will soon break into pieces! Don't you hear the tremblings of it?

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

All of which is only to explain how I came by a piece of equipment that most writers have to acquire one way or another: an unusual tolerance, even a preference, for instability. Not that they don't suffer from being unsure of next year's plans or this month's rent. They do. But, unlike many people, they can live with it.

Chaos, then, is the enemy of growth. Disorganization, sloppiness, and inattention generally introduce the kind of instability that weakens rather than strengthens. Where there is no order there will likely be little in the environment that sustains and nourishes. Life needs to be ordered.

As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows.