Irritants Quotes:

My ultimate vocation in life is to be an irritant.

- Elvis Costello

source: "New Music Express" interview with Nick Kent, 1978.

topic: Music, Reality, Life Is, Irritants

Anger is the noise of the soul; the unseen irritant of the heart; the relentless invader of silence.

- Max Lucado

topic: Heart, Silence, Soul, Irritants

Patience is like good motor oil. It doesn't remove all the contaminants. It just puts them into suspension so they don't get into your works and seize them up. Patient people have, so to speak, a large crankcase. They can put a lot of irritants into suspension.

- Cornelius Plantinga

topic: Oil, People, Patient, Irritants, Motor Oil

In "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.

- Zygmunt Bauman

source: Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

topic: Art, Skills, Differences, Irritants

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

- Steven Pinker

topic: Toxins, Warfare, Want, Irritants, Chemical Warfare

There is no irritant as painful as an ace up your sleeve that you can never use; it's the kind of thing that causes oysters to produce pearls.

- Sheila Ballantyne

source: Sheila Ballantyne (1983). “Imaginary crimes”, Penguin Group USA

topic: Oysters, Pearls, Aces, Irritants

I think I have been much of my life an irritant. But some people say that something good came out of my research, something valuable that could be regarded as a pearl, and I can assure those who worked with me it was you who made the pearls and I was merely the grain of sand, the irritant to produce the pearls.

- Nicholas Kurti

topic: Thinking, People, Research, Irritants

When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power.

- Ezra Taft Benson

topic: Inspirational, Spiritual, Quests, Irritants

We can neither heal nor build if, on the one hand the rich in our society see the poor as hordes of irritants or if on the other hand the poor sit back, expecting charity. All of us must take responsibility for the upliftment of our conditions, prepared to give our best to the benefit of all

- Nelson Mandela

topic: Responsibility, Hands, Giving, Irritants

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

- Charles A. Murray

source: Charles A. Murray (2006). “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State”, Aei Press

topic: Greatness, Europe, Ideas, Irritants, Syndromes

Being banned from UK will be minor irritant for [Donald] Trump, but catastrophic for local community around Turnberry.

- Corri Wilson

source: Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

topic: Community, Trump, Banned, Irritants, Local Community

Take care with manufactured chemicals, certainly. Your safety and long term health are more important than anything. Yet don't forget that if you grow even a dozen different plants, you are surrounded by chemistry. Inside their cells even the most ordinary plants creates potent fungicides, insecticides, irritants, balms, hallucinogens, sedatives, nerve toxins, cell repair stimulants, lures, repellents... you name it. Treat all plants with respect!

- Janet Macunovich

topic: Cells, Names, Long, Insecticides, Irritants

I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

- David Foster Wallace

topic: Fun, Thinking, Littles, Irritants, Footnotes

You know, almost everyone is an irritant to me. I think people have forgotten what the word 'public' means. 'Public' means you're going to be irritated. It's a natural consequence of leaving one's home. You go outside, and there are people who are irritating. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, and someone berates me for smoking. I look at the person and think, but what about your shoes? How can you wear shoes like that and have the confidence to accost someone like me?

- Fran Lebowitz

topic: Home, Mean, Thinking, Irritants, Natural Consequences

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

- Carol Ann Duffy

source: "Christmas Carol" by Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2005.

topic: Oysters, Creative, Trying, Irritants

The one real irritant is that my young children - they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That's a hard, hard adaption which they didn't ask for. I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

- Julian Assange

source: Source: www.zerohedge.com

topic: Mother, Children, Father, Irritants

As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.

- Zygmunt Bauman

source: Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

topic: Taken, Long, Minorities, Deportation, Irritants

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon.

- Paul Theroux

source: Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Revenge, Party, Home, Irritants, Working Life

Oh, brothers and sisters, families can be forever! Do not let the lures [or the irritants] of the moment draw you away from them! Divinity, eternity, and family--they go together, hand in hand, and so must we!

- Spencer W. Kimball

topic: Brother, Hands, Forever, Irritants

Yes, he’s like a rash for which there’s no cure. It only goes away for a bit before returning unexpectedly to ruin every pleasurable experience. He should have been named Herpes rather than ZT. Or maybe just Herpes Z, since he’s a very special irritant. (Arik)

- Sherrilyn Kenyon

source: Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “The Dream-Hunter”, p.126, Macmillan

topic: Should Have, Special, Ruins, Irritants, Herpes

And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.

- Jhonen Vasquez

topic: Pain, Thinking, Long, Irritants

Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside.

- Nikola Tesla

source: Nikola Tesla (2013). “The Nikola Tesla Treasury”, p.593, Simon and Schuster

topic: Giving, Principles, Matter, Irritants, Susceptible

It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

- Peter Bart

topic: Years, Tv Shows, Corporations, Irritants, Multinational Corporations

Most people assume that a muse is a creature of perfect beauty, poise and grace. Like the creatures from Greek mythology. They're wrong. In fact, there should be a marked absence of perfection in a muse--a gaping hole between what she is and what she might be. The ideal muse is a woman whose rough edges and contradictions drive you to fill in the blanks of her character. She is the irritant to your creativity. A remarkable possibility, waiting to be formed.

- Kathleen Tessaro

topic: Creativity, Character, People, Irritants, Rough Edges

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

- Ken Burns

topic: The End Of The Day, Pearls, Layers, Irritants

It is popular to call it a crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a crisis of the whole world. Communism, which claims to be a solution of the crisis, is itself a symptom and an irritant of the crisis.

- Whittaker Chambers

topic: Facts, World, Communism, Irritants

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

- Marshall McLuhan

source: Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

topic: Art, Technology, Men, Specifications, Irritants

The most callous, stupid things were done just because regulations required them...It was not until 1983, for example, that U.S. federal agencies stated that substances known to be caustic irritants such as lye, ammonia, and oven cleaners, did not need to be tested on the eyes of conscious rabbits.

- Peter Singer

topic: Stupid, Eye, Animal, Irritants, Stupid Things

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

- Henry Adams

topic: Love, Disease, Nervous, Irritants

May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans? I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant

- Leonard Nimoy

topic: Inspiration, May, Emotion, Irritants, Mr Spock