At My Breaking Point Quotes

“Do you really think you're the only human being alive who is unforgivably flawed? Who's been hurt almost to the point of breaking?”

— Vanessa Diffenbaugh

“Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

“The Holy Spirit is like the wind. It can be gentle enough to stroke a leaf but hard enough to bend a tree. God provides us rest, but He'll also bring us an inch away from our breaking point. Both are done in love.”

— Alisa Hope Wagner

“There are degrees of discomfort, and everyone has a different breaking point. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, there is no choice.”

— Ryan Blair

“In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?”

— John Steinbeck

“My Mom and Dad and brother have grown through the years into my closest friends, the people who tell me the most searing truth, who give me soft places to rest and present to me a bright future when the only one I can see from my vantage point is dim and breaking before my eyes.”

— Shauna Niequist

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until
"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience ... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

— Tom Stoppard

“And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest"
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I once heard this saying that God keeps breaking your heart until it opens. And ain't that the truth. Think about it. Every struggle, every challenge, every adversity brings you closer to your heart, to your true self, to who you really are. Sometimes you got to be broken down to the point where you feel powerless to discover your ultimate and true power.”

— Jon Gordon

“What if he just bombs everyone again?" Ian asks, breaking the silence. "Just like he did with Omega Point?"
"He won't," Warner says to him. "He's too arrogant, and this war has become personal. He'll want to toy with us. He'll want to draw this out as long as possible. He is a man who has always been fascinated by the idea of torture. This is going to be fun for him."
"Yeah, that's making me feel real good," Kenji says. "Thanks for the pep talk."
"Anytime," Warner says.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“I looked at him nonplussed. I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional idea is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets.”

— Helen Fielding

“I'm interested in that thing that happens where there's a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there's no sign that it's going to get any better, and that's the point when people quit. But some don't.”

— Robert Redford

“Nevertheless, the realization that breaking a pencil point would have far less disastrous consequences played little or no role, I believe, in this decision to explore theory!”

— Rudolph A. Marcus

“I know this might be breaking news to Nicholas Kristof, but guns being 'more lethal than anything else you have around' is sort of the whole point. The issue should not really be the lethality of the gun, but the but the psychology of the person holding it.”

— Glenn Beck

“My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages.”

— Haruki Murakami

“It is amazing to hear grown-up people rationalize homophobia and discrimination. The lengths they go to trying to prove their points take reason to its breaking point.”

— Henry Rollins

“I've been lucky to get some path-breaking films, which proved to be the turning point in my career. Be it 'Rock on!' 'The Last Lear' or 'Raajneeti,' directors started working in a different way.”

— Arjun Rampal

“I'm going to make mistakes, I just have to be able to learn from them as quickly as possible. To learn faster, I watch film of myself and other good point guards, and then breaking down my mistakes and really analyzing them and seeing where I could have made better decisions.”

— Jeremy Lin

“He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time.”

— Thomas Bangalter

“To resolve the climate crisis, good will, statements of intent are not enough. We are at breaking point.”

— Francois Hollande

“In order to be the best, you have to know your breaking point-go to the edge of it, but never go beyond.”

— Rebecca Twigg

“Everyone has a breaking point. I've just reach mine.”

— Susane Colasanti

“I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy.”

— Jill Stein

“Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

“I write about how in Midland, the mayor instituted water conservation measures like restrictions on car washing. He made a point though that they were only "suggestions" and not government telling people what to do. But then his constituents got very ticked off at the sight of their neighbors breaking the rules and demanded that they be made into actual laws with penalties.”

— Gail Collins

“I don't revise a lot when writing short stories. As far as the novel, I definitely thought more about plot. Honestly, I'm still pretty confused about what "plot" means. I've been reading some of my Goodreads reviews and one reader noted that the The Last Days of California "reads like a short story stretched to the breaking point, padded and brought into novel range ... " I don't know what people want, really.”

— Mary J. Miller

“God knows your breaking point. You simply don't know your own strength.”

— Swami Satchidananda

“Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.”

— Theodore Millon

“With the Roxbury guys (on 'Saturday Night Live'), I think the breaking point was when Stallone came on and wanted to do the sketch just because. And we're, like, 'Well, now we've got to create a story, so, what, are we bopping our heads with Rocky? What are we doing?'”

— Chris Kattan

“Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find.”

— David Gemmell

“Change is more often a rapid transition between two stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates ... Change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stress that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water, and it eventually boils. Oppress the workers more and more and bring on the revolution.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!' But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company-I mean hell.”

— John Adams

“I experimented with drugs and I experimented with everything that little boys do - vandalism, throwing eggs at cars, breaking and entering schools and destroying a room. But I finally got to a point where I looked around and said, "This is not getting me anywhere. I'm stagnating with these guys." They were getting drunk and high every weekend. I got out.”

— Johnny Depp

“Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.”

— Georg C. Lichtenberg