Quotes about FICKLE: http://quotes.dictionary.com/search/fickle
Robbie Burns talks about the futility of trusting foresight in the face of fickle fate in his note to a mouse:
To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough:
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
"Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate."
-Emily DickinsonUpon a shifting plate."
Even the most fickle are faithful to a few bad habits.
- Mason Cooley
The passion for money is never fickle.
- Mason Cooley
Fame is fickle, but Obscurity is usually faithful to the end.
- Mason Cooley
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists , there may be moods--moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former--but no opinion. -- Hannah Arendt
Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they ar e most swayed and in which they show absence of control...They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted.
-- Aristotle
Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested--for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. -- Emma Goldman
Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discards it with indifference.
--Franz Grillparzer
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
-- Gerhard Manley Hopkins
The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune.
-- François La Rochefoucauld, Duc De
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church--
But let your poison be your cure.
Oath and anchors equally will drag; nought else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy. --- Herman Melville
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
-- Sir William Osler
Struggling over my fickle heart, love draws it now this
way, and now hate that--but love, I think, is winning. I
will hate, if I have strength; if not, I shall love unwilling.
-- Ovid
With wavering steps does fickle fortune stray,
Nowhere she finds a firm and fixed abode;
But now all smiles, and now again all frowns,
She's constant only in inconstancy.
- Ovid
Beneath the sun's rays our shadow is our comrade;
When clouds obscure the sun our shadow flees.
So Fortune's smiles the fickle crowd pursues,
But swift is gone whenever she veils her face.
- Ovid
To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine color that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents.
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurly-burly innovation. LESS
- Shakespeare
God, for wise reasons, has made our affairs in this world, almost as fickle and capricious as ourselves.--Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other; and he that knows how to accommodate himself to their periodical returns, and can wisely extract the good from the evil,--knows only how to live.
-- Laurence Sterne
When you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe like this, you do not forget that you are completely at the mercy of the wind, a nd a fickle power it is. The playful waves may at any time become too rude for you in their sport, and play right over you.
- Thoreau
fick·le
[fik-uhl] Show IPA
adjective
1.
likely to change, especially due to caprice, irresolution, or instability; casually changeable: fickle weather.
2.
not constant or loyal in affections: a fickle lover.
Origin:
before 1000; Middle English fikel, Old English ficol deceitful, akin to fācen treachery, fician to deceive, gefic deception
before 1000; Middle English fikel, Old English ficol deceitful, akin to fācen treachery, fician to deceive, gefic deception
Related forms
fick·le·ness, noun
un·fick·le, adjective
Synonyms
1. unstable, unsteady, variable, capricious, fitful. 2. inconstant. 1, 2. Fickle, inconstant, capricious, vacillating describe persons or things that are not firm or steady in affection, behavior, opinion, or loyalty.
Fickle implies an underlying perversity as a cause for the lack of stability: the fickle seasons, disappointing as often as they delight; once lionized, now rejected by a fickle public. Inconstant suggests an innate disposition to change: an inconstant lover, flitting from affair to affair. Capricious implies unpredictable changeability arising from sudden whim: a capricious administration constantly and inexplicably changing its signals; a capricious and astounding reversal of position.
Vacillating means changeable due to lack of resolution or firmness: an indecisive, vacillating leader, apparently incapable of a sustained course of action.
1. unstable, unsteady, variable, capricious, fitful. 2. inconstant. 1, 2. Fickle, inconstant, capricious, vacillating describe persons or things that are not firm or steady in affection, behavior, opinion, or loyalty.
Fickle implies an underlying perversity as a cause for the lack of stability: the fickle seasons, disappointing as often as they delight; once lionized, now rejected by a fickle public. Inconstant suggests an innate disposition to change: an inconstant lover, flitting from affair to affair. Capricious implies unpredictable changeability arising from sudden whim: a capricious administration constantly and inexplicably changing its signals; a capricious and astounding reversal of position.
Vacillating means changeable due to lack of resolution or firmness: an indecisive, vacillating leader, apparently incapable of a sustained course of action.
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