Stumbling Quotes

1. "In the end, it all comes to choices to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones."
Author: Amber Frey

2. "The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human."
Author: Andrew Davidson

3. "Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way."
Author: Anton Chekhov

4. "Attraction and distraction are the two stumbling blocks that are essentially met en route in life's journey towards excellence."
Author: Anuj Somany

5. "She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike."
Author: Betty Smith

6. "To my mind, it's one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it's good."
Author: Brad Leithauser

7. "Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming."
Author: Brennan Manning

8. "We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us."
Author: Charles De Lint

9. "With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho- then!" the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind."
Author: Charles Dickens

10. "Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome."
Author: Clifford D. Simak

11. "Dear Human:You've got it all wrong.You didn't come here to master unconditional love. This is where you came from and where you'll return.You came here to learn personal love.Universal love.Messy love.Sweaty Love.Crazy love.Broken love.Whole love.Infused with divinity.Lived through the grace of stumbling.Demonstrated through the beauty of... messing up.Often.You didn't come here to be perfect, you already are.You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.And rising again into remembering.But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.Love in truth doesn't need any adjectives.It doesn't require modifiers.It doesn't require the condition of perfection.It only asks you to show up.And do your best.That you stay present and feel fully.That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU.Its enough.It's Plenty."
Author: Courtney A. Walsh

12. "A stepping-stone can be a stumbling block if we can't see it until after we have tripped over it."
Author: Cullen Hightower

13. "I am often amused when women with little or no experience in housekeeping and/or unaccustomed to performing household chores, upon stumbling on a man almost miraculously become domesticated."
Author: D. Cypriani Regis

14. "Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag."
Author: Dan Chaon

15. "When he awakened again he could stand, and did. He doused his head in cold water and drank four glasses of water. The water made him sick and after that he began to shake with a chill. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bare blood-stained mattress, but got up almost immediately to go stumbling and staggering in haste back to the bathroom, where he got down on hands and knees and searched the floor until he had found the rusty razor-blade. He sat on the floor and put the razor-blade into his vest-pocket. Putting it in, his fingers touched his lighter. He took the lighter out and looked at it. A cunning gleam came into his one open eye as he looked at the lighter. The gleam was not sane."
Author: Dashiell Hammett

16. "Between the disfigurement and the muzzle, it's nearly impossible to catch what she's saying. Always, though, while tripping and stumbling to the music, she looks out into her audience and tells the story about her mother. Most people laugh and yell for her to lift her skirts, but every so often she'll spot someone weeping and swear they can understand her every word."
Author: David Sedaris

17. "Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities---that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

18. "Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others."
Author: Edward Carpenter

19. "The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation."
Author: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

20. "To my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief...Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

21. "These kinds of lost, overeducated mama's boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER."
Author: Gary Shteyngart

22. "No singer would ever make a song about that battle. No maester would ever write down an account for one of the Reader's beloved books. No banners flew, no warhorns moaned, no great lord called his men about him to hear his final ringing words. They fought in the predawn gloom, shadow against shadow, stumbling over roots and rocks, with mud and rotting leaves beneath their feet."
Author: George R.R. Martin

23. "With stumbling feet, he blindly walked somewhere, anywhere. Whenhe got to the king's study, he looked over his shoulder and checked thecarpet over which he'd trodden.No trail of his blood. Which, considering the way his chest washurting, was a surprise.Sure as shit felt like he'd been shot in the heart."
Author: J.R. Ward

24. "The fact that so many of my friends were stumbling headfirst into their happily-ever-after gave my tired heart hope that I couldn't be far behind."
Author: Jay Crownover

25. "I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasn't necessarily intending to read."
Author: Jill Abramson

26. "But as you say, the fundamental stumbling block is the question of the future of the economy. And it's not just the sort of economic laboratory question, of what kind of system would best generate growth, which is the way it's presented."
Author: Joe Slovo

27. "The more it changes, the more it's the same thing. But overall, things have changed. I say changed and not "changed for the better" because I am no fool. Fate is a total drama queen. The second you say things are better than they were, she'll come stumbling toward you on her six-inch heels, nasty-ass wig crooked and on sideways. You'll wonder exactly how she got all that makeup slathered onto her face. One nicotine-caked fake fingernail will point at you, and she will make sure that things are anything but better from there on out. So no, thank you. Things are different but not better and, in fact, could get much much worse, so fuck off, Fate! Is she gone? Whew. Things had changed at school and not in a bad way(crosses fingers and hope that doesn't count as pissing Fate off)."
Author: John Goode

28. "You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect."
Author: Josh Lanyon

29. "Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.You are the way and the wayfarers.And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone."
Author: Kahlil Gibran

30. "Oh, those warm days of stumbling words; blinded eyes, embracing in sweet slow dances and sipping courage from a bottle for sneaking kisses."
Author: Kellie Elmore

31. "Forgiving ourselves and learning from our inevitable mistakes transforms failure from a stumbling block into a stepping stone."
Author: L.R. Knost

32. "America is a dream.The poet says it was promises.The people say it is promises—that will come true.The people do not always say things out loud,Nor write them down on paper.The people often holdGreat thoughts in their deepest heartsAnd sometimes only blunderingly express them,Haltingly and stumbling say them,And faultily put them into practice.The people do not always understand each other.But there is, somewhere there,Always the trying to understand,And the trying to say,"You are a man. Together we are building our land."
Author: Langston Hughes

33. "It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."
Author: Leonard Cohen

34. "Sometimes we are given exactly what we need. The precise people that you need the most come stumbling into your life. Sometimes you don't notice, and this is very sad. Sometimes you lose them again. This is sad too, but not as sad. Because what you have once had together you have forever."
Author: Linda Olsson

35. "The Father of Winter says tells Ista,"...For my great-souled child is very late, and lost upon his road. My calling voice cannot reach him. He cannot see the light in my window, for he is sundered from me, blind and deaf and stumbling, with none to take his hand and guide him. Yet you may touch him, in his darkness. And I may touch you, in yours. Then take you this thread to draw him through the maze, where I cannot go."Later, Ista delivers the message,"Your Father calls you to His Court. You need not pack; you go garbed in glory as you stand. He waits eagerly by His palace doors to welcome you, and has prepared a place at His high table by His side, in the company of the great-souled, honored, and best-beloved. In this I speak true. Bend your head."
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

36. "I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly."
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

37. "Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words."
Author: Margaret Mitchell

38. "I wasn't running now so much as stumbling quickly, panting like a geriatric lion."
Author: Nicole Peeler

39. "If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain."
Author: Paul Cezanne

40. "But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating."
Author: Paul Harding

41. "It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying--generally you killed something--but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling."
Author: Peter S. Beagle

42. "With battle-weary arms, Sheridan slugged his way across the luminous waves sending light-filled droplets splashing into the air like Fourth of July sparklers.Stumbling onto the lake's rocky banks, he clawed desperately at the animal skin suit, yanking at the fastenings and peeling back the suffocating shroud in a fitful temper tantrum. He collapsed onto the glitter washed shore, his chest heaving, his forehead pulsing with pumped up veins."That was a nightmare!" Sheridan rasped between gulps of air. "Like some sort of freaked-out acid trip!""All suffering comes bearing a gift. Every pain is a portal. You must look at the hand of your suffering to see the gift it offers and peer into your pain to see where it may lead." Kunchen said calmly."
Author: Phillip White

43. "Every kingdom work, whether publicly performed or privately endeavored, partakes of the kingdom's imperishable character. Every honest intention, every stumbling word of witness, every resistance of temptation, every motion of repentance, every gesture of concern, every routine engagement, every motion of worship, every struggle towards obedience, every mumbled prayer, everything, literally, which flows out of our faith-relationship with the Ever-Living One, will find its place in the ever-living heavenly order which will dawn at his coming."
Author: Randy Alcorn

44. "This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me."
Author: Roger Angell

45. "By our stumbling the world is perfected"
Author: Śrī Aurobindo

46. "It was not that she felt any allegiance to the truth. God knows she had cheated on too many men for the truth to be more than a stumbling block. But sometimes falsehood took more strength than she could summon up."
Author: Stephen Dobyns

47. "Sometimes, as we're stumbling along in the dark, we hit something good."
Author: Susan Ee

48. "I grinned, and a burst of shocked laughter shoved out of me. I'd done it! I'd beaten that bitch, and could see again. I'd won. With only my blood.I climbed to my feet, cradling my throbbing hand against my stomach, and looked out over the cemetery.The first real thing I saw was Silla, stumbling toward me. Her hands left scarlet prints on every headstone she touched."
Author: Tessa Gratton

49. "It just goes against nature for a thinking and seeing being to live among these irregularities and unknown X's. It is as if someone blindfolds you and then makes you walk around like that and you feel your way around, stumbling, and you know that there is an edge somewhere very nearby and that it would only that one step for the only thing left of you to be a flattened, mangled piece of meat. Isn't that just about the same thing I'm going through?"
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

50. "In order to align your life choices with your values, you will need to inquire about the effects of your actions (and inactions) on yourself and others. Although we are always stumbling upon new knowledge that shifts our choices and life direction, bringing conscious inquiry to life means that we continually ask questions that lead us to the information we need to make thoughtful decisions. Asking questions is liberating because we develop great understanding and discover more choices with our new knowledge."
Author: Zoe Weil

Stumbling Quotes Pictures