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The Ability to influence people without irritating them is the most profitable art known to man.
Sep 10, 2025
I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.
Haven't we all heard some irritating person saying that if so-and-so is elected, then he/she is absolutely definitely leaving the country? There must be some reason why it is mainly liberals who tend to say this, but the chief thing to note about the promise is that it is usually an empty one.
When I go to see live music I tend to want to really listen to it, so when people get up and dance it's really irritating.
After a while some of the houseguests at Big Brother can become a little bit high maintenance so they're going to find everything to be irritating. We don't really try to show it on the show. How interesting is that? But we can make a funny story out of it when they complain, complain, complain.
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?
Lyndon Johnson is still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life. He was huge, a huge character, not only standing six feet four, but when you talked to him, he violated the normal human space between people. He was a great storyteller. The problem was that half his stories, I discovered, weren't true.
There's nothing quite so irritating to an author as a family member's easy confidence that, of course, the book will come.
What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.
He's going to be okay," said Quentin. "He has to. He's Tybalt. You'd be all weird and irritating if he wasn't around." "Weird and irritating?" I raised an eyebrow. "What gives you that idea?" Quentin shrugged. "That's already how you get when he isn't around.
I enjoy irritating the people who enjoy being irritated.
Freedom means self-fulfillment. It also means putting up with other people's irritating pursuit of the same. It means being confronted by disturbing images and ideas.
You'd think that sweet would be a land far, far away from irritating, but as it turns out they're right next door, and always having border disputes.
Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
We need to learn how to keep people through love. Despite imperfections, sins, and irritating habits of other Christians, they belong to Jesus and they need our love as a healthy climate for growth.
I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn't help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.
Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second.
I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon , at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila , but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.
Salad freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating.
Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people, they're silly and they're irritating.
I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.
This modern mania for interfering in other's lives, usually under the guise of health and safety concerns, is highly irritating and counterproductive. Down with the nanny state.
You know, Mr. Webb, you have two commands you use with irritating frequency. 'Move' and 'Let's go.
Its really irritating. Even people who like my work sometimes come up to me and say, I usually dont like female comedians, but your material is great! It makes the job prospect more daunting. Funny is funny, you know?
When I became a father acting sort of took the place of what I did in my free time and my children became the main focus. I play a lot and my children play. Both my sons - my daughter's still too young really - have surpassed me with their music skills, which is wildly irritating.
The only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: "I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love." But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.
I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music.
One of the most fruitless, irritating wastes in the world is arguing-the contentious, endless kind of arguing that is akin to quarreling, and causes feuding in families and among friends, and leaves resentful feeling in homes, in hearts, in businesses and professions, and in all kinds of gatherings in public and private places, and in all relationships of life-and with so little that it ever seems to settle!
Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.
My brother asked me once, 'Are you a misanthrope?' And I said, 'No, I just find people irritating.'
Stephen Fry is a master exponent of the English tongue. Some people might think that he is the most irritating man in Britain, but my wife and I love him all the same.
Scientists have determined that the most irritating sound to the human ear is the sound of a knife cutting a glass bottle. And the second-worst sound is a fork scratching a glass bottle. Evidently they did all their research at the Picnic for Morons.
Get a friend to tell you your faults, or better still, welcome an enemy who will watch you keenly and sting you savagely. What a blessing such an irritating critic will be to a wise man, what an intolerable nuisance to a fool!
I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.
Okay, you're right about that. But this whole ghost thing's irritating." "Park benches are irritating to you in some moods." "Depends on whether or not I want to sit down.
James Delaney as an individual is sort of like a grain of sand in an oyster who is irritating all of them. But for me he's a creature of the time, like the industrialists who started the Industrial Revolution who extricated themselves from their class and their background
Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I'm going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don't, too bad! As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."
The lumbermen...regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools....And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads. The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or "denudatics," more or less touched in the head. What talk there was about forest protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a mosquito, and just about as irritating.
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.
It's sort of irritating now - people always ask me, "You're a dad, and how's fatherhood?" If Bob Dylan or Neil Young had a kid, it didn't seem like it made them a different person. It didn't make you old right away.
Ro trails his hands against the wall as he walks. The archivists look at him as he passes. Ro is good at irritating people; he'll find the one thing you don't want him to do, and do it every time. It's one of his many gifts.
Tranquillizers do not change our environment, nor do they change our personalities. They merely reduce our responsiveness to stimuli. They dull the keen edge of the angers, fears, or anxiety with which we might otherwise react to the problems of living. Once the response has been dulled, the irritating surface noise of living muted or eliminated, the spark and brilliance are also gone.
It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.
There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.
I am one of those irritating people, who hang on to the door-knob after they say good-bye, and will neither come back nor go, always remembering something else which must be said.
You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there - with your eyes open - and lived to see it.
To any man who has slaved to acquire skill in his art, it is most irritating to have his ability referred to as a “gift.”
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.