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1 " We learn to love by basking in the love of other people. We learn how to express our love and our warmest feelings whenever other people grace us with the privilege of besetting upon them many acts of kindness. We unleash a germinal of internal tenderness by affectionately doting upon pets and by generously spending time admiring the natural world. "
2 " Regarding 'Jabez's Prayer', I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can honestly say I have never sunk to confusing prayer: the soul's colloquy with the Creator, mortal man's dialogue with the Deity: with magical incantation and the ritual of the 'spell. "
― Markham Shaw Pyle
3 " The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant. "
― Azar Nafisi , The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
4 " I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after "
― Gyles Brandreth , Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance
5 " Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. " Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom. "
6 " You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" " My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin. "
7 " And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or - more importantly - write anything profound. "
― Theodore Dalrymple , The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World
8 " All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied; and that if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct. "
― John Stuart Mill , An Essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated)
9 " Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls ‘the mad pride of intellectuality,’ taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books. "
― Theodore Roosevelt
10 " Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. "
11 " A sign that a peace association is going adrift is its exclusion of other political parties, with whom it could collaborate effectively on most of the problems besetting the cause of peace. "
