Utterance Quotes - Page 2

• Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Believe, Power, Matter

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• Often your utterances and expressions of your face leak out the secrets of your hidden thoughts.

  Ali ibn Abi Talib

  Expression, Secret, Faces

  "'Nahj al-Balagha' ('The Peak of Eloquence')". Book by Ali, translated by Askari Jafri,

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• Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

  W. H. Auden

  Grief, Passion, Men

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• God has frequently to knock the bottom board out of your experience if you are a saint in order to get you into contact with Himself. God wants you to understand this is a life of faith, not a life of sentimental enjoyment of His blessings. ... "Though He slay me yet will I trust Him" - this is the most sublime utterance of faith in the whole of the Bible.

  Oswald Chambers

  Encouragement, Religious, Blessing

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• I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.

  Billy Collins

  Falling In Love, Writing, Silence

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

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• The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses -- all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Character, Soul, Agents

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1971). “Hegel's Philosophy of Mind”, p.265, Library of Alexandria

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• When a man’s heart is right with God the mysterious utterances of the Bible are spirit and life to him. Spiritual truth is discernible only to a pure heart, not to a keen intellect. It is not a question of profundity of intellect, but of purity of heart.

  Oswald Chambers

  Spiritual, Heart, Men

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”, p.30, Discovery House

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• Have gentle utterances that will inspire a superior longing for all time.

  Philip the Apostle

  Time, Inspire, Longing

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• Utterance does not in principle mean a weakening of conviction--that would not be anything to be deplored--but a weakness of conviction.

  Franz Kafka

  Mean, Weakness, Principles

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• The obvious merits utterance. Character is f**king pertinent.

  Al Swearengen

  Kings, Character, Merit

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• I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

  Walter Lippmann

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Walter Lippmann “Force and Ideas: The Early Writings”, Transaction Publishers

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• An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

  Gary Saul Morson

  Museums, Anthology, Quotations

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• No client ever had money enough to bribe my conscience or to stop its utterance against wrong, and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Clients, Oppression, Enough

  Abraham Lincoln, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (1950). “The Lincoln treasury”

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• I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Expression, Giving, Feelings

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• Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.

  W. H. Auden

  Dog, Missing, Religion

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• Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

  William James

  Struggle, Inspire, Triumph

  William James (1956). “The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality”, p.47, Courier Corporation

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• Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Adequate, Fowl, Littles

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Julian Hawthorne (2015). “Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of “The Scarlet Letter”, “The House of Seven Gables” and “Twice-Told Tales””, p.408, e-artnow

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• What sort of man is this, who over and over again, gave numerous details about His death, months before it occurred, and added to each such utterance that on the third day after His decease He would rise again from the dead - and DID RISE, as even the city of Jerusalem soon came to believe? No other founder of a great world religion (or a small one) ever made such statements, or ever came forth from the dead.

  Wilbur Moorehead Smith

  Believe, Men, World Religions

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• We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him.

  Lucy Larcom

  Body, Spirit, Mask

  Lucy Larcom (1892). “The Unseen Friend”

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• These were choice documents to me... They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.

  Frederick Douglass

  Interesting, Choices, Soul

  Frederick Douglass (2016). “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, p.80, Frederick Douglass

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• I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.

  Mark Twain

  Media, Talking, Community

  Mark Twain (1992). “Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays: 1852-1890”

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• Pray God in the bowels of his mercy to send you his Holy Spirit; for he hath given you his great gift of utterance, if it pleased him also to open the eyes of your heart.

  Lady Jane Grey

  Heart, Eye, Spirit

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• To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Hands, People, Mouths

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

  Robert Benchley

  Men, Average, Two

  Robert Benchley (1951). “My ten years in a quandary and how they grew”

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• There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Ideas, Poetic

  Evelyn Waugh (2012). “A Little Order: Selected Journalism”, p.199, Penguin UK

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