Pauses Quotes

• The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

  Mark Twain

  Silence, Progressive, Achieve

  Mark Twain (2016). “Mark Twain in Eruption (Abridged, Annotated)”, p.154, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• The most precious things in speech are the pauses.

  Ralph Richardson

  Teaching, Parenting, Speech

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• Take a long pause ...breathe and know that things are happening for you not to you.

  Ashton Kutcher

  Long, Breathe, Knows

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• We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

  Karen Armstrong

  Past, Should, Circumstances

  Karen Armstrong (2010). “The Spiral Staircase”, p.20, Vintage Canada

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• Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

  Rollo May

  Self, Wish, Weight

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• When you take a pause before delivering your punch line, you will be using silence as a creative entity in itself.

  Franklyn Ajaye

  Silence, Creative, Lines

  Franklyn Ajaye (2002). “Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy”

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• Pause for a moment and check where your own heart and thoughts are. Are you focused on the things that matter most? How you spend your quiet time may provide a valuable clue. Where do your thoughts go when the pressure of deadlines is gone? Are your thoughts and heart focused on those short-lived fleeting things that matter only in the moment or on things that matter most?

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Heart, Gone, Fleeting

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• It's not only moving that creates new starting points. Sometimes all it takes is a subtle shift in perspective, an opening of the mind, an intentional pause and reset, or a new route to start to see new options and new possibilities.

  Kristin Armstrong

  Moving, Perspective, Mind

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• The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.

  Gillian Flynn

  Lying, Waiting, Feelings

  Gillian Flynn (2012). “Gone Girl: A Novel”, p.157, Crown

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• The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

  Natalie Babbitt

  Summer, August, Years

  Natalie Babbitt (2015). “Tuck Everlasting”, p.3, Macmillan

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• We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock.

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Leadership, Wisdom, Health

  "Queen's Christmas message - full text", www.theguardian.com. December 25, 2013.

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• Pause and remember - If you just keep moving forward, everything you need will show up for you at the perfect time.

  Jennifer Young

  Moving, Perfect, Needs

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• This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically. If you can truly know yourself, you will begin the journey of transformation.

  Deepak Chopra

  Success, Journey, Keys

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• How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Life, Shining, Age

  'Ulysses' (1842) l. 6

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• The pause is a part of the walk.

  Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar

  Walks

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• Whenever I experience something beautiful, I am with Soul. That moment of inward breath, that pause and awareness of "how beautiful this is" is a prayer of appreciation, a moment of gratitude in which I behold beauty and am one with it.

  Jean Shinoda Bolen

  Beauty, Beautiful, Appreciation

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• Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Girl, Fall, Believe

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.94, Vintage

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• I do not understand; I pause; I examine.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Michel de Montaigne, William Hazlitt, Orlando Williams Wight (1859). “Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Journey Into Italy, and Letters”, p.108

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• Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Children, Dark, Night

  "The Children's Hour" st. 1 (1859)

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• I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.

  Lyn Hejinian

  Persons

  Lyn Hejinian (2013). “My Life and My Life in the Nineties”, p.19, Wesleyan University Press

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• The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.

  Jon McGregor

  Cities, World, Complicated

  Jon McGregor (2014). “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line--even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.

  Isaac Asimov

  Curves, Long, Juice

  Isaac Asimov (2004). “Second Foundation”, p.19, Spectra

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• We cannot too soon convince ourselves how easily we may be dispensed with in the world. What important personages we imagine ourselves to be! We think that we alone are the life of the circle in which we move; in our absence, we fancy that life, existence, breath will come to a general pause, and, alas, the gap which we leave is scarcely perceptible, so quickly is it filled again; nay, it is often the place, if not of something better, at least for something more agreeable.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Life, Moving, Thinking

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• But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

  Barack Obama

  Thinking, Talking, Feet

  Speech at the 'Together We Thrive: Tucson and America' Memorial, delivered 12 January 2011, McKale Memorial Center, University of Arizona, Tucson

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• Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Giving, Soul

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