Phrases Quotes - Page 20

Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem.

Paul Desmond

Keys, Different, Balls

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The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history.

Camille Flammarion

Earth, Duration, Chapters

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Never use the phrase: 'buy my book' - ever.

Heather Hart

Book, Marketing, Use

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There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

George Eliot

Serious, Belief, Misery

George Eliot (1873). “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Works of George Eliot”, p.233

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So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one: "Civil War." Do you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me?" (shoots gun) "I'm awfully sorry. Awfully sorry."

George Carlin

Country, Sorry, Philosophy

"What Am I Doing in New Jersey?". Live album by George Carlin, 1988.

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Theories of "natural law" and the "law of nations" are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [...] "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[....]

Vilfredo Pareto

Law, Example, Libertarian

Vilfredo Pareto (1942). “Non-logical conduct”

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In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

Karen Joy Fowler

Important, Humans, Human Beings

Karen Joy Fowler (2013). “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel”, p.104, Penguin

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One should not interpret the word “Revolution” in its literal sense. Various meanings and significances are attributed to this word, according to the interests of those who use or misuse it. For the established agencies of exploitation it conjures up a feeling of blood stained horror. To the revolutionaries it is a sacred phrase.

Bhagat Singh

Agency, Blood, Feelings

Bhagat Singh, Bhagat (2010). “WOF : Bhagat Singh”, p.51, Penguin Books India

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Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'

Maxwell Maltz

Inspirational, Life, Self Esteem

Maxwell Maltz (2015). “Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded”, p.79, Penguin

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If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it's not a matter of sloppy editing. I'm repeating myself. I'm reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right. And I'm still wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again because I am not finished with them. Any may never be. Work-in- progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on.

Robert Fulghum

Life, Running, Hope

Robert Fulghum (2010). “Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door”, p.28, Ivy Books

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It is very wonderful to see persons of the best sense passing hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards with no conversation but what is made up of a few game-phrases, and no other ideas but those of black or red spots arranged together in different figures. Would not a man laugh to hear any one of his species complaining that life is short?

Joseph Addison

Life, Laughter, Men

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Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, ..., there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”).

Albert Schweitzer

Life, Death, Sunset

"Albert Schweitzer's Ethical Vision: A Sourcebook".

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Da Free John's phrase kept running through my mind: "Practice the wound of love... practice the wound of love." Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love.

Ken Wilber

Love, Running, Hurt

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For much of my life I floundered under the excuse of "nobody's perfect," the liberating and over-used phrase that affords guys like me the freedom to pile up sins in a careless and unchecked way. Ironically, being perfect is precisely what we are called to be!

Tarek Saab

Perfect, Guy, Catholic

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His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

Henry Fielding

Marriage, Design, Way

'Tom Jones' (1749) bk. 11, ch. 4

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Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.

Terry Pratchett

Asking, Lexicon, Argument

Terry Pratchett (2010). “Witches Abroad: (Discworld Novel 12)”, p.173, Random House

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There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. If you're playing a money game, why not get into banking?

Artie Shaw

Games, Playing Music, Why Not

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"Lambe them, lads! lambe them!" a cant phrase of the time derived from the fate of Dr. Lambe, an astrologer and quack, who was knocked on the head by the rabble in Charles the First's time.

Walter Scott

Time, Fate, Drs

Walter Scott (2016). “Peveril of the Peak, Complete: Scott's Works Vol.26”, p.453, VM eBooks

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Ever heard of the phrase 'midlife crisis'?

Janet Maslin

Midlife, Crisis, Heard

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Do you know what the costliest phrase in technology is? 'It will work because it would be cool if it did.'

Jean Louis

Technology, Would Be, Being Cool

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Stay far from timid only make moves when you're heart's in it, and live the phrase the sky's the limit.

The Notorious B.I.G.

Inspirational, Life, Moving

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I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.

John Shelby Spong

Love, Thinking, Mindfulness

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To illustrate what I mean, an apt dancer may be in thorough unison with the others in that particular group, and at the same time reveal a difference in dancing temperament, rhythm or technique; she may phrase, accentuate or actually interpret differently.

Florenz Ziegfeld

Time, Mean, Differences

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This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.

John Drinkwater

Goal, Soul, Mind

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Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!

Richard Bach

Children, Ideas, Different

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