Scalpels Quotes

• You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Soul

  Gustave Flaubert (1976). “Bouvard and Pécuchet”, Penguin Books

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful.

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Pain, Painful, Truth Is

  "The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)". Book by Miguel Angel Ruiz, 1997.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time heals. No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue is not a good thing. It is merely the wound's other face.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Pain, Coffins, Tissues

  28 Copy quote

• Get a scalpel, and practice just, say, cutting a piece of meat or something like that. You sort of learn how you want to hold your fingers, and that sort of thing, and try to become graceful when you operate.

  Denton Cooley

  Cutting, Practice, Trying

  "Denton A. Cooley, M.D. on Preparation". The Academy of Achievement Intreview, www.achievement.org. April 11, 1991.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you take the time to study how to be a doctor and how to use your scalpel and your medicine, then there are endless beings out there to help.

  Tenzin Palmo

  Doctors, Medicine, Use

  8 Copy quote

• If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.

  John McNally

  Reading, Writing, Two

  8 Copy quote

• I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera.
  I recognize it for the instrument it is,
  part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

  Irving Penn

  Cameras, Instruments, Awe

  30 Copy quote

• Truth is to be used as a scalpel, not a club.

  Matt Chandler

  Clubs, Truth Is, Used

  20 Copy quote

• An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Sarcastic, Sarcasm, Economics

  11 Copy quote

• A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Blow, Torches, Use

  7 Copy quote

• He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Agony, Numbers

  CHARLES DICKENS (1867). “LITTLE DORRIT”, p.289

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.

  Vernor Vinge

  Hair, Voice, Gentle

  Vernor Vinge, Maureen F. McHugh (1993). “The Tor sf sampler: featuring excerpts from the 1993 Nebula and Hugo nominees : A fire upon the deep by Vernor Vinge and China mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've never taken a scalpel to a dead body.

  Patricia Cornwell

  Taken, Body

  "Crime Novelist Patricia Cornwell on Blood, 'Boundaries' and Her Next Book" by Lauren Effron, abcnews.go.com. December 6, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Emotional, Scar, Remove

  5 Copy quote

• After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.

  Richard Matheson

  Feeling Sad, Sorrow, Despair

  Richard Matheson (1954). “I Am Legend”, Greenwich, Connecticut : Fawcett

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too - ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring earth.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Philosophy, Doctors, Heaven

  Marcus Aurelius (2002). “Meditations: A New Translation”, p.33, Modern Library

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.

  Ed Koch

  New York, Law, Knives

  7 Copy quote

• God is at the tip of our scalpels, our screwdrivers, our computer terminals, our dust rags, our vacuum cleaners, our pencils and pens. He is with us in our wheelchairs, or on our hospital beds, when all we can do is sit or lie flat. When we envision Him and His purpose in what we do, then we begin to grow aware of His presence in the middle of it. We are able to engage in our inward conversation with Him as we work, naturally, without strain. He becomes our partner, our collaborator.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  God, Lying, Dust

  30 Copy quote

• [Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

  Stephen Batchelor

  Mindfulness, Sentimental, Belief

  5 Copy quote

• I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process.

  Gerry Spence

  Book, School, Doctors

  32 Copy quote

• Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ - I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel.

  Murong Xuecun

  Writing, Cutting, Skills

  "Words We Can Use, and Those We Can Not". www.nytimes.com. February 24, 2011.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

  Mary Roach

  Heart, People, Waiting

  18 Copy quote

• Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser

  Michael Caine

  Acting, Lasers, Theater

  Michael Caine (2000). “Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making”, p.9, Hal Leonard Corporation

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, the deficit doctors have their scalpels out all right, but they're not poised over the budget. That's as fat as ever and getting fatter. What they're ready to operate on is your wallet.

  Ronald Reagan

  Doctors, Wallets, Fats

  Reagan, Ronald (1984). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 198”, p.709, Best Books on

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Law, Freedom Of Speech, Censorship

  Alan Dershowitz (2008). “Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism”, p.191, John Wiley & Sons

  7 Copy quote

  Show source