Sifting Quotes

• Keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Friendship, Best Friend, Relationship

  A Life for a Life ch. 16 (1859)

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some people spend so much time hunting treasure that they fail to see it all around them. It's like sifting through gold to find the silt.

  Richard Paul Evans

  Hunting, People, Gold

  Richard Paul Evans (2015). “Walking on Water: A Novel”, p.207, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

  T. S. Eliot

  Creative, Toil, Composing

  11 Copy quote

• Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

  Toni Morrison

  Memories, Light, Dust

  6 Copy quote

• Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

  George Eliot

  Love, Friendship, Relationship

  156 Copy quote

• Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.

  Paula McLain

  Running, Past, Mind

  Paula McLain (2012). “The Paris Wife (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.63, Ballantine Books

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

  Gautama Buddha

  Positive, Inspiring, Wise

  7 Copy quote

• Raking over the past and sifting its dust is an occupation for the idle or the elderly retired.

  Armand Hammer

  Work, Past, Elderly

  Armand Hammer, Neil Lyndon (1988). “Hammer”, Perigee

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

  George Eliot

  Best Friend, Friendship, Relationship

  33 Copy quote

• Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Friendship, Best Friend, Relationship

  A Life for a Life ch. 16 (1859)

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality

  Bruce R. McConkie

  Teaching, Church, Doctrine

  8 Copy quote

• But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Friendship, Kindness, Blessing

  A Life for a Life ch. 16 (1859)

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Trying, Wonderful, Conviction

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.19, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• With my singing I can make, a refuge for my spirit's sake; a house of shining words, to be my fragile immortality.

  Sara Teasdale

  Music, House, Shining

  Sara Teasdale, William Drake (1984). “Mirror of the Heart: Poems of Sara Teasdale”, MacMillan Publishing Company

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we learn to say a deep, passionate yes to the things that really matter, then peace begins to settle onto our lives like golden sunlight sifting to a forest floor.

  Thomas Kinkade

  Wisdom, Peace, Passion

  29 Copy quote

• Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.

  Lord Kelvin

  Hard Work, Science, Discovery

  39 Copy quote

• Make all good men your well-wishers, and then, in the years' steady sifting, Some of them turn into friends. Friends are the sunshine of life.

  John Hay

  Friendship, Sunshine, Men

  John Hay (1913). “Poems”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat. Oh! be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on.

  Julia Ward Howe

  Heart, Men, Marching On

  Julia Ward Howe (1866). “Later Lyrics”, p.42

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you are having fun and creating something you love, it shows in the product. So when a woman is sifting through a rack of clothes, somehow that piece of clothing that you had so much fun designing speaks to her she responds to it and buys it. I believe you can actually transfer that energy to material things as you're creating them.

  Tom Ford

  Fun, Believe, Clothes

  "Tom Ford's Home on the Range". Interview with Lisa Eisner, www.gq.com.au. January 25, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the process of mental analysis, sifting through the selves, sifting through your thoughts, practicing mindfulness, learning to control thought.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Self, Mindfulness

  3 Copy quote

• But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation.

  Neal Stephenson

  Suicidal, Cereal, Long

  "Cryptonomicon". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men's hearts are being searched...it is a tremendous sifting time, not only of actions but of inner motives. Nothing can escape the all-searching eye of God.

  Frank Bartleman

  Heart, Eye, Men

  32 Copy quote

• The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

  T. S. Eliot

  Fall, Heart, Singing

  "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" l. 35 (1919)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Algaliarept varied its shape, sifting through my mind without me even knowing to choose what scared me the most. Once it had been Ivy. Then Kisten —until I had pinned him in an elevator in a foolish moment of vampire-induced passion. It's hard to be scared of someone after you've French-kissed him.

  Kim Harrison

  Passion, Ivy, Knowing

  Kim Harrison (2010). “Every Which Way But Dead”, p.5, HarperCollins UK

  51 Copy quote

  Show source