Chipping Away Quotes

• The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Beautiful, Art, Block

  Harry Persons Taber, Elbert Hubbard (1902). “The Philistine”

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• Whether it's people walking off 'The View' when Bill O'Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.

  Eric Cantor

  Walking Away, Views, Expression

  "Republicans to Add NPR Funding to 'You Cut' Budget Slashing Contest". www.foxnews.com. October 22, 2010.

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• Yes, it's a man's world, but that's all right because they're making a total mess of it. We're chipping away at their control, taking the parts we want. Some women think it's a difficult task, but it's not.

  Cher

  Men, Thinking, Tasks

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• 

  All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of their masterpiece.

  Eddie Murphy

  Men, Self, Ideas

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning.

  Richard Bangs

  Winning, Rivers, Dancing

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• I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

  Will Self

  Writing, Thinking, Building Things

  "Will Self (1961- )", www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2008.

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• If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.

  Noam Chomsky

  Disappointment, Hard Work, Law

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• Writing is an exercise in sculpture, chipping away at the rock until you find the nose.

  Stanley Elkin

  Writing, Exercise, Rocks

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• Another son came along 18 months later, although we waited four years to have the third, because Mitt was still in school and we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.

  Ann Romney

  Children, Home, School

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• I feel like you have to earn something with an audience. If I just did it now, I think producers on any superhero movie, I think they wouldn't trust me to do it the way I'd want to do it, because I'd want to do something basically really strange. I think you have to earn that freedom to do stuff like that. So I think, if I keep kind of chipping away, trying to do good movies and interesting, strange movies then people will eventually trust you to do that on a bigger scale.

  Robert Pattinson

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Source: collider.com

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• Our biggest challenges for the ocean and for the planet are problems of perception. People need to understand that species extinctions, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and pollution are all chipping away at the resilience of the thin layer of life that sustains us on Spaceship Earth.

  Edith Widder

  Ocean, People, Challenges

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• Who can I marry? Where can I live? What kind of career can I achieve? These are just some of the stories breaking with Anthem-like implications. And the ideas crushing the individual are all around us, chipping away at us constantly.

  Jeff Britting

  Crush, Careers, Ideas

  Source: www.theobjectivestandard.com

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• People ask me what I do in my spare time, and I look at them blankly, truly believing that I don't even have spare time, and if I did, I'd probably use it for something mundane, like chipping away at the mound of laundry rising to dangerous proportions in the back room.

  Kim Harrison

  Believe, People, Looks

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• People who are great thinkers, in science or in art, people who are great performers, have to have that kind of capacity. Without that kind of capacity, it's extremely difficult to manage a high level of performance because you're going to get a lot of extraneous material chipping away at the finery of your thinking or the finery of your motor execution.

  Antonio Damasio

  Art, Thinking, People

  Interview with David Hirschman, bigthink.com. August 10, 2010.

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• Towards the end of it [working as an escort girl] I could feel myself drifting towards a liquor habit and I had a few minor mental breakdowns due to a what I felt like was a constant chipping away at my personhood (guys thinking I would have unprotected sex with them if they just paid me fifty more dollars, for instance) and a few abusive clients.

  Marie Calloway

  Girl, Sex, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's a certain pressure you put on yourself to use the comics page to full advantage that can focus your mind to a pinpoint, and when the juices are flowing, that's incredibly exciting. When you've managed to fit a complex set of actions or a complicated emotional passage into a single page there's the sense of satisfaction that I suspect a sculptor gets from chipping away at a piece of stone and ending up with a fully-realized work of art.

  James Vance

  Art, Emotional, Focus

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Look, you do everything in stages, right? I don't think everything happens at once. There are so many layers we are constantly chipping away at, down and down and down, closer and closer to what would be the body. I think what happened with cancer, was that I woke up out of nine hours of surgery and I was body. I was just body.

  Eve Ensler

  Cancer, Thinking, Would Be

  "The Big Idea: Eve Ensler". Interview with Suzanne Koven, therumpus.net. June 12, 2013.

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• But you finally think, there is what there is, and you have to work within those confines and just keep chipping away at your own work.

  Sissy Spacek

  Thinking

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• You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that's constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

  Ron Wyden

  Surveillance State, Law, Liberty

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.

  Robert Altman

  Sculpture, Pieces, Stones

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• When you're in doubt about the future and you're in doubt about how solid this thing is that you're laying your life and your soul on the line for, you will probably retract into yourself a little bit and think, No, there's only so much I can give to something that everyone doesn't believe in. There's been chipping away, people have been chipping away at it, so it's just you in the spotlight in front of all these people.

  Richard Ashcroft

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Source: www.excellentonline.com

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• So many I considered, closest to me,turned on a dime and sold me out dutifully,although that knife was chipping away at me,they turned their eyes away and went home to sleep.

  Mariah Carey

  Home, Sleep, Eye

  Song: Petals, Album: Rainbow, 1999

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• Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

  Piers Anthony

  Writing, Cutting, Rocks

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• Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

  Terry Brooks

  Fire, One Day, Energy

  Terry Brooks (2000). “The Elf Queen of Shannara”, p.164, Del Rey

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• . . . These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife, always chipping away at the Tao, trying to render it graspable and manageable. But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable. There is, however, this consolation: She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her fingertips.

  Laozi

  Letting Go, Knowing, Knives

  Laozi, Brian Browne Walker (1992). “Hua Hu Ching: Teachings of Lao Tzu”

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