Phrases Quotes - Page 13

• Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

  Virginia Woolf

  Brain, Mercy, Traveler

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• After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lovely

  Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

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• Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?

  Charles Kingsley

  Religious, Heart, Character

  Charles Kingsley (2008). “The Good News of God: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.125, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.

  Dorothy Parker

  Beach, Reading, Eye

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• Some men's wit is like a dark lantern, which serves their own turn and guides them their own way, but is never known (according to the Scripture phrase) either to shine forth before men, or to glorify their Father in heaven.

  Alexander Pope

  Father, Dark, Men

  Alexander Pope (1847). “The works of Alexander Pope, with notes and illustrations, by himself and others. To which are added, a new life of the author [&c.] by W. Roscoe”, p.389

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• As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Reflection, Men, Names

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge, John McVickar (1854). “Coleridge's Aids to reflection: with the author's last corrections”, p.2

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• I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?

  Ellen Goodman

  Religious, Moving, Acceptance

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• Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?

  Erica Jong

  Language, Menace, Taxes

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• I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

  Agnes Repplier

  Confused, Years, Age

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• There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

  Agnes Repplier

  Fancy, Virtue, Repetition

  Agnes Repplier (1898). “Varia”

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• Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

  Agnes Repplier

  Speech, Accepted, Substitutes

  Agnes Repplier (1936). “In Pursuit of Laughter ...”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

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• In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.

  Barbara Holland

  Falling In Love, Philosophy, Single Mom

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

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• The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

  Mary McCarthy

  Together, Adjectives, Nouns

  Mary McCarthy (1985). “Occasional prose”, Harcourt

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• Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.

  Catherine the Great

  Long, People, Letters

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• This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

  Gore Vidal

  Giving Up, Sky, Religion

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• I don't like the phrase having it all. It implies we're being greedy, like "have a second piece of pie."

  Kirsten Gillibrand

  Pie, Pieces, Greedy

  "Meet Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (and Take Her Work Advice)". Interview with Cindi Leive, www.glamour.com. March 11, 2014.

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• Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really.

  Richard Rohr

  Christian, Jobs, Order

  Source: ryanthomasneace.com

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• I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

  Aaron Belz

  Taken, Ideas, Two

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• It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

  Hortense Calisher

  Writing, Stories, Kind

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• Zen phrase says The instant you speak about a thing you miss the mark.

  Fritjof Capra

  Missing, Speak, Mark

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• I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Children, Powerful

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• A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

  Storm Jameson

  Lying, Optimistic, Noble

  Storm Jameson (1966). “The Early Life of Stephen Hind”

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• Military intelligence is a meaningless phrase because the two words are mutually exclusive.

  Lucille Kallen

  Military, Two, Exclusive

  Lucille Kallen (1987). “C.B. Greenfield: A Little Madness”

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• Ah! the curse of slavery, as the common phrase goes, has fallen not merely on the black but perhaps at this moment still more upon the white, because it has warped his sense of truth and has degraded his moral nature. The position and the treatment of the blacks, however, really improve from year to year; while the whites do not seem to advance in enlightenment.

  Fredrika Bremer

  Years, White, Black

  Fredrika Bremer, Adolph Benson, Carrie Catt (2007). “America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer”, p.102, Applewood Books

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• Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

  Paula Fox

  War, Reality, Thinking

  Paula Fox (2011). “News from the World: Stories and Essays”, p.150, W. W. Norton & Company

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