Scalpels Quotes

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

  Gustave Flaubert

  Soul

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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Matt Chandler

  Clubs, Truth Is, Used

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• 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

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

  Michael Ondaatje

  Blow, Torches, Use

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• 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

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• 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”

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• 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.

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• Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Emotional, Scar, Remove

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• [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

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• 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

• If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

  Austin O'Malley

  Patient, Poet, Clean

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• Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

  Alice Weaver Flaherty

  Dog, Sleep, Writing

  Alice Weaver Flaherty (2015). “The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

  Gustave Flaubert

  Science, Men, Doctors

  Gustave Flaubert (1968). “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas”, p.32, New Directions Publishing

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• At first I was queasy; I'll never forget the sound of the scalpel cutting a body open. But it was so cool trying to work out how these people died.

  Jonathan Davis

  Cutting, People, Work Out

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• Touching hands are not like pharmaceuticals or scalpels. They are like flashlights in a darkened room. The medicine they administer is self-awareness. And for many of our painful conditions, this is the aid that is most urgently needed.

  Deane Juhan

  Self, Hands, Medicine

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