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)

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• 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

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

  Toni Morrison

  Memories, Light, Dust

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Gautama Buddha

  Positive, Inspiring, Wise

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• 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

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• 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)

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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”

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• 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)

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• Nevertheless, scientific method is not the same as the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit does not rest content with applying that which is already known, but is a restless spirit, ever pressing forward towards the regions of the unknown, and endeavouring to lay under contribution for the special purpose in hand the knowledge acquired in all portions of the wide field of exact science. Lastly, it acts as a check, as well as a stimulus, sifting the value of the evidence, and rejecting that which is worthless, and restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.

  Archibald Garrod

  Science, Hands, Imagination

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• The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

  James Salter

  Past, Design, Disappear

  James Salter (1995). “A Sport and a Pastime”

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• Cosmology is serious business and in our hearts we are nothing if not cosmologists, hanging in a cold cage sifting the ruthless jewels of existence.

  Dennis Overbye

  Heart, Jewels, Serious Business

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