Be Specific Quotes

#1. Take a stand; go for the right choice. Don't just sit for anything; stand for something. Be specific because sometimes, when the meaning is not clear, there us absolutely no meaning!

Israelmore Ayivor

#2. Assessment coordinators need to be knowledgeable about general higher education topics (e.g., student persistence, the cost of higher education, diversity, and student learning); they must also know how those play out at specific institutions.

Kimberly Yousey-Elsener

#3. It's not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk-show host.

Jim Bakker

#4. Give me your morning. Breakfast, waking up, walking to the bus stop. Be as specific as possible. Slow down in your mind and go over the details of the morning.

Natalie Goldberg

#5. For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Charles Palliser

#6. Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.

Augusten Burroughs

#7. I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

Jeff Koons

#8. The way that I work is very specific, very thorough, and the process has to be totally clear.

Lynn Collins

#9. Earthquakes would be great if they could hit specific areas, like the parent lounge at a children's beauty pageant.

Dana Gould

#10. Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.

Rick Moody

#11. Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.

Jeffrey Toobin

#12. It's too bad music can't be like movies. For me, playing music and listening to music and creating music is very environmental. It creates a certain environment; it sets a specific mood.

Avey Tare

#13. Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.

Seymour Papert

#14. I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.

Antonio R. Damasio

#15. I always wanted to be something, but now I see I should have been more specific.

Lily Tomlin

#16. Your dharma is what kind of work you should be doing, what kind of people you should associate with, whether you should have a teacher or not. Dharma encompasses all things and it is specific to the individual.

Frederick Lenz

#17. If you like strange, specific stuff - that's a nerd. Kanye West is a black nerd. He likes strange, specific stuff. If you go up to Kanye West and say, 'Hey, what are your favorite things?' He'll be like, 'Robots and teddy bears.' That's a nerd.

Donald Glover

#18. Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

Elliott Carter

#19. To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#20. The specific patterns, out of which a building or a town is made
may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner
forces loose, and, set us free; but when they are dead they keep
us locked in inner conflict.

Christopher Alexander

#21. Listening to albums and records is not the best way to percept Verka Serduchka. Live shows are the place where you can feel that specific atmosphere, that is not going to be the same ever.

Verka Serduchka

#22. The great thing about not being American is that you don't assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.

Cate Blanchett

#23. When General Motors builds a car, they want to meet the specific needs of many customers. But if they custom-make each car, then it will not be economical.

Susumu Tonegawa

#24. I'm very happy to make specific choices (as an actor), (but) you can't be married to them because you never know when the writers are going to be like, "By the way, you have no brothers, you have a sister."

Anna Chlumsky

#25. Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.

Barack Obama

#26. A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.

Michel De Montaigne

#27. My career seems to be a career of non-specific subjects which are all over the place.

Ridley Scott

#28. I want to make these films that I think other people would be scared to do. I don't think anyone can go off and make a rock opera. I think it's a very specific niche.

Darren Lynn Bousman

#29. The recession is everywhere. We need to be heard. Wouldn't it be great if there could be more referendums so we could have regular voting on specific points?

Joss Stone

#30. I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.

Alain De Botton

#31. The more specific and measurable your goal, the more quickly you will be able to identify, locate, create, and implement the use of the necessary resources for its achievement.

Charles J. Givens

#32. I think you have to have a real point of view that's your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it's a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine's point of view because it's never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph [ the way] you believe it..

Mary Ellen Mark

#33. It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

Frank O'Hara

#34. I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

Neil Gaiman

#35. What does it mean to be an American? While each of us may have our own specific answer to that question, we likely can agree on the basic principles of America: freedom, equal opportunity, and rights accompanied by responsibilities.

Ben Nelson

#36. Mistakes focus our minds on specific details. They weed out truths and afford us goals, bringing straight to our attention lessons to be learned. Mistakes are not meant to make us failures; they are meant to make us wise.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#37. Wishes are slippery things. You have to be very specific or you can get exactly what you wished for and still end up with nothing.

Cynthia Lord

#38. We have had no specific or credible threats, but we don't take that as any kind of comfort. We know we need to be ready and we know that, that vigilance is the price of freedom.

Greg Nickels

#39. On the whole it may be observed, that the specific use of a body of unproductive consumers, is to give encouragement to wealth by maintaining such a balance between produce and consumption as will give the greatest exchangeable value to the results of the national industry.

Thomas Malthus

#40. Specific policy decisions would be absolutely necessary to promote the UK. It's not necessarily borrowing more or changing our current account status.

Andrea Leadsom

#41. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

Viktor E. Frankl

#42. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

Noam Chomsky

#43. I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.

Lily Tomlin

#44. At MTV, it's very nice sometimes to be able to be very specific. Specificity really makes a news story interesting because you can color it in that personality.

Tabitha Soren

#45. trapped in his past, refusing to move forward. Unless this is a specific part of the character's arc, a character caught under this mountain of backstory can be painful to

Jordan McCollum

#46. Books, films should be based on specific people... people which are rare and by it's own way pretty mystery as characters.

Deyth Banger

#47. I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.

Italo Calvino

#48. We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Vladimir Nabokov

#49. If you design a system to do something specific, don't be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppresses individuality, imagination, and creativity, don't be surprised it that's what it does.

Ken Robinson

#50. And there will continue to be a specific threat, and there will continue to be terrorism, as there has been for as long as human history exists.

Ted Koppel

#51. God created you to be in the world.
You are in the world to fulfil a specific mission.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#52. The period-effects model refers to influences specific to particular points in time - effects thought to be unique economic or demographic circumstances to which any observable fluctuations in population growth or decline may be attributed.

Brian A. Hoey

#53. But fluttery hope suggested that when she was ready to open back up, perhaps all emotions wouldn't be stones-pressing-chest horrible. She had no specific expectations. She just contemplated that bird's heartbeat inside her and considered it was time to take a chance.

Shannon Hale

#54. Unsolvable problems do not exist. Any crisis is a combination of specific tasks to be worked on. The government has the experience and reserves to overcome the economic downturn

Dmitry Medvedev

#55. I have a specific set of, I have a specific sort of negative energies to deal with that might be specific to me, but it definitely something that all artists have to deal with at one point or another. But I think for me, it's just maybe more specific.

Sean Lennon

#56. I'm not that in control of myself that I could be specific about exactly the way I'm doing everything as it happens. I'm just trying my best.

Sean Lennon

#57. You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

David Cronenberg

#58. The proper exegetical principle is this: Mosaic law is still to be enforced, by the church or the State or both, unless there is a specific injunction to the contrary in the New Testament.

Gary North

#59. There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#60. For years we've been treating men and women as though the only differences had to do with our sexual organs. The field of Gender-Specific Medicine was launched by cardiologist Marianne J. Legato, M.D. in 1997 when she recognized that a gender-neutral approach could be harmful to both men and women.

Jed Diamond

#61. The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

Diane Arbus

#62. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

Matt Damon

#63. Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.

Teju Cole

#64. Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.

Melissa Pritchard

#65. You have to be precise. You have to be specific, but you want to be accurate. That is first and foremost. You want to be on top of the story, but words do matter.

Wolf Blitzer

#66. The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.

Paul Klee

#67. There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won't let us look anywhere else in the room if there's a map on the wall.

Ken Jennings

#68. Well, it's more of a sane life to be part of an ensemble! I find that the work can be more specific too and I have to really make sure I know where I am in the story because I'm not in every scene.

Lauren Graham

#69. Hillary Clinton almost got to be president. The reasons why she didn't become president had to do with bad judgments about how to handle the early caucus states, which is not a gender-specific trait.

Gail Collins

#70. If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.

Chuck Klosterman

#71. Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance - embracing all opposites.

Taisen Deshimaru

#72. You must be very specific in your wishes or they'll come back to haunt you.

Erica Jong

#73. I'm on a single track here - I work to direct what I want to see onstage. I basically have been feeding my own needs - to be working on a specific project at a specific time, and fortunately more often it works than fails.

Harold Prince

#74. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.

Altiero Spinelli

#75. I don't believe God wants our church life to be centered on buildings and services. Instead, God wants our churches - whatever specific forms our gatherings take - to be focused on active discipleship, mission, and the pursuit of unity.

Francis Chan

#76. Most of us don't think about miracles that we could possibly do. We don't have a vocabulary of how God works with the specific things that He does, and we don't know how to align ourselves with what He is doing so that we can be His vehicle on the earth to deliver a miracle.

Bruce Wilkinson

#77. I believe careers should be judged independently unless there's a clear conflict of interest in a specific case.

John Fund

#78. Finally life becomes a very specific thing
and that's what we are. Ultimately, looking back, I'm beginning to believe that we need to always be fucked up. We need to always have some reason to hate ourselves, something to make us feel eternally incomplete.

Arthur Nersesian

#79. There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable ... in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

P. J. O'Rourke

#80. Please let me meet someone and please make sure he's good in bed." She figured it was a good idea to be specific about what she wanted - she didn't want to be blessed with the wrong man.

Lea Hart

#81. To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them

A.W. Tozer

#82. All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.

Jane Wagner

#83. Failure does not exist. Failure is simply someone else's opinion of how a certain act should have been completed. Once you believe that no act must be performed in any specific other-directed way, then failing becomes impossible.

Wayne Dyer

#84. Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the moment.

Thomas Pynchon

#85. Christ had a specific evangelizing goal in mind when he prayed at the Last Supper that all his disciples 'be one ... 'The Church's evangelizing mission, therefore, moves along the path of ecumenism, the path of unity of faith, of evangelical witness and authentic fraternity.

Pope Benedict XVI

#86. I love big summer dresses, and it sucks because I'm such a little person, so I always have to be very specific about which ones I put on.

Becky G

#87. In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of stickiness.

Malcolm Gladwell

#88. It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#89. I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they're all somewhere in the basement of my folks' house.

Nathan Fillion

#90. Never be jealous of anyone.
You are special with unique talents for a specific mission.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#91. The day you learn to be publically specific in your prayer, that is the day you will discover power.

David Wilkerson

#92. You are always where you are meant to be at any specific moment in time.

Steven Redhead

#93. Companies should be able to share specific threat information with the government without the prospect of lawsuits hanging over their head.

Leon Panetta

#94. The incongruity between perceived and actual reality typically characterizes a whole industry or a whole service area. The solution, however, should again be small and simple, focused and highly specific.

Peter F. Drucker

#95. When you are too specific on a target, it can drain you. Ask me where I will be when I am 60, and I will have no answer to give.

Christian Louboutin

#96. I don't know - the idea of a specific wine paired with a specific piece of music seems a little far-fetched to me. But maybe I just need to be opened to it.

Mike D

#97. Today many medications act across diagnostic groups. Alliance effects also transcend specific psychotherapy methods. Both may be affecting profound psychopathological processes.

Leston Havens

#98. Regardless of past aspirations, this is the right time to be focusing on services for two specific reasons The increasing ubiquity of broadband has made it viable, and the proven economics of the advertising model has made it profitable.

Ray Ozzie

#99. There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them ... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

Diane Arbus

#100. I don't think the film is going to work for everybody, period. It wasn't meant to be done for everybody. I didn't four quadrant this movie, like Hollywood did. I knew it was a very specific audience that was there. We're also taking a shot in the dark.

Joseph M. Kahn