Top 100 Chiefly Quotes
#1. Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.
Mary Everest Boole
#2. There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper ...
May Sarton
#3. We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#4. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality: that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything.
Benjamin Franklin
#6. It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs on surrounding scenes and objects and whoever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon?
Algernon H. Blackwood
#7. Everything starts to break down, however, when a species gains language. What we talk about isn't what we experience - we speak chiefly of interesting things, and those tend to be things that are uncommon.
Brian Christian
#8. Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.
Arthur Brisbane
#9. One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#10. The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.
Stephen Gardiner
#12. It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain.
Victor Hugo
#13. We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
John Dewey
#14. He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
Kate Chopin
#15. On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not.
Georg Brandes
#16. Since I was 18, I've been under orders from magazines and newspapers - chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone - to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn't always succeed.
Neil Strauss
#17. Examples are cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from he path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the cabin.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.
Fritz Leiber
#19. The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.
William Shenstone
#20. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#21. Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something.
Dorothy Dunnett
#22. We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.
Matthew Simpson
#23. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#24. Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend, rather than the gloss of a sweet-lipped flatterer there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness.
Francis Quarles
#25. BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Herman Melville
#27. What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.
Walter Karp
#28. Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin, and that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child's inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food.
Charlotte Mason
#29. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
Oscar Wilde
#30. Our relations with the Indians have been governed chiefly by treaties and trade, or war and subjugation.
Nelson A. Miles
#31. A large portion of those who demand woman suffrage are persons who have not been trained to reason, and are chiefly guided by their generous sensibilities.
Catharine Beecher
#32. Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
D.H. Lawrence
#33. ANKER (A'NKER) n.s.[ancker, Dut.] A liquid measure chiefly used at Amsterdam. It is the fourth part of the awm, and contains two stekans: each stekan consists of sixteen mengles; the mengle being equal
Samuel Johnson
#34. For popular purposes, at least, the aim of literary artists should be similar to that of Rubens in his landscapes, of which, without neglecting the minor traits or finishing, he was chiefly solicitous to present the leading effect, or what we may call the inspiration.
William Benton Clulow
#35. I consider that it is on instruction and education that the future security and direction of the destiny of every nation chiefly and fundamentally rests.
Lajos Kossuth
#36. Zeal is fit for wise men, but flourishes chiefly among fools.
John Tillotson
#37. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
Henry David Thoreau
#38. Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
Arnold Bennett
#39. Hence it is predicated chiefly of the virtuous; then of the pleasant; and lastly of the useful.
Thomas Aquinas
#40. We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man.
Henry David Thoreau
#41. It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.
Woodrow Wilson
#42. Spiritual delight in God arises chiefly from his beauty and perfection, not from the blessings he gives us.
Jonathan Edwards
#43. All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.
Saint Augustine
#44. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE DAN KIRKSEN OPENED THE WASHINGTON POST AND started to take a sip of his orange juice. It never reached his mouth. Gavin had managed to file a story on the Sullivan case consisting chiefly of the information that Jack Graham, newly ordained partner at Patton,
David Baldacci
#45. Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men that comes chiefly through their work.
Bertrand Russell
#46. Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What
Kevin Kelly
#47. There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. Ram Mohan Roy would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak a greater scholar if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.
Mahatma Gandhi
#49. What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.
H.L. Mencken
#50. I ate no butcher's meat, lived chiefly on fruits, vegetables, and fish, and never drank a glass of spirits or wine until my wedding day. To this I attribute my continual good health, endurance, and an iron constitution.
John James Audubon
#51. And chiefly thou, O spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know'st. Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sattest brooding on the vast abyss,
And madst it pregnant.
John Milton
#52. Pragmatically speaking, I like the fact that the masses vote, abuse drugs, believe in Jesus, follow sports, and worship a flag. They are tools of social engineering that keep the many-too-many sedate, pacified, and out of many people's hair (chiefly, my own).
Matt Paradise
#53. The word "innovate" - to make new - used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end.
Anonymous
#54. The vices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness and facility. Francis Bacon More
J.D. Robb
#55. Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
H.L. Mencken
#56. By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau
#57. Unconditional love is furnished by many 4 legged creatures, but chiefly by human kinds best friend DOG!
Ladee Basset
#58. To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair - chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.
H.G.Wells
#59. Indeed, it was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but unmanned me, as it were.
Herman Melville
#60. In the Fall of 1774 & Winter of 1775, I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed ourselves into a committee for the purpose of watching the movements of the British soldiers, and gaining every intelligence of the movements of the Tories.
Paul Revere
#62. If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
W. H. Auden
#63. The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#64. We sought out and visited all the Indians hereabouts that we could meet with, in number about twenty. They were chiefly in one place, about a mile from where we lodged.
John Woolman
#65. London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.
Louis Kronenberger
#66. System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
#67. The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged. Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God, and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.
Thomas Jefferson
#68. I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.
Thomas Jefferson
#69. Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
Cynthia Ozick
#70. they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.*
William L. Shirer
#71. A life merely of pleasure, or chiefly of pleasure, is always a poor and worthless life.
Theodore W. Parker
#72. If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
Robert Quillen
#73. To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#74. It's been constant grinding and trying to secure work that I care about, tireless auditions and meetings. I've been fortunate that a lot of cool doors have opened to me, chiefly meeting great people who were inspired by what I've done and what they feel I could bring to their projects.
Keith Stanfield
#75. That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running short
not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.
Lewis Carroll
#76. One principal reason is that the histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher classes. We have but few accounts that can be depended upon of the manners and customs of that part of mankind where these retrograde and progressive movements chiefly take place.
Thomas Robert Malthus
#77. Mr. President, the cause of this great discontent in the country, the cause of the evils which we now suffer and which we now fear, originates chiefly from questions growing out of the respective rights of the different States and the unfortunate subject of slavery ...
John J. Crittenden
#78. The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things - chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups.
Catherynne M Valente
#79. It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers
Fred Brooks
#80. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
Adam Smith
#81. The Legislature of Lower Canada, consisting chiefly of Roman Catholics, could hardly be expected to support a church which they were taught to consider heretical, and in Upper Canada the scanty means at the disposal of the Government, precluded all hope.
John Strachan
#82. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.
G.K. Chesterton
#83. Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
Immanuel Kant
#84. He did have his beliefs, chiefly in his own genius.
T. J. Stiles
#86. Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
Franklin P. Adams
#87. It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly concerned with our being religious.
William Temple
#88. The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.
Andy Miller
#89. INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.
Ambrose Bierce
#90. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
#91. Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.
Adam Smith
#92. All classes of society are trade unionists at heart, and differ chiefly in the boldness, ability, and secrecy with which they pursue their respective interests.
William Stanley Jevons
#93. Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer, or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?
Maria Edgeworth
#94. That not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued.
Plato
#95. The national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose.
Herbert Croly
#96. The investigations thereon resultant have appeared in medical and dental journals for the past two decades. The present work is chiefly based on these researches.
Eugene Solomon Talbot
#98. You're good. You're very good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.
Dashiell Hammett
#99. Seek not to grow in knowledge chiefly for the sake of applause, and to enable you to dispute with others; but seek it for the benefit of your souls.
Jonathan Edwards
#100. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.
Henry David Thoreau
