Top 83 Chisel Quotes
#1. Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
Samuel Butler
#3. Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#4. Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#5. But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen, we will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever, Amen.
Rudyard Kipling
#6. It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
Michelangelo
#7. No, I'm telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me and you.
N.K. Jemisin
#8. Someday," Joseph said to his granddaughter, "someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won't be able to prevent yourself; that's just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.
Jane Urquhart
#9. In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continuously.
Victor Hugo
#10. We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.
William Butler Yeats
#11. A marble cutter, with chisel and hammer, was changing a stone into a statue. A preacher looking on said: "I wish I could deal such changing blows on stony hearts." The workman answered: "Maybe you could, if you worked like me, upon your knees."
Arthur Tappan Pierson
#12. You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.
John Ruskin
#13. The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece ... We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is ... everything.
Peter Kreeft
#15. In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]
Anthony Marra
#16. The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer.
Agona Apell
#17. I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.
C.S. Lewis
#18. Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize-gra b a chisel and get busy!
Steve Pavlina
#19. She did not arrive at Annandale without taking the chisel to herself more than once, without rubbing up against a few boys to smooth an edge or two.
Thomm Quackenbush
#20. Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
Henry Ward Beecher
#21. Let's here it for modern dentistry, eh? I said, and he grimaced. Actually, as much as people dislike going to the dentist now, try doing it two hundred years ago, when having a cavity meant some quack knocking it out with a chisel and a hammer in the market square. With no anesthetic.
Cate Tiernan
#22. Why should I deem myself to be a chisel, when I could be the artist?
Friedrich Schiller
#23. Words. Ever since chisel was taken to slate, it has been accepted that words can and do change the world.
LIFE Magazine
#24. Still, we made it back to the corn mill, and even though it felt like a dwarf with a chisel had taken up permanent residence in my frontal lobe, I managed to stagger all the way back to the house.
Rachel Hawkins
#25. No one will ever win four [Super Bowls] in six years again. It won't happen. You can chisel that sucker in stone.
Terry Bradshaw
#26. The mind is the chisel, matter is the stone and life is the sculpture. Make sure you use your chisel wisely
Carsten Ostergaard Pedersen
#27. What could you possibly write at Gates of Hades?" Cadmus asked.
"Keep your spirits up." Lycon sheathed the dagger he'd used to chisel the trunk.
Cadmus shook his head. "Idiot.
Sulari Gentill
#28. Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt or thought has had its hand in molding us, shaping us.
Orison Swett Marden
#29. Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.
Federico Chini
#30. Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel, I am a carpenter of my own soul.
Rumi
#31. I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't.
Anne Heche
#32. Fear is a poor chisel with which to carve out tomorrow.
Andy Andrews
#33. Standing there, chisel and mallet in hand, gazing at the statue that was his vision in stone, was a moment when Richard could savor the supreme achievement of having his creation exist exactly as he had originally conceived it. For this singular moment in time, it was complete, and it was his alone.
Terry Goodkind
#34. And that is how a self-seeking hotchpotch distorts and debases the very finest social schemes. It is the black vein in white marble; it gets everywhere, appears under your chisel at any moment without warning. Your statue has to be redone.
Victor Hugo
#35. When carving stone, the sculptor removes everything that is not the statue. [ ... ] The art of revealing beauty lies in removing what conceals it. So, too, Patanjali [in the Yoga Sutras] tells us that wholeness exists within us. Our work is to chisel away at everything that is not essence, not Self.
Judith Hanson Lasater
#36. Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.
Victor Hugo
#37. A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.
William C. Bryant
#38. Love and kindness are the hammer and chisel that gently chip through barriers and long-held beliefs to reveal the magnificent soul contained within every human.
Molly Friedenfeld
#39. With poetry and writing, the question isn't "do you know the right words?".
The real question is, "can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?
Jacob Nordby
#40. Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop
Gabrielle Zevin
#41. Children are like clay in the hands of teachers. Like a sculptor we can chisel and carve their personalities with our behavior.
Balroop Singh
#42. What can a sculptor do without the chisel and the hammer? And what can an impostor politician do without the ignorant and the uneducated?
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#43. Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H. It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#44. Doubt is the chisel that causes the fissures to drive a solid relationship apart,
K. Bromberg
#45. I can't believe how hard it is. The pain is indescribable. It's like I've been turned into sandstone and my insides are being slowly hollowed out by a chisel and mallet.
Lang Leav
#46. And ne er did Grecian chisel trace A Nymph, a naiad or a grace Of finer form or lovelier face ...
Walter Scott
#47. Life is a quarry, out of which we have to mod and chisel and complete character?" ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Matt Nelson
#48. You are provided with hands, but you decide how to employ them. Some use their hands to provide a lover's caress, chisel a sculpture, plant seeds; others use their hands to tighten a noose, pull a gun trigger, turn a prison key on innocent souls.
Joshua Emmet
#49. I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life ... They are the artists of being alive.
Frederick Franck
#50. behind the wall." The next day, Hem and Haw returned with tools. Hem held the chisel, while Haw banged on the hammer until they made a hole in the wall of Cheese Station C. They peered inside but found no Cheese. They were disappointed but believed they could solve the problem. So they started
Spencer Johnson
#51. It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.
William Butler Yeats
#52. After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being.
N.K. Jemisin
#53. Don't accept the limitations of other people who claim things are 'unchangeable'. If it's written in stone, bring your hammer and chisel.
Peter McWilliams
#54. Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments.
Diane Glancy
#55. Liberals have shifted government into a position of being neutral between right and wrong. By concentrating power in government institutions, liberals chisel at the three pillars of society: the family unit, work ethic and faith. That's not good for America.
James G. Watt
#56. So this is love:
the Sculptor's chisel.
And stone, which in its whole life
does not utter a single word,
suddenly sings.
Milan Rufus
#57. Write today's worries in sand. Chisel yesterday's victories in stone. Pick up the stone of the past.
Max Lucado
#58. Let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work. Let us lead them into the healthy world of primitive building methods, where there was meaning in every stroke of an axe, expression in every bite of chisel.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#59. The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#60. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails ...
Gloria E. Anzaldua
#61. Great sculptors and artists spend countless hours perfecting their talents. They don't pick up a chisel or a brush and palette, expecting immediate perfection. They understand that they will make many errors as they learn, but they start with the basics, the key fundamentals first.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#62. The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.
Basil Bunting
#63. To assume you have it all figured out is a warning signal that you aren't humble enough to listen to God and to others. If you refuse to chisel away at arrogant attitudes, trouble lies ahead. You know very little if you claim to have all the answers.
Thomas A Kempis
#64. If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.
Michelangelo
#65. Celibacy is like poetry keeping the idea ever in mind like a dream; but marriage uses chisel and brush, concentrating more on marble and canvas. Celibacy jumps to a conclusion like an intuition; marriage, like reason, labors through ebb and flow, step by step.
Fulton J. Sheen
#66. The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.
John Ruskin
#67. Davos had often heard it said that the wizards of Valyria did not cut and chisel as common masons did, but worked stone with fire and magic as a potter might work clay.
George R R Martin
#68. This was my first real lesson in politics ... If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#70. The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets.
He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.
P.G. Wodehouse
#71. Nails are forged for pounding. Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded - under torch and hammer and chisel - into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.
N.D. Wilson
#72. I want to strip my work of 'effects' until it stands monolithic, based on reality and yet transcending it. It must flow naturally from my materials, from the way of the chisel and the way of the block ... It is the ultimate ideal.
Shiko Munakata
#73. The older I get
the quicker Christmas comes,
but if I had to give up the heavenly
taste of Guinness dark, I couldn't
live another goddamn day. Darling,
you can chisel that into my headstone.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#74. Now I knew why I had been hollowed out, why my insides were chipped away with a chisel and mallet. It was to make room for this new feeling, this love that was so vast, so expansive it could not have fit into the vessel I once was.
Lang Leav
#75. Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. Gavin said that writing novels with a PC was supposed to be easier than writing with a typewriter and bond paper, or with a pen and foolscap, or with a chisel and a granite obelisk imported from Greece. I shook my head with pity as he related this canard to me.
Gary Reilly
#77. A disease and its treatment can be a series of humiliations, a chisel for humility.
Laurel Lea
#78. I've chickened out. Because what if he says no? What if he says yes? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if the English guy is there? What if he isn't? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if my m other breaks stone as easily as clay? What if this rash on my arm is leprosy? Etc.
Jandy Nelson
#79. That's the big challenge of life - to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don't annoy your friends with your whining.
Marc Maron
#80. I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son.
Have you never used a broom before?
Laurie R. King
#81. Climbing is individual thing, it's a reflection of yourself. When you put up a route you're looking at yourself. If you chisel holds, it's your responsibility, nobody else's.
Ron Kauk
#82. Ardent
yet chill and formal,
how I ache
to tempt a chisel
as a sculptor.
Hilda Doolittle
#83. I am more likely to give help than to ask it" - Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it - "still I should like to know.
Rudyard Kipling
