More Or Less Quotes

#1. What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

Thomas Pynchon

#2. I, more or less, love camping out, so I dug it, but I didn't enjoy other people's pain.

Casper Van Dien

#3. She wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.

Thomas Pynchon

#4. The best I could say about third grade was that it was a more or less continuous state of dread.

Sonia Sotomayor

#5. My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

Richard Dawkins

#6. Nor is it strange That after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same

Paul Simon

#7. The love of praise, howe'er conceal'd by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in ev'ry heart.

Edward Young

#8. I had a place in England and was commuting from England to Australia, which is pretty stupid, but after two years I sort of knew what I wanted to do, more or less.

Diane Cilento

#9. We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness.

Antonio Damasio

#10. There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#11. I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?

Paul Krugman

#12. I said before, that I have learnt much by guiding others. In the first place I see that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, and on the other hand, that one soul differs widely from another, so each must be dealt with differently.

Therese De Lisieux

#13. I don't sit down at nine in the morning and begin writing and then take a break for lunch and stop at four. I have no structure like that. I am at my computer constantly, more or less attached to it. I live on-line and hate being off-line and don't care how unhealthy it is.

Augusten Burroughs

#14. I'm trying to keep the face of my opponent more or less not damaged but eventually to execute the plan and knock him out.

Wladimir Klitschko

#15. Justice is a commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

Ambrose Bierce

#16. I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.

Margaret Mead

#17. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.

C.S. Lewis

#18. If the Modern Technical Age is to remain human, it cannot overlook the trust that our ancestors have left with us. Our past cannot be mere matter for a more or less curious utilitarianism, like iron deposits, say, on the moon.

Marshall G.S. Hodgson

#19. The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

Douglas Huebler

#20. In my culture, shoes are more or less the first thing women look at. Women look at the build, and then they look at the shoes. If you don't have nice shoes, you don't have money. When I meet a lawyer, the first thing I look at are his shoes. If he has good shoes, he's getting my money.

Method Man

#21. Death didn't answer. He was looking at Spold in the same way that a dog looks at a bone, only in this case things were more or less the other way around.

Terry Pratchett

#22. In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her Being.

Natalie Goldberg

#23. I have never separated form and content. The photo should have a meaning. But my photos are also more or less well constructed. If they had false notes, they stayed on the contact sheet.

Willy Ronis

#24. The biblical God lets us make our own history, and goes with us on the more or less unheard-of adventures we concoct.

Jacques Ellul

#25. Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

Jean Genet

#26. Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside. It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant.

Adyashanti

#27. Outwardly, other than her hair, she had not changed much. She was still more or less the same cool, aloof woman who garnered more respect than affection. On the inside, however, it had been impossible to return to the person she used to be.

Sherry Thomas

#28. No taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.

George Washington

#29. I think what I've realized is, life is all about climbing up, slipping down, and picking yourself up again. And it doesn't matter if you slip down. As long as you're kind of heading more or less upwards. That's all you can hope for. More or less upwards.

Sophie Kinsella

#30. Real chessplayers think about chess more or less 24 hours a day. It is a passion and a fate that one has to live with - and it lasts a lifetime.

Simen Agdestein

#31. First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.

Richard P. Feynman

#32. If stem cells divide equally, so both daughter cells look more or less the same, each one becomes another stem cell. If the split is unequal, neurons form prematurely.

Sam Kean

#33. I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

Stephen King

#34. We do two shows a night for five weeks. A lotta times we'll go upstairs and sing until daylight - gospel songs. We grew up with it ... It more or less puts your mind at ease. It does mine.

Elvis Presley

#35. It would be easy to say that I want to play a role that was very much like myself, but more or less with acting, you get to be all these different things, and you aren't trying to be yourself, so it's escapism in a way.

Summer Altice

#36. Depending on what day of the week it is and what time of the month it is, I'm a good friend or not a good friend. I'm more or less a good mom or not a good mom, more or less a good mate or not a good mate. That's just life, whether or not you're public.

Amy Grant

#37. I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

Marilynne Robinson

#38. Henry Ford is quoted as saying. "History is more or less bunk." Now, if he never spoke those words, doesn't that just prove he was right when he didn't say them?

Alex Bosworth

#39. If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

Timothy Garton Ash

#40. One life is worth no more or less than any other

Melinda Gates

#41. Let me get this straight. Whoever fights and wins gets to be in charge?" I questioned. "More or less." "Perfect. I challenge you all.

Eve Langlais

#42. 'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

Raza Jaffrey

#43. They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.

Douglas Adams

#44. More or Less Love Poems #11:
No babe
We'd never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild

Diane Di Prima

#45. Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive.

David Foster Wallace

#46. Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

Josef Albers

#47. Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.*

Douglas Adams

#48. The idea of polytheism is grounded in the view that reality (divine or otherwise) is multiple and diverse ... Polytheism has allowed a multitude of distinct groups to exist more or less in harmony, despite great divergence in beliefs and practices ...

Margot Adler

#49. I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.

Marcel Proust

#50. Wisdom is like the rain.
It's supply is unlimited, but it comes down according to what the occasion requires -
in winter and spring, in summer and autumn,
always in due measure, more or less,
but the source of that rain is the oceans itself, which has no limits.

Rumi

#51. A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

George Bernard Shaw

#52. Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

Patrick O'Brian

#53. I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

Neil Gaiman

#54. You can't be protein deficient without being calorie deficient because even if you take the foods that have the least amount of protein in them, let's say potatoes, for example, or rice at 8 or 9%. That's the figure we more or less need.

T. Colin Campbell

#55. Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

Hervey Allen

#56. In any group there is more or less tension between people, and there are complicities and affinities.

Guillaume Canet

#57. One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.

David Bowie

#58. On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

Matthew Arnold

#59. One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.

Paul Cezanne

#60. Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few.

John C. Wright

#61. A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

Gertrude Stein

#62. I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

Adrienne Rich

#63. But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.

Richard Ford

#64. Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [ ... ] of all rhythms. But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse.

Stephane Mallarme

#65. I may be a burglar ... but I'm an honest one, I hope, more or less.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#66. Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.

Thomas Kuhn

#67. I'm no more or less Jewish than any other Jew. Israel has survived because we haven't forgot our Judaism, but there are some Israelis who did forget.

Arcadi Gaydamak

#68. Well, just that there would be somebody in the office and the voters - it was more or less an understanding in the entire community, as long as that person was doing a good job on the merits, nobody was going to run against him.

Stephen Breyer

#69. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Michael Pollan

#70. You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done.

Felix Adler

#71. Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought.

Albert Ellis

#72. It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable

Alice McDermott

#73. It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another.

Stephanie Coontz

#74. Civil war brought many hardships to the cities, such as happen and will always happen as long as human nature is the same, although they may be more or less violent or take different forms, depending on the circumstances in each case.

Thucydides

#75. I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

Henry Louis Gates

#76. Dreams and visions are not always intended to be interpreted or analyzed. At times they say exactly what they mean, providing a set of images and meanings to be taken for no more or less than they are.

Hal Zina Bennett

#77. It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Havelock Ellis

#78. All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.

Terry Pratchett

#79. It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

Jamaica Kincaid

#80. It's always a struggle to make things sound more or less brilliant.

Victoria Legrand

#81. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with life.

Ben Jeffery

#82. I'd often thought being a Christian meant by definition being a bad one, since nothing is more difficult than Christianity, so I was more or less used to that feeling.

Charlaine Harris

#83. Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness ... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Henry James

#84. Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, "elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.

Jason L. Riley

#85. We are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#86. You have to realize that everyone in a band is all more or less together, and everyone has their own niche, and some people lead in some ways, and some people lead in others.

Mick Jagger

#87. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity a a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

G.K. Chesterton

#88. Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.

John Ruskin

#89. I allowed life to give me presents. And everything just sort of happened the way it was supposed to happen. I did not pursue anything. It more or less pursued me.

Ruth Bernhard

#90. I don't necessarily put on an act when I go on Jay Leno or dress differently in public than I do in private. I'd like to think I'm the same person, more or less.

Mila Kunis

#91. Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

Albert Camus

#92. Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me.

Brian Ferneyhough

#93. One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

Thornton Wilder

#94. We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.

Joseph Joubert

#95. We are human, and we suffer, and unlike the animals on the farm, we are self-aware, and we know that we suffer, and it doesn't hurt more or less if God caused it or could stop it, at least for me. I am definitely of the school that believes God has bigger stuff to worry about than me.

Jon Katz

#96. The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Richard Hofstadter

#97. I'm always keeping an eye on the court. Also, when the members of Congress came to his office during the budget debacle of a year and a half back and said, "We want to de-fund Planned Parenthood," he said, "Not going to happen." Those apparently were more or less his exact words.

Anna Quindlen

#98. I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more or less literally.

Francis Bacon

#99. Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.

Henry Spencer

#100. Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.

Gregory B. Sadler