Top 100 One Sentence Sayings
#1. I would prefer to have gum on my face than own up to the fact that I accidentally got gum on my face. And of course one sentence out of every ten that comes from my mouth is probably not one hundred percent true.
Alicia Thompson
#2. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#3. nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence. Conditions
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#4. No one dared do it before, not in front of the King (opening sentence)
Gordon Thomas
#5. In one sentence, I'd describe myself as indescribable. But, I wouldn't end it with a period. I'd end it with three dots.
Jason Schwartzman
#6. If I had to cram all my tournament experience into one sentence, I would say, Don't give up and don't let up!
Tony Lema
#7. And in the last sentence I would like also to mention that Poland is one of the countries with which the United States has run strategic dialogues since last year.
Marek Belka
#8. The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#9. There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.
Peter Landesman
#10. Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn't.
Eben Alexander
#11. But it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me."
As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it.
Suzanne Collins
#12. There is no one way to render an idea. Let's explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive.
Constance Hale
#13. Two women chasing him, ready and waiting for his call and the one that had buts at the end of every sentence was the one who turned him inside him out with a simple kiss.
Carolyn Brown
#14. They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
Wislawa Szymborska
#15. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.
Jack White
#16. Making films can be absolutely fantastic, but it can also be incredibly dull. You spend the whole day sitting by yourself in your trailer and then you get called to deliver one sentence - then you're told to come back and do it again at 5:30 the following morning.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#17. Sometimes writing a sentence can be harder than serving one.
James Magnuson
#18. As a general rule, no one should ever be allowed to say there is no history of racial tension here, because that sentence has never been true anywhere on Earth,
John Oliver
#19. [Flowy]'d undertaken this mainly because he'd known that going to public school, with girls, would sentence him to fatherhood by age sixteen, and he wanted to evade that pattern, one from which he himself had been born.
Jeff Hobbs
#20. What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in ... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.
Jonathan Blum Kate Orman
#21. So now get up.'
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Hilary Mantel
#22. A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name ... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity ... he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.
John Quincy Adams
#23. Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the Scotch been weaker, had the gods been kinder, had the dice been hotter, this could have been a one-sentence story: Once upon a time I lived happily ever after.
Mickey Rooney
#24. Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.
Winston Churchill
#25. One senses with so many Democrats who support the Clintons an unspoken sentence: "They're all we have." They're the only big national winners the party has left. I always want to say to them: That's not true, you've got better than that, you've got good people, go look and you will find them.
Peggy Noonan
#26. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
Nicole Krauss
#27. Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence--one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.
Amor Towles
#28. There would be a trial and there would be a judge. The only problem was, there could only be one sentence.
Christopher Pike
#29. I want people who have received a diagnosis of Hepatitis C to know that they didn't just receive a death sentence. They do have options, even if the person who gave them their diagnosis isn't aware of all of them. The path they choose doesn't have to be one of desperation.
Melody Beattie
#30. The writers of religious scriptures and texts would have done humanity a grand service if they would have used just one sentence, in one of the pages out of the thousands, to support respectful and peaceful disagreement.
Steve Maraboli
#31. Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.
Ai Weiwei
#32. To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge without succumbing to the suggestive power of the fashion of the day, to be able to express what one has seen and felt in a snappy sentence or even in a cunningly wrought word - is that not glorious? Is it not a proper subject for congregation?
Albert Einstein
#33. Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time,
Charles James
#34. The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
John Irving
#35. How could one sentence uttered in anger cause so much damage? But then words were the most powerful thing in the universe. Cuts and bruises always healed, but words spoken in anger were most often permanent. They didn't damage the body, they destroyed the spirit. (Acheron)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#36. All the elements in an advertisement are primarily designed to do one thing and one thing only: get you to read the first sentence of the copy.
Joseph Sugarman
#37. This is the end, Fuka-Eri informed him in a whisper. One sentence, as always. Time stopped, and the world ended. The earth ground slowly to a halt, and all sound and light vanished.
Haruki Murakami
#38. An aphorism that does not score is just one more sentence.
Mason Cooley
#39. I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.
Laura Linney
#40. If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
Walter Wriston
#41. Put all these numbers together and what do they add up to? In a sentence: We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.
Daniel Gardner
#42. If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.
Chris Bohjalian
#43. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
#44. Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?
Virginia Woolf
#45. One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#46. I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.
Garth Ennis
#47. My heart is a schizophrenic. One sentence is about how I hate him. The next is about how much I love him. It goes on like that, back and forth, pacing.
Lesley Anne Cowan
#48. That is what I imagined life to be-one long sentence of waiting out the clock.
Ottessa Moshfegh
#49. The practice of love can be expressed in one sentence: 'Do not harm others.'
Dalai Lama
#50. You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
Caitlin Moran
#51. A good game has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it's fun.
Paul Reiche III
#52. All energy contains consciousness. That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world.
Seth
#53. Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
Amy Hempel
#54. Because if he wasn't really, really careful, Lori Sullivan was just going to keep stealing his heart
one sentence, one meal, one smile at time
Bella Andre
#55. What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
Katy Lederer
#56. If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.
Sam Kean
#57. No one should ever have to read a sentence twice because of the way it is put together.
Wilson Follett
#58. Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
Richard Hugo
#59. I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.
Neil Gaiman
#60. Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
P.D. James
#61. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.
Barbara Jordan
#62. If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!
David Mermin
#63. Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King Jr., can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream speech. No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this had a dream. We do not know what the dream was'.
Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
#64. I think it's insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.
Asghar Farhadi
#65. In the complete overall history of tennis, I figure I'll be worth a sentence or two ... That's why my place in the all-time rankings means so very little to me, because I know I won't be anybody's number one, and it's that same old thing: if you're not number one, then what does it really matter?
Billie Jean King
#66. What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?
Mary Oliver
#67. Maybe if I had to boil it down to one easy sentence, it would be this: I believe in evolution, and I believe in God. I just haven't worked out the details yet.
Robin Brande
#68. Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.
Ashly Lorenzana
#69. I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.
Padgett Powell
#70. I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.
Leonard Cohen
#71. True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.
Zig Ziglar
#72. Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
Wilfrid Sheed
#74. If you could sum up your life in one sentence, then you didn't live much of a life.
Carroll Bryant
#75. The one sentence I regret? "Let's watch some porn.
Sarina Bowen
#76. I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.
V.S. Naipaul
#77. I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
William Gibson
#78. My grandmother has kept all of his stuff in a drawer. This one notebook was particularly chilling. He's [howard Brookner] writing to his parents knowing he has a death sentence; his movies are how he'll live on.
Aaron Brookner
#79. But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.
Barbara Pym
#80. The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
Karl Marx
#81. I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.
Orson Scott Card
#82. For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.
Malcolm Gladwell
#83. Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.
Brenda Ueland
#84. One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.
Nick Hornby
#85. Because a quite night is not the same as a silent one,a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one because of the way they wedge themseleves into a sentence changes everything.
Tahereh Mafi
#86. Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Caroline Yessayan's miniskirt was to blame for everything.
Michel Houellebecq
#87. All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.
Benjamin Disraeli
#88. There may be thousands of principles of Marxism, but in the final analysis they can be summed up in one sentence: Rebellion is justified.
Mao Zedong
#89. The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting.
Malik Bendjelloul
#90. Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
Ernest Hemingway,
#91. Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met ... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.
Eric Weiner
#92. One single sentence, one frame of film, and abracadabra! the story's wings would take her to another lost world, another magic realm that was ready to be explored.
Neale Osborne
#93. ..the poem is made of sequences in which images, figures of speech and rhythm are undivided. One needs to enter this 'undivision'", and what it does, the proposition it issues, in both senses of the word, logical and erotic: "Let us call a sentence a proposition. A poem makes propositions
Michel Deguy
#94. I don't think - I begin, but then I stop there. Strangely enough, this sounds like a full, declarative sentence, as if I'm standing in a bar shouting out one of my most obvious character flaws. I don't think!
Matthew Norman
#95. If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
Arthur Brisbane
#96. The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.
Emma Goldman
#97. I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.
Carl Hiaasen
#98. The most beautiful novel is the one that starts with a sentence wholly unexpected by the reader who has lived through our storms and norms, and who might once have been the cause of our changing moods.
Ahlam Mosteghanemi
#99. You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative breaks for buttered toast and coffee.
Carlene Bauer
#100. We put together a one-sentence petition asking Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to other pressing issues. We sent it to under 100 friends and family, and within a week we had 100,000 people sign the petition.
Joan Blades
