Phrase It Quotes

#1. Spare time is like spare change. It's hard to quantify, the definition of that phrase. What do I do when I'm not onstage singing, or sleeping, with or without someone else? I watch movies.

Marilyn Manson

#2. It's important to preach like there's a broken heart on every pew. That's always been a phrase that stuck with me. Not everybody is having a tough time, but you can bet your buck that there's a good tenth of your church that's going through a hard season. There really is a broken heart on every pew.

Max Lucado

#3. It's amazing how much power a simple false phrase repeated can have.

Kinley MacGregor

#4. Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

Gerhard Richter

#5. I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one ... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

Joe Strummer

#6. Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .

Joe Eszterhas

#7. Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

Josiah Royce

#8. The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.

Amity Shlaes

#9. The only phrase I've ever disliked is, 'Why, we've always done it that way.' I always tell young people, 'Go ahead and do it. You can always apologize later.'

Grace Hopper

#10. It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.

Anton Seidl

#11. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.

Diana Gabaldon

#12. That first phrase-please bless me, Father, for I have sinned-was so humbling and so total, Matt always felt a kind of absolution as soon as he said it

Patricia McCormick

#13. Humour and high seriousness ... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

Mark Haddon

#14. Ceviche is an acquired taste, a phrase which here means something you don't like the first few times you eat it ...

Lemony Snicket

#15. You ever heard the phrase 'nice guys finish last'? It's true. Been true my whole life. So, maybe it'd be nice for me for a change, if someone thought I was worth fightin' for.

Lorelei James

#16. (Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17 p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.

John Buchan

#17. No man can sincerely resolve to apply to his daily life the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth without sensing a change in his own nature. The phrase, 'born again', has a deeper significance than many people attach to it. This changed feeling may be indescribable, but it is real.

David O. McKay

#18. It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.

Walter Bagehot

#19. I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life?
The world is not simple, Claire said.
The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.

Elizabeth Brundage

#20. For years we have heard the phrase "every member a missionary." That is not a choice. It is a fact of our membership. Our choice is to speak to others about the gospel or not.

Henry B. Eyring

#21. There's a phrase we live by in America: "In God We Trust". It's right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.

Bill Maher

#22. Sun'qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says "don't undermine me," "don't underestimate me," and "just try me." It's a command and a threat, all at once. It

Trevor Noah

#23. A Latin phrase says: De mortuis nil nisi bonum, Speak no ill of the dead. But it is better to say this way: Speak the truth of the living and speak the truth of the dead!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#24. The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe's history.

Camille Flammarion

#25. When you hear the phrase "rescue the financial system," translate it in your mind into "keep the debts on the books." They are trying to find a way for you (and debtor nations too) to keep paying and for the debt to keep growing.

Charles Eisenstein

#26. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day..

James Joyce

#27. The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase ... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.

Rick Bragg

#28. There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. If you're playing a money game, why not get into banking?

Artie Shaw

#29. Every musical phrase has a purpose. It's like talking. If you talk with a particular purpose, people listen to you, but if you just recite, it's not as meaningful.

Itzhak Perlman

#30. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

John Dewey

#31. How many times did we hear [Barack] Obama say, 'You didn't build that. You didn't build that - no, you need government.' We even saw Hillary Clinton say - remember her phrase - 'It takes a village to raise a child.' In other words, your children are not your children - they belong to the community.

Rafael Cruz

#32. Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?
It's fucking spherical, Catamounts.

Sam Lipsyte

#33. When I'm writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself - meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don't wait, or it's gone.

Paul Anka

#34. [A]s if it were not the masterful will which subjugates the forces of nature to be the genii of the lamp ... that forces a life-thought into a pregnant word or phrase, and sends it ringing through the ages!

William Mathews

#35. I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'too much money and not enough things to spend it on.

Elle Lothlorien

#36. There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

Gilbert N. Lewis

#37. Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'.
- M.F.K. Fisher A Is for Dining Alone

Jenni Ferrari-Adler

#38. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble,

Lemony Snicket

#39. Perhaps it is a secret yearning of all Hallmark employees to use the phrase 'you big fat pain in the butt' in an anniversary card.

Stephan Pastis

#40. Believe it or not, this simple phrase, "Yes! And . . ." is the secret of improv.

Amy Lisewski

#41. The problem is that "by now" is a phrase we say to ourselves when we're trying to believe the lie that it's too late to start pursuing our dream.

Jon Acuff

#42. And the stains would never wash out. That's what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar.

Hugh Howey

#43. It was funny how people were people everywhere you went, even if the people concerned weren't the people the people who made up the phrase "people are people everywhere" had traditionally thought of as people.

Terry Pratchett

#44. Have you ever heard the phrase, it is better to keep your mouth closed and have people wonder if you are stupid than open it and remove all doubt? (Hakim al Harbi)

Vince Flynn

#45. FACT: In 1991, a document was locked in the safe of the director of the CIA. The document is still there today. Its cryptic text includes references to an ancient portal and an unknown location underground. The document also contains the phrase "It's buried out there somewhere.

Dan Brown

#46. Tadark, this phrase is probably meaningless to you as it is so oft repeated, but do be quiet.

Cayla Kluver

#47. In any case, it wouldn't affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you'd been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I

Michel Houellebecq

#48. Begin where you are. Read every word, every phrase, every paragraph of the mind, as it operates through thought.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#49. So many things are difficult, said Miss Marple. It was a useful phrase which she used often.

Agatha Christie

#50. 'Data exhaust' is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world 'cause it sounds like something you're trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car.

Rick Smolan

#51. I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

Gunter Grass

#52. My wife simply quoted, 'For better or worse.' It was only then that I realized the phrase was not multiple-choice.

Michael Gurnow

#53. Believe in better, which is a corporate phrase rather than a political phrase. We don't want more. We're not looking for quantity. We're looking for quality. Believe in better suggests intergenerational change. It suggests product innovation. It suggests something better for the future.

Frank Luntz

#54. No, (slightly grandly) it's time that time-turning became a thing of the past. ALBUS: You're quite proud of that phrase, aren't you? SCORPIUS: Been working on it all day.

J.K. Rowling

#55. Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.
[WHAM! CRUNCH!]
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite.

George Carlin

#56. It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Gene Simmons

#57. It's only when you've lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that
phrase "It's a small world". It isn't. It's a vast, devouring world, especially if you're alone.

Clive Barker

#58. I always love that phrase, 'Oh, this is a good idea, but it's execution dependent.' As if anything in life is not execution dependent. Breathing is execution-dependent.

Ted Sarandos

#59. Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

Robert C. Solomon

#60. The answer is, of course, to simplify, to prioritize, and in some cases, to use a well-known phrase, "Just say no!" But actually doing it may prove to be one of the real challenges in our complicated, overheated lives.

M. Russell Ballard

#61. There is a phrase in French, which means 'to miss.' To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can't work for different reasons.

Emmanuelle Beart

#62. Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

Paul Kane

#63. What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

Isaac Asimov

#64. I quickly became aware that the phrase "it can only get better" could very quickly turn into "it could always be worse," because it was.

Savannah Grace

#65. By her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; 'circle' sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.

Emma Donoghue

#66. Stay far from timid only make moves when you're heart's in it, and live the phrase the sky's the limit.

The Notorious B.I.G.

#67. The catchall phrase big data means three things. First, it is a bundle of technologies. Second, it is a potential revolution in measurement. And third, it is a point of view, or philosophy, about how decisions will be-and perhaps should be-made in the future

Steve Lohr

#68. But it is a very difficult thing to change the future.
The slightest turn of phrase ... action and the human soul.
The future changes direction based on those things.

CLAMP

#69. You know that old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

Chuck Palahniuk

#70. It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

Julie Burchill

#71. What's that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn't reader friendly; it's saying to the reader, "I bet you can't take this, and if you can you're the kind of reader I want and you'll stay with me. If you can't take it, I don't want you to read me anyway.

Paul West

#72. It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

Veronica Roth

#73. I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.

Matthea Harvey

#74. Why I can't stand this phrase about I don't have any permanent enemies, any permanent friends, only permanent interests. I can't stand that. It's a matter of principles. What kind of integrity, what kind of morality do you have?

Cornel West

#75. The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

C.P. Snow

#76. His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools
the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans
and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.

Terry Pratchett

#77. A simple word or phrase on a blank sheet of paper gathers momentum as I wonder at what it could mean, where it could take place, why, and what if? . . . And then, I write.

Tyrean Martinson

#78. Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#79. He recognized it and knew it. In others - clients, witnesses, or sometimes adversaries, he had seen or heard it: A gesture, a phrase, or a tone which exposed unintended truth in the beat of a second.

Jackson Burnett

#80. Todays uplifting phrase is love your body exactly as it is. Yout think it is imperfect and you're right, but its only goning to get worse.

Marian Keyes

#81. Being surrounded by toadies does not mean you are respected; it means you are the head toad.

Jo Goodman

#82. Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.

Irving Howe

#83. The line of 'Make America great again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody's using it, they are all loving it. I don't know I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.

Donald Trump

#84. All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

Clive James

#85. It was the Spice Girls who messed it all up. And obviously, the appropriating of the phrase "girl power", which at that point overrode any notion of feminism, and which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing apart from being friends with your girlfriends.

Caitlin Moran

#86. At these moments I need my reading easy and quick; I need to turn the pages without knowing it. I don't have the bandwidth to wonder about the underlying meaning of the exact word chosen to phrase how one turned around or analyze just why an object was described in a certain

Lauren Leto

#87. Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.

G.K. Chesterton

#88. Every time you use the phrase all my life it has a different meaning.

George Carlin

#89. People of the hundred," he said, using an ancient Herrani phrase Arin was surprised he knew, "who leads you?"
So many cried Arin's name that it no longer sounded like his name.

Marie Rutkoski

#90. Yet I cannot believe that this talisman of love has lost all its power and I still attempt to use it.

- Those who have never had occasion to feel sometimes the value of a word, of an expression, consecrated by love will find no sense in this phrase. (C. de L.)

Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

#91. Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.

Sam Neill

#92. Stumble on joy
the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy?

Amy Waldman

#93. Finally Beiderbecke came out with a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying 'yes'.

Eddie Condon

#94. It is no idle phrase that man was made in God's image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.

Philip Jose Farmer

#95. It's incredible how one song or even one little phrase or just a few notes, if you really concentrate on it, can be a kaleidoscope of possibility.

Bill Frisell

#96. Can I ask you something? He added after a moment.
'yes,' said Shmuel.
Bruno thought about it. He wanted to phrase the question just right.
'why are there so many people on that side of the fence?' He asked. 'And what are you all doing there?

John Boyne

#97. Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty,

Maggie Nelson

#98. him to shoot anyone who even looked cross-eyed at him. "Web English is such a subtle tongue," he said. "That phrase is older than the Web," I said. "Just do it.

Dan Simmons

#99. On loof, literally 'on rudder', was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion.

Henry Hitchings

#100. I would not have used the phrase "I'm selling you" because even though that's exactly what you're doing, when you tell people you're doing it - or worse yet, when you tell people "I'm not here to sell you anything," they automatically assume that that's exactly what you are here to do.

Frank Luntz