Top 100 Phrase Quotes
#1. You look different," Snorri said. "I think 'even more handsome' was the phrase you were looking for.
Mark Lawrence
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.
Alfred De Vigny
#6. A title from the1966 movie
"The Russians Are Coming,
The Russians Are Coming,"
gives a new meaning to
a phrase: "wait a minute,
we've seen this movie before
Steven Ivy Attorney Entrepreneur
#7. It's amazing how much power a simple false phrase repeated can have.
Kinley MacGregor
#8. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.
Graham Greene
#9. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Stephen King
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .
Joe Eszterhas
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. One of the most useful pieces of advice we've learned in our journalism careers is summed up in the phrase "beware the fallacy of evil men.
Bill Kovach
#19. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#20. I love to read scripts. But I am very happy right now to say that I am a working actor. In this town of Los Angeles, the phrase 'I'm an actor' is overrated. So, I like to say, 'I'm a working actor.'
Jaime Camil
#21. Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new:
Endless labor all along,
Endless labor to be wrong:
Phrase that Time has flung away;
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
Samuel Johnson
#22. 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
#23. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them ( ... ) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.
Aldous Huxley
#24. I like the phrase "shot heard 'round the world," and I don't think there's any doubt the Oklahoma City blast was heard around the world.
Timothy McVeigh
#25. It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.
Anton Seidl
#26. Whoever coined the phrase 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' was an idiot.
Absence makes a bitch go crazy.
Toni Aleo
#27. I know for a fact that a lot of my Christian friends have thoughtful reasons for interpreting the Bible the way they do and that the phrase "pick and choose" sounds far too arbitrary to describe the attentiveness and concern with which they approach the text.
Rachel Held Evans
#28. 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
#29. Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. 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
#31. I call them sacred echoes because I noticed that throughout my relationships, daily life, and study, the same scripturally sound idea or phrase or word will keep reappearing until I can no longer avoid its presence. -The Sacred Echo
Margaret Feinberg
#32. They say some people ' cast a thin shadow', a turn of phrase that fitted my father like a glove. Too weak, too kind, he couldn't even say goodbye to my mother and me when he left. Weak and pathetic, pathetic and sad - that Dad.
Rika Yokomori
#33. 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
#34. Drag you back if you do not wish to go. Though ... the prince consort did mention the phrase, throw away the key, at one point.
I couldn't be sure, but I thought I saw Keirran gulp.
Julie Kagawa
#35. Ceviche is an acquired taste, a phrase which here means something you don't like the first few times you eat it ...
Lemony Snicket
#36. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
Bell Hooks
#37. He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#38. 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
#39. (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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Thus, an index built for vector space retrieval cannot, in general, be used for phrase queries. Moreover, there is no way of demanding a vector space score for a phrase query - we only know the relative weights of each term in a document.
Prabhakar Raghavan
#44. I have an idea that the phrase "weaker sex" was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.
Ogden Nash
#45. I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
Jason Isbell
#46. Cop-out excuses and catch-phrase dismissals can only work so long before the holes in the religious argument cannot be ignored any longer.
Steve Dustcircle
#47. I could have.What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have heppened but, didn't. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
Paulo Coelho
#48. I had one of those flashes - the sea-glass feel of a well-worn phrase.
Olivia Sudjic
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Ezra Pound
#54. The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.
Richard Rohr
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Don't fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else's expense.
Harvey MacKay
#58. Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up
The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas
For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.
Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.
John Ashbery
#59. As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.
- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. The phrase "the body of Christ," expresses well what we are called to do: to represent in flesh what Christ is like, especially to those in need. The
Philip Yancey
#61. Optimism is important. You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned in college called, 'having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not do.
Larry Page
#62. Theories of "natural law" and the "law of nations" are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [ ... ] "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[ ... ]
Vilfredo Pareto
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The only talents he possessed were delusions of adequacy.
Jodi Taylor
#66. 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
#67. Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase "missional church" lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.
Alan Hirsch
#68. The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.'
William Safire
#69. O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound,
"Your lord will soon return," no phrase brings.
Charles Robert Maturin
#70. I'm going to say a phrase or terminology or vowel that I don't know how to attack .
Lake Bell
#71. 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
#72. Ever heard of the phrase 'midlife crisis'?
Janet Maslin
#73. You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
Jane Hirshfield
#74. Asking someone to repeat a phrase you'd not only heard very clearly but were also exceedingly angry about was around Defcon II in the lexicon of squabble.
Terry Pratchett
#75. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#76. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
Joseph Story
#77. 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
#78. My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.
Sidney Poitier
#79. There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.
Koji Suzuki
#80. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
Aldous Huxley
#81. Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?
It's fucking spherical, Catamounts.
Sam Lipsyte
#82. 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
#84. Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#85. [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
#86. Stop, would you kindly? 'Would you kindly'. Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase? Sit, would you kindly? Stand, would you kindly? Run! Stop! Turn. A man chooses, a slave obeys. Kill! A man chooses! A slave obeys! OBEY!
Andrew Ryan
#87. An intentional object is given by a word or a phrase which gives a description under which.
G. E. M. Anscombe
#88. I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'too much money and not enough things to spend it on.
Elle Lothlorien
#89. The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.
George Will
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. A new phrase was making the rounds in Berlin, to be deployed upon encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street, ideally with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow: "Lebst du noch?" Which meant, "Are you still among the living?
Erik Larson
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Believe it or not, this simple phrase, "Yes! And . . ." is the secret of improv.
Amy Lisewski
#96. 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
#97. Haunt an old house.
Ask for a treat.
Laugh like a witch.
Lick something sweet.
Offer a trick.
Wander a maze.
Echo a boo.
Exclaim the phrase
Normal's unnatural on Halloween!
Richelle E. Goodrich
#98. 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
#99. 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
