Top 100 Phrases For Quotes
#1. Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
#2. I collect words and phrases for naming the children of my brush.
Gene Black
#3. There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
George Orwell
#4. I tried to find a rhythm, and I stopped comparing myself to anybody else. One of the great phrases for me is "Compare and despair." If I compare myself to Kate Middleton or Dame Judi Dench, I'm going to come out at the bottom and be sad.
Jamie Lee Curtis
#5. Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'
Sloane Crosley
#6. There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:
Lyndsay Faye
#7. For just a little while, in all our lives, we're granted brief glimpses at the way things really operate. In those times, we learn the hardest lessons. To coin a few phrases, there are none so blind as those who will not see ... and sometimes, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.
Edward Morris
#9. Two of my favorite phrases to repeat to myself daily are 'Life is perfect' and 'I am grateful'. The more I do, the better I feel. Try it for yourself!
Hal Elrod
#10. The universe does not work in phrases; don't focus on the commas; just wait for the full stop.
Jude Idada
#11. The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.
Will Ferguson
#12. It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.
Thornton Wilder
#13. For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.
Lewis Carroll
#14. Its subject is the slow and erratic process by which the peoples of the British Isles learnt - and then for long periods forgot - about the 'Safeguard of the Sea', as the 15th century phrase had it, meaning the use of the sea for national defence, and the defence of those who used the sea.
Nicholas Rodger
#15. If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.
Stephen Fry
#16. One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
Mark Twain
#17. O Fame! if I ever took delight in thy praises, Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover The thought that I was not unworthy to love her.
Lord Byron
#18. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.
Christopher Hitchens
#19. For proverbs are the pith, the proprieties, the proofs, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good.
John Florio
#20. Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.
Barry Hannah
#21. One of the phrases I frequently look for is infinite learning curve.Because each entrepreneurial pattern is to some degree unique and new.
Reid Hoffman
#22. Every sentence, every phrase, every word has to fight for its life.
Crawford Kilian
#23. There are often multiple sources for some famous statements by King; as a professional speaker and minister he used some significant phrases with only slight variation many times in his
essays, books, and his speeches to different audiences.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#24. A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.
Italo Calvino
#25. The day that music is taken for free by the majority is the day that the phrase "sell out" doesn't exist any more.
Jack White
#26. What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#27. Lao Tsu doesn't seem to hold to much stock for words or phrases or teachings.
Frederick Lenz
#28. In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words
liberty, equality, and fraternity
do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#29. But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over.
Zadie Smith
#30. For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
#31. Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Maxwell Maltz
#32. To use words and phrases in an easygoing manner without scrutinizing them too curiously is not in general a mark of ill-breeding. On the contrary, there is something low-bred in being too precise. But sometimes there is no help for it
Socrates
#33. Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.
Edwin Newman
#34. What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.
Pattiann Rogers
#35. For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.
Lucretius
#36. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time.
Benjamin Hoff
#37. And for those of you that dropped out of high school, remember the famous phrase: 'Do you want fries with that?'
Bobby Heenan
#38. People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so; they are called dwellers sur la branche.
E. V. Lucas
#39. I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
Adam Mansbach
#40. Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony.
Gino Severini
#41. I just go for what makes me feel good. Especially in 2011, it's so easy to sound like a dickhead when describing yourself because anything anyone says is a catch-word or a buzz-phrase.
Mike Tucker
#42. I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases - I'm addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.
Ezra Furman
#43. I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
Tao Lin
#44. But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
John Updike
#45. There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism.
Camille Paglia
#46. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#47. FedEx is another company that's passionate. When it absolutely, positively has to get there is such a great, aspirational phrase. And FedEx used it for almost a decade to communicate the passion of delivering a package. The more passionate you are, the more successful you are.
Frank Luntz
#48. Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
Michel De Montaigne
#49. The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.
Kate Christensen
#50. For a wise man, I have been told, once said, 'Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.' But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem.
Isaac Asimov
#51. The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
John Steinbeck
#52. Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Eleanor Catton
#53. Governments have a favorite phrase: "lean and mean." But they've been made very, very fat for corporate interests.
Vandana Shiva
#54. the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
Francis Wheen
#55. Some new machinery with adequate powers must be created now if our fine phrases and noble sentiments are to have substance and meaning for our children.
J. William Fulbright
#56. Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "Form is emptiness." That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, "Emptiness is form." One should not think that these are two seperate things.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
#57. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T. S. Eliot
#58. I found I'm quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stone cutter - chipping away at the raw material until it's just right, or as right as you can get it.
Harriet Doerr
#59. I will go anywhere if you say the phrase 'there might be cake.' I would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, register somebody else's boat in Spanish, a language I do not speak, without ID - for cake.
Greg Behrendt
#60. Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
Noam Chomsky
#61. LEARN FROM THE MASTERS:
Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Colin Nissan
#62. You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
Charles A. Beard
#63. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Evelyn Waugh
#64. It is not enough for the phrases to be good., what you make with them ought to be good too.
Aldous Huxley
#65. An excellent precept for writers: Have a clear idea of all the phrases and expressions you need, and you will find them.
Ximenes Doudan
#66. I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools. I
Og Mandino
#67. Tragic phrases comfort the heart ... Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to bear.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#68. All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#69. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
Sophie Calle
#70. I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#71. Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?
Kazuo Ishiguro
#72. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#73. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed his blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.
Eugene B. Sledge
#74. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#75. You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
Ellie Goulding
#76. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#77. The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#78. Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
Ali Smith
#79. How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.
Emma Cline
#81. Every word, every phrase, wants to be in a sentence, when it is written for you.
M.F. Moonzajer
#82. That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason.
Roger Ebert
#83. Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?
Charles Kingsley
#84. And buxom, which means only obedient, is now made, in familiar phrases, to stand for wanton; because in an ancient form of marriage, before the Reformation, the bride promised complaisance and obedience, in these terms: "I will be bonair and buxom in bed and at board.
Samuel Johnson
#85. I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.
Aaron Belz
#86. The phrase "singular incredible life" seems to me that it applies more appropriately to Jane Goodall or David Attenborough, people I regard with awe and who stand for great humanism and knowledge.
Merrill Markoe
#87. Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.
Virgil Miller Newton
#88. I feel sorry for myself. To let me be myself for some period of time and found out that all of her phrases wont make any difference.
Ariel Seraphino
#89. What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#90. Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases.
Steven Millhauser
#91. If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the "enthusiasm for truth and justice" using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.
Denis Diderot
#92. Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating.
Maria Semple
#93. You should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.
Dogen
#94. I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools.
Og Mandino
#95. The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#96. When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt - for obvious reasons - that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came
back my catch phrase was "nothing goes right." Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes.
Rodney Dangerfield
#97. An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.
Leigh Hunt
#98. 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
#99. Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.
Gloria Steinem
#100. I used the phrases Jungian realism and linear archetypes, and congratulated myself on achieving a level of douchbaggery I had previously only witnessed in shampoo commercials for men.
Catherine Lowell
