Top 100 Phrases In Quotes
#1. As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are "Notice that" and "What happens next?" Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#2. I've always said, 'I am a selector, I am not defector' - the first few phrases in English I learned. I said I hate 'defector'; something defective about the people. It's a bad word.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#3. The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
Eleanor Catton
#4. 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
#5. Don't be ridiculous. Only one of the most condescending phrases in the English language ... and
Christine Pope
#6. I should have" is one of the most tragic phrases in the English language. Live while you can.
Michael A. McLellan
#7. Thus, to take the phrases in Acts and make them into a magical incantation upon which God s forgiveness rests is to grossly misunderstand the phrase and, consequently, grossly misportray the kind of God whom Scripture reveals. Beyond
Gregory A. Boyd
#8. Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey taxi." Two is "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales?" And three is "Don't worry, it's only a flesh wound.
David Letterman
#9. 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
#10. He tried to learn seductive phrases in all languages, but the only Swedish he had ever really needed was, "Do you serve anything aside from pickled fish?" and "If you wrap me in furs, I can pretend to be your little fuzzy bear.
Cassandra Clare
#11. I have become increasingly used to the Tory party mimicking our policies and phrases in a desperate effort to pretend to their members they are still Eurosceptic.
Nigel Farage
#12. A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.
William Shakespeare
#13. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.
Paul Auster
#14. 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
#15. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#16. It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.
Donald Hall
#17. 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
#18. Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
#19. 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
#20. In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.
David Pietrusza
#21. 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
#22. I'm trying to tell the story in the most clear, concise, and truthful way, taking those everyday words and phrases and capturing them in a way that they become something else.
Jay-Z
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Magnificent phrases like 'inductive reactance' flow effortlessly from the lips of guys who can't cook hot dogs or find the flashing blue light in a K-Mart store.
Kenn Amdahl
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. In 2005, the Global Language Monitor - a nonprofit organization that does exactly what its name suggests - issued a tongue-in-cheek list of the year's most politically correct words and phrases. Top
Kevin Dutton
#30. Americans specially love superlatives. The phrases 'biggest in the world,' 'finest in the world,' are on all lips. Unless President Hayes is a strong man, they will soon come to boast that their government is composed of the 'biggest scoundrels' in the world.
Isabella Bird
#31. Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.
Kenneth Clark
#32. Originally, I thought English was more my home. But Spanish is so much more romantic. I've had to learn new phrases. I've had to learn to be more secure about singing in Spanish. But I'm working on it.
La India
#33. 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
#34. People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'
[What It Is (2009)]
Dylan Moran
#36. It may be necessary to change our brand, catch phrases, strategy, design, etc. once in awhile. It may give us competitive advantages. But a change that demands the change of the SOUL of who we're doesn't deserve to be entertained.
Assegid Habtewold
#37. I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me.
Virginia Woolf
#38. I love to use these phrases - 'with the greatest respect', 'in all modest', 'I humbly submit' - which in fact always imply the complete opposite.
William Boyd
#39. 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
#40. Live in the moment, just do it - those are phrases thrown around by people who don't know what they mean. Just do it - it's idiotic. You could slap that slogan on a picture of Hitler and it would make as much sense. He did it, all right.
Gregory Galloway
#41. 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
#42. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#43. 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
#44. As he settled in, he assessed the way he felt with one of his favorite phrases from Mark Twain - the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces. He slept well.
Don W. Weber
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. In unremarkable texts we soon trip on phrases that penetrate into us, as if a sword has thrust up to its hilt inside us.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#48. 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
#49. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. In America, there is no racial segregation. I'm not sure I'm quite familiar with this phrase.
Trevor Noah
#53. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.
Ian McEwan
#54. The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.
Michel De Certeau
#55. Every word, every phrase, wants to be in a sentence, when it is written for you.
M.F. Moonzajer
#56. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.
James Russell Lowell
#57. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.
John Fante
#58. There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won't bite. The only line that pisses me off faster is when some drunk, ham-faced dude in a bar sees me trying to get past him and barks: Smile,it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.
Gillian Flynn
#59. There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.
Agnes Repplier
#60. Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.
Tom Robbins
#61. 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
#62. Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.
William Congreve
#63. In Necessary Marriage, I tried to repeat entire phrases without the reader noticing. My work doesn't have the rigor of music, but I hope it alludes to it.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#64. The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.
Wendell Phillips
#65. Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.
Alex Trebek
#66. In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound
John Grierson
#67. Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.
Isaac Asimov
#68. True religion is a union of God with the soul, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or in the apostle's phrase, it is Christ formed in us.
Henry Scougal
#69. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
George Henry Lewes
#70. Effective readers, even at their earliest levels, read in five to seven word phrases rather than word by word.
Richard Allington
#71. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Vladimir Lenin
#72. The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.
John Gresham Machen
#73. I hate phrases like that. "Jesus vocab," El would call them. Things you learn in church that are hammered into you until they're so normal that you expect everyone else who doesn't go to church to know what you mean.
Julie Murphy
#74. In phrases as brief as a breath worldly wisdom concentrates.
Willis Regier
#75. Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
Erica Jong
#76. I basically try not to waste any lines in any of my songs, and I think the witty phrases and funny lyrics I have bring a smarter sound to college hip-hop.
Mike Stud
#77. Phrases and images from the game filtered through his head... hitting the sweet spot, working the rosin bag, over the bat, going deep, in the hole, double header, baseball was a filthy, dirty sport!
J.D. Ruskin
#78. It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
Andre Breton
#79. Affirmations are not bound up in rules. An affirmation can be long or short, poetic or plain. If you love a phrase and find that it helps you, that is a valid affirmation.
Eric Maisel
#80. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare - all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#81. Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...
Virginia Woolf
#82. 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
#83. That has to be one of the dumbest phrases Christians use: "finding God's will." We don't have to "find" God's will, because it's not lost. "The Lord ... is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9 NKJV). His will is that we be involved in that mission.
J.D. Greear
#84. I think that phrase is the most horrible phrase in the English language - 'I don't know.' It's terribly embarrassing.
Jim Morrison
#85. Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.
John Stuart Mill
#86. I often pray, though I'm not really sure Anyone's listening; and I phrase it carefully, just in case He's literary.
Mignon McLaughlin
#87. The words I use Are everyday words and yet are not the same! You will find no rhymes in my verse, no magic. There are your very own phrases.
Paul Claudel
#88. It doesn't phaze, I amaze wit my phrases
Play this in your Jeep, so your neighbors lose some sleep
(I wanna thank you)
Del Tha Funkee Homosapien
#89. Second-century Christian thinker Athenagoras wrote, Our life does not consist in making up beautiful phrases but in performing beautiful deeds.
Shane Claiborne
#90. In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.
I. A. Richards
#91. Tommy's [Gamble] an East Coast guy, so he kind of talks fast and in quick statements and phrases, so I understood him and he understood me, and we just hit it off.
Chip Kelly
#92. Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.
Maeve Binchy
#93. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
John Dewey
#94. Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.
Chuck Thompson
#95. I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
Anais Nin
#96. It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.
Hortense Calisher
#97. My intellect, my wit - I'd forgotten I'd even possessed them, and they were dull and neglected, to be sure. But in the company of others who prized thought over action, laughter over brooding, they blossomed and sharpened. My tongue fairly tripped with sparkling phrases, insightful comments.
Melanie Benjamin
#98. Do you know what the costliest phrase in technology is? 'It will work because it would be cool if it did.'
Jean Louis
#99. It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Susan Sontag
#100. We do not think in words and phrases. We think only in pictures and/or images. Words are the raw materials of thought.
David J. Schwartz
