Top 100 Plain Quotes
#2. Like so many poor Ilokanos, my grandparents left their village, for it could no longer sustain them. The Ilocos is a narrow coastal plain where, so often, the mountain drops to the sea. Land hunger had always afflicted the Ilokanos and made them migratory.
F. Sionil Jose
#3. When you have that, you dream of this and when you have this, you dream of that. Maybe you call it romantic, but it's just plain stupidity. It destroys life.
Jaggi Vasudev
#4. Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday. That's how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have
Ally Condie
#5. That girl is just plain crazy," Chey said as she looped her arm through Arkadia's. 'I swear when they were handing out social skills she was still in the line for shoes.
Dzintra Sullivan
#6. Yes," I said. "Before ... it's all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it's born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is." She
Diana Gabaldon
#7. It is wrong and just plain stupid not to ask your guidance when you so graciously make it available. I repent and trust your Holy Spirit to prompt me to pray for guidance every day. Thanksgiving
Rosemary Jensen
#8. If you want to enjoy the movie, you should know that it is the combination of film and light and white screen, and that the most important thing is to have a plain, white screen.
Shunryu Suzuki
#9. For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
Emma Donoghue
#10. Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear.
Ann Patchett
#11. The key to hitting is just plain working at it. Work, that's the real secret.
Ted Williams
#12. Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.
William Landay
#13. I just like to have cereal in the morning, but it'll be those cluster things - it's a bit random - and through the day, I like just pasta, plain pasta with a bit of sauce on it, never too much in case I get a bad belly ... and jelly just before I go on for a bit of energy!
Jade Jones
#14. A perfectly happy marriage? There is no such thing. There are strong marriages that can survive problems, but happiness is such a brief condition, interrupted by difficulties and plain, boring routine.
Ursula Hegi
#15. In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you're just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you're wrong.
Craig Newmark
#16. The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
H.L. Mencken
#17. She was so plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with the naive and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face pretty.
Leo Tolstoy
#18. But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.
Aimee Bender
#19. Plain living and high thinking are no more. The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.
William Wordsworth
#21. The best way to hide something is to put it in Plain Sight.
Robert Junior
#22. Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.
Walter Mosley
#23. Sleep makes people calmer, more alert, less fearful - just plain happier, or so I see around me and in me. I am sure that if this great nation were to concentrate on getting more sleep, we would be a happier, more confident people, and that by itself would be a major achievement.
Ben Stein
#24. Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity.
Lewis Black
#25. The mind of man has no defense To equal plain, old common sense. This homely virtue don't despise, If you would be happy as well as wise.
Don Herold
#26. She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in precut shapes more narrow than the world itself, and this allowed her to hide in plain sight.
Carolina De Robertis
#27. Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
Michael Chabon
#29. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ...
Walker Evans
#30. Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.
Ben Yagoda
#31. Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.
Edward Dahlberg
#32. If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.
Herman Melville
#33. When it comes to selling stocks, it is plain that nobody can sell unless somebody wants those stocks.If you operate on a large scale you will have to bear that in mind all the time.
Edwin Lefevre
#34. This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.
[Women Know Everything!]
Dorothy Parker
#35. I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.
Thomas Paine
#36. A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people
Edgar Degas
#37. We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#38. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring" - and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and
Benjamin Graham
#39. We are conditioned by the national parks to link beauty and environmental value, a prejudice that makes as much sense as thinking attractive people form better friendships than plain people.
Charles Wohlforth
#40. As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makres plain the pathway.
Anne Hutchinson
#41. It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring.
Christopher Hitchens
#42. There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#43. In your sales pitch use plain language, and as simply as you can, explain exactly how your service works.
Timi Nadela
#44. Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.
Muhammad Ali
#45. The plain truth is that what holds a free state together is neither general will nor a common interest, but simply politics itself.
Bernard Crick
#46. Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools.
Jaggi Vasudev
#47. As much as Jason hated the man, it was plain to see how Sloan had built the empire he had. Perseverance, dedication and hard work. Along with an appalling lack of ethics and a healthy does of gray magic.
Kristen Painter
#48. It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.
Elizabeth Kostova
#49. The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.
James Surowiecki
#50. He was poor, yet always appeared to be giving something away; a stranger, yet everyone was his friend; no longer young, but as happy-hearted as a boy; plain and peculiar, yet his face looked beautiful to many.
Louisa May Alcott
#51. Mrs. Erskine struck him as fierce and plain and haughty as one of those straight-backed red-haired girl-women in certain of the watercolors of Winslow Homer.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.
Eve Ensler
#53. When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Richard Steele
#54. I just can't stand to look plain, 'cause that don't fit my personality. I may be a very artificial-looking person, but the good news is, I'm very real on the inside.
Dolly Parton
#55. As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
Sam Harris
#56. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on
Jane Austen
#57. See him, the gentle Bible beast, / With lacquered hoofs and curling mane, / His wondering journey from the East / Half done, between the rock and plain.
Edwin Muir
#58. The social states of human kinds Are made by multitudes of minds, And after multitudes of years A little human growth appears Worth having, even to the soul Who sees most plain it's not the whole.
John Masefield
#59. I'm plain incapable of getting angry with Angela Merkel and likewise.
Donald Tusk
#60. Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?
J.M. Coetzee
#61. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
William Wordsworth
#62. When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.
Jung Chang
#63. A picture of my existence ... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow ... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
Franz Kafka
#64. When one drives away the negligent through vigilance, he climbs the heights of wisdom, and can see the suffering masses. Serene, you look upon the lost like one that stands on a mountain sees those that stand upon the plain.
Gautama Buddha
#65. Putting us in risk is just plain stupid.
Joe Teti
#66. So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal.
Joan Frances Turner
#67. It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.
M.F.K. Fisher
#68. Oh! not handsome - not at all handsome. I thought him very plain at first, but I do not think him so plain now. One does not, you know, after a time.
Jane Austen
#69. Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
George Carlin
#70. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#71. Though I'd wanted to wear sequinned flip-flops, I'd worn boots and switched the plain white ties for pink lace because, uh, the pink were sturdier.
Gena Showalter
#72. and everything about me goes from crying out to just plain crying
Rachel Cohn
#73. Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
Aldo Leopold
#74. The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,
travel a whole day together,
looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. Women need to remember that if nature has made them plain, grace can make them beautiful, and if nature has made them beautiful, good deeds can add to their beauty. Grace will make you beautiful and will attract truly godly men to you. Make godliness and inward beauty your priority.
Joshua Harris
#76. White sharks and tuna travel for thousands of miles before returning to the same hot spot just as salmon do when they return to the same stream. These journeys are the marine equivalent of wildebeest migrations that take place on the Serengeti plain in Africa.
Barbara Block
#77. There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves level-headed.
Dick Cavett
#78. Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
L.P. Hartley
#79. Menopause: it had to be the gods' ironic warning to (or just plain nasty trick on) humanity for having artificially extended the life span,
Haruki Murakami
#80. Extension work is not exhortation. Nor is it exploitation of the people, or advertising of an institution, or publicity work for securing students. It is a plain, earnest, and continuous effort to meet the needs of the people on their own farms and in the localities.
Liberty Hyde Bailey
#81. Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. Date rape is just plain moronic when you consider how slutty figs are
Josh Stern
#83. Life, like love, holds many secrets for us to discover. Some we unearth early on. Others take us most of our days to stumble upon, even though they are hidden in plain sight.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#84. They are a doomed race. Wars, smallpox, gross immorality, a change from old ways to new ways their fate is the common fate of the American, whether he sails the sea in the North, gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the forests of Brazil.
George Amos Dorsey
#85. There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.
Peter Thiel
#86. Ill is the very word to speak, for none Can ransom or atone For blood once shed and darkening the plain.
Aeschylus
#87. There is nothing more frightening or exciting than a blank piece of paper. Frightening because you're on your own, leaving dark tracks across that snowy plain, and exciting because no one knows your destination but yourself, and even you can't say exactly where you'll end up.
Robert McCammon
#88. To bring oneself to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.
Thomas Buckner
#89. If you neglect those who are currently poor and stable, you may create more poor and unstable people. There has been a tremendous concentration of donor interest in countries that are seen as particularly fragile - but it becomes harder to mobilise money for sub-Saharan, plain poor countries.
Helen Clark
#90. I realized that you don't try on a pair of pants, fart in them, and then put them back on the shelf, and the same rough politeness applied here, too. Plain and simple, I bled on it, I bought it.
Laurie Notaro
#91. Amazingly, i'd actually forgotten that i'm supposed to be plain. i'm so used to alex telling me i'm beautiful. i'm so used to feeling beautiful around him. a hollow opens up in my chest. this is what life will be like without him: everything will become ordinary again. i'll become ordinary again.
Lauren Oliver
#92. All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.
Vincent Bugliosi
#93. Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n.
Alexander Pope
#94. Not only am I better looking.. I'm just plain better.
Randy Orton
#95. In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.
Grace Paley
#96. If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I'd store up no virtue For Heaven's distant plain, I'd live at ease as I did please And sin once again.
Robert Graves
#97. It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. But the plain truth about most of us is that we have let our intellects sink into a condition in which they have neither the muscles nor the energy nor the right habits for the job, nor any effective inclination towards it. We must see how they may be made fit.
Frank Sheed
#100. Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind.
Edmund Burke
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