Top 100 Quotes About Phrases
#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. 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
#3. 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
#5. Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .
Joe Eszterhas
#6. Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties.
Muriel Spark
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
Fred Allen
#11. Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
W. Somerset Maugham
#12. 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
#13. Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
#14. The Affluent Society not only changed the way the country viewed itself, but gave new phrases to the language: Conventional wisdom, the bland leading the bland, private opulence and public squalor.
Amartya Sen
#15. She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.
Gloria Steinem
#16. The phrases and language used everyday in an organization can in fact affect the way your team makes decisions and conducts themselves.
Kevin Allen
#17. When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia Woolf
#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. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan
#20. One of the monks was doing something incomprehensible at the altar, and the others would occasionally chant a few phrases of mumbo jumbo.
Ken Follett
#21. Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
Ezra Pound
#22. When we hear phrases like 'New World Order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers.
Pat Buchanan
#23. 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
#24. No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.
Woodrow Wilson
#25. Ever since the introduction of psychoanalysis there have been too many terms to excuse behavior and phrases that can be [used] to explain everything.
Sean Connery
#26. 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
#27. Phrases that have historical significance or become headlines don't just magically appear in the moment. They are mindfully planned.
Nancy Duarte
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in the sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity.
Larry McMurtry
#31. O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound,
"Your lord will soon return," no phrase brings.
Charles Robert Maturin
#32. I'm going to say a phrase or terminology or vowel that I don't know how to attack .
Lake Bell
#33. 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
#34. Ever heard of the phrase 'midlife crisis'?
Janet Maslin
#35. I know a girl made of memories and phrases, lives her whole life in chapters and phases ...
Jimmy Buffett
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#39. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.
John Dos Passos
#40. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.
G.K. Chesterton
#42. Human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
George Eliot
#43. [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
#44. 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
#45. An intentional object is given by a word or a phrase which gives a description under which.
G. E. M. Anscombe
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
Joseph Conrad
#49. The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron.
George Will
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant - poor memory!
Norman Mailer
#54. Scarcely have I ever heard or read the introductory phrase, "I may say without vanity," but some striking and characteristic instance of vanity has immediately followed.
Benjamin Franklin
#55. 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
#56. When the ancient Masters said, "If you want to be given everything, give everything up," they weren't using empty phrases. Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.
Laozi
#57. Well, within a phrase. And with a series of phrases, you can certainly create the effect of diminuendo and crescendo, no question.
Mahan Esfahani
#58. It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me.
Sara Sheridan
#59. 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
#60. ...a relationship is one of those things that builds upon itself, incident upon incident. Words and gestures and phrases pile up, and in the end, they either make something that's strong and pleasing, or they're a sort of ramshackle mess and you know it's time to walk away.
Kylie Logan
#61. People will kill you over time. And how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like 'be realistic'.
Dylan Moran
#62. 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
#63. Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.
Robert C. Solomon
#64. Tragic phrases comfort the heart ... Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to bear.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. 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
#66. I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.
Mose Allison
#67. To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And
Michel De Montaigne
#68. Those who are addicted to the phrase "to use a vulgarism" expect to achieve the feat of being at once vulgar and superior to vulgarity.
Henry Watson Fowler
#69. There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.
Malcolm Gladwell
#70. The phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.
Jen Pollock Michel
#71. It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.
Veronica Roth
#72. 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
#73. It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes
all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
Paul Auster
#74. I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
Virginia Woolf
#75. An excellent precept for writers: Have a clear idea of all the phrases and expressions you need, and you will find them.
Ximenes Doudan
#76. 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
#77. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Thomas Hardy
#78. I was planning on starting a new file on my computer with the title Phrases That Sound One Way to Witches but Mean Something Else to Vampires.
Deborah Harkness
#80. It is not enough for the phrases to be good., what you make with them ought to be good too.
Aldous Huxley
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Evelyn Waugh
#84. 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
#85. Emotionally, I was affected a lot by Rage Against the Machine, not specifically the literal intention of the words or what it was about, but the feel, the sound, those phrases that got me.
Fred Durst
#86. When I was young, I had one of those Yamaha drum machines, and I used to practice to that quite a bit, just to practice soloing and being in time and completing all my phrases.
John Otto
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Every time you use the phrase all my life it has a different meaning.
George Carlin
#91. All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason
Thomas Paine
#92. Better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. Whoever came up with that phrase I wanted his greasy head on a silver platt
Sean Paul
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. She made a fence of phrases, which seemed a treachery to herself.
Elizabeth Taylor
#96. 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
#97. I usually start with a title or maybe a little rhyme or phrase.
Harlan Howard
#98. Military intelligence is a meaningless phrase because the two words are mutually exclusive ...
Lucille Kallen
#99. What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
John Irving
#100. I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Flannery O'Connor
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