Top 100 So To Speak Quotes
#1. The voices of conformity speak so loudly. Don't listen to them. No one does the right thing out of fear. If you ever utter the words, 'We've always done it that way,' I urge you to wash out your mouth with soap.
Anna Quindlen
#2. I convinced my parents to let me see an agent, but because I had been taught never to speak to strangers, I was so quiet during the interview, they said to bring me back when I was older.
Jason Fuchs
#3. Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!
Charlotte Bronte
#4. Success is a nice thing because it always means you've taken a step forward and it gives you a sense of pride, which in turn gives you confidence and experience-a positive circle, so to speak.
Roger Federer
#5. I don't believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games, it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy.
Ai Weiwei
#6. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.
Slavoj Zizek
#7. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.
Virginia Woolf
#8. I've never had to spend any time in the VA hospital, so I really can't speak for those guys.
R. Lee Ermey
#9. The more I view the independence of the press in its principal effects, the more I convince myself that among the moderns the independence of the press is the capital and so to speak the constitutive element of freedom.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#10. It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
#11. Love is a fever which, so to speak, drives off without wasting time on the address.
P.G. Wodehouse
#12. 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
#13. It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
Soren Kierkegaard
#14. Sex is pretty much our most important job. It's the one thing we have to nail - so to speak - so we get invited back for more. It's pretty much the reason we take a shower and brush our hair.
Rachel Gibson
#15. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
Steven Pinker
#16. (..) she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby so I ripped the page from the book - "I don't speak. I'm sorry." - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara (..)
Jonathan Safran Foer
#17. Angie Dickinson in 'Hollywood Wives' took me under her wing. If you look at that cast, I was definitely an 'outcast' ... so to speak. Most of them were of the same era, or just so much more experienced that I was.
Catherine Mary Stewart
#18. I lay curled in a fetal position one night, listening to my wife's voice. In the evenings, she just talked, speaking light into my darkness by reading verses to me. I needed a touchstone and she knew it, so she kept gently pointing toward Christ. She set aside her fears to speak into my own.
Ben Palpant
#19. Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.
Mark Twain
#20. Lord Chesterfield advises his son "to speak often, but not to speak much at a time; so that if he does not please, he will not at least displease to any great extent."
Rousseau tells us, that, "persons who know little, talk a great deal, while those who know a great deal say very little.
Arthur Martine
#21. I wish I could tell him that we're going through the same thing. I wish I could speak to him like I want to instead of like I'm supposed to. But the idea of admitting that I need help is too much to bear, so I turn away.
Veronica Roth
#22. And remember, following Christ is a lifelong journey. Christians are foot soldiers, so to speak. Always learning. Always growing stronger.
Robin Lee Hatcher
#23. Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.
Huston Smith
#24. If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#25. I do like Christmas. I do understand that there are people who hate it, and there are other religions that resent it. So, I speak to everybody - I try to speak to every kind of minority and majority that cannot escape the steamroller known as Christmas.
John Waters
#26. Highly sensitive people are often afraid to speak up, until life pushes them to do so.
Doreen Virtue
#27. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Salman Rushdie
#28. I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.
Martin Scorsese
#29. It wasn't so long ago that it was not popular to speak Gaelic in Ireland because the areas that Gaelic is spoken in were much poorer areas.
Enya
#30. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
Virginia Woolf
#31. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#32. Mothers ought to bring up and nurse their own children; for they bring them up with greater affection and with greater anxiety, as loving them from the heart, and so to speak, every inch of them.
Plutarch
#33. Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can't. They don't hear that point where something else has to come.
James Salter
#34. I will ask questions that are so wide and open they will feel the need to speak for a week. Then from the information that they give to me, I will mould solutions designed specifically for them.
Chris Murray
#35. Having the courage to speak one's mind is as important as knowing when the time is right to do so.
Nana Awere Damoah
#36. These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
Joyce Carol Oates
#37. I realized that my camera work could help me in a lot of ways to put the audience in the driver's seat, so to speak, to get them in there with the action, and to get them as close and be as intimate with what was going on on-screen as possible.
James Wan
#38. The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?
Jules Verne
#39. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.
James Frey
#40. Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.
Sarah Dessen
#41. Freedom is the only style. That is why I never speak about beauty or beautiful products but 'good products'. Nowadays, we have so many challenges; it is not really a priority to care for beauty. The only way for us is to focus on an ethic and ecological behaviour.
Philippe Starck
#42. Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
Henri Poincare
#43. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.
Edward W. Said
#45. It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can't say how old I was - but surely not less than three.
Albert Einstein
#46. I wish not to tell you how I feel,
I choose silence so that you leave,
Kiss me goodbye and set me free...
Sanhita Baruah
#47. You listen to me now and stop cutting me off. It's rude." She stopped moving and dropped her hand. "You can't tell me what I can and can't do; where I can go and who I can see."
She stopped talking so he requested, "May I speak?"
"Only if you don't piss me off when you do it,
Kristen Ashley
#48. I'm quite shy, so if there's a guy I like, I actually ignore him because I can't speak to him. I get all red and sweaty, and it's embarrassing.
Silvia Colloca
#50. stared at it for so long that I became lightheaded, just so I wouldn't lose my focus. If I had, the only thing that would come to mind
Barbara Speak
#52. It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.
Anne Rice
#53. Before they could continue their sparring, Dr. Steele walked up to Vasile and asked to speak with him in private, so naturally the whole table got up and followed them.
Loftis, Quinn (2011-11-18). Blood Rites: Book 2 Grey Wolves Series (The Grey Wolves Series) (p. 112). Kindle Edition.
Quinn Loftis
#54. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#55. It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. Forster
#56. Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ...
Jack Kerouac
#57. So with that will prompt and prepared to serve all those whom I perceive to be servants of my Lord, I will speak of three things with simplicity and love as if I were speaking to my own soul.
Ignatius Of Loyola
#58. It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.
Ksenia Solo
#59. Before we're Americans, we're Christians. And so we have to be informed by a certain moral sense, which means that we need to speak up for moral principle and for gospel principle regardless of who that offends.
Russell D. Moore
#60. I wanted to find a way to speak for people. It was important for me, because so many people spoke for me when I was a kid and made me feel less invisible, and I wanted kids or whoever is listening to my music not to feel so voiceless.
Emeli Sande
#61. I've certainly had to bite my tongue on occasion and live to fight another day, so to speak, on certain things. But when you're new and fresh, you come out and think, 'I don't want to screw my chance up, so I'll go along with what everybody else does.'
Joe Nichols
#62. Denial is a very effective human trick. People often tell how a situation was "unbearable," though, clearly, they have borne it. Lived to tell, so to speak.
Lorna Jane Cook
#63. English is only a weak second language, so that the third language
which at the moment is getting the most play, since French is what I speak, read, and hear almost 24/7
is trying to take over the no. 2 spot.
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
#64. In the very shadows of doubt a thread of reason (so to speak) begins, by whose guidance we shall escape to the clearest light.
Thomas Hobbes
#65. If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.
Novalis
#66. I speak to people who have been through so much more.
Trisha Goddard
#67. It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.
James Salter
#68. It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.
Alfred Adler
#69. It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Henry Miller
#70. Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear ... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.
Horace Mann
#71. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#72. To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#73. Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects
Rene Descartes
#74. I would rather they did not speak of it at all, until I am out of the district."
Mrs. Bennet was all amazement.
"Until you are out of the district, child! What else are people to speak of when they hear you are to marry a man so rich, so highly placed in society, so ... rich?
Helen Halstead
#75. Death has its revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart open the mind as well; light comes to us with our grief. As for me, I have faith; I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul; I saw this soul. I touched it, so to speak.
Victor Hugo
#76. Growing up in Oklahoma the way I did, and being raised the way I was raised by my parents, gave me such a strong foundation to go out into the world and fly, so to speak, the way I was able to do.
Suzy Amis
#77. I want to always move forward with everything I am doing. So, I do the radio show, speak at universities and other social institutions all around the world, appear on TV, and continue to create music all in the hope to keep the struggle alive.
Chuck D
#78. The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
H.G.Wells
#79. I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.
James Joyce
#80. Animals speak with pure affection. It's important to me to get something going in NY so we can get to be a no-kill city, and give the animals homes and more attention and love.
Bernadette Peters
#81. The instant of birth is exquisite. Pain and joy are one at this moment. Ever after, the dim recollection is so sweet that we speak to our children with a gratitude they never understand.
Madeline Tiger Bass
#82. Proud folk separate themselves from others, judging them ... To criticize others we must hold them from us, at arm's length so to speak. And then before you know where you are you've pushed them away and you're the poorer.
Elizabeth Goudge
#83. Now you die while we live on, and you've no one to blame but your selves. So do not speak of betrayal behind my back, humans. For the Great Betrayal is your shame, not mine. ~ Ayden
Rachel Haimowitz
#84. [Introverts,] the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.
Susan Cain
#85. When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.
("Out Of The Deep")
Walter De La Mare
#86. You realize you've forgiven people, your past and yourself when you don't speak bad about them anymore, even if you're encouraged to do so, even if you remember you were once brutally broken because of them ...
you just move on, let go, let them be and let yourself be ...
Sanhita Baruah
#87. At one point in college I was so shy that I'd drop out of a class if asked to speak in front of other people.
Joe Flanigan
#88. Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.
Sigmund Freud
#89. Usually I'm pretty myopic. It's hard for me to multi-task, so to speak. If I'm in a show and I'm creating a character, I'm just completely into that. It's really hard for me to do anything else like write music. I have to sort of shut down different sides of my head and just focus.
Idina Menzel
#90. It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. If they did so, they couldn't be reelected.
Jimmy Carter
#91. A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.
George Santayana
#92. Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs
putting in his oar, so to speak
with some pat word or sentence.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#93. Did you really think I was too fragile to know what Deryn was?"
"Fragile?" Volger looked about. "I hadn't thought so, but now I find you brooding in a bathroom. This doesn't speak well of your sturdiness.
Scott Westerfeld
#94. The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton's standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak.
James Wolcott
#95. My heart is so intoxicated with love that I have no wish to speak.
Kabir
#96. I think I sort of blossomed, so to speak, around 17. I started to get hips and put on weight, which I was very happy about. And that's when I met this agent, who told me I had to lose 10 pounds. I said, 'You've got to be kidding me. I finally got it on - I'm not losing it!'
Tricia Helfer
#97. The kind of people that love 'The Rocketeer' are the kind of people that love good storytelling and innocence and a better world, so to speak, so they're almost always nice people to bump into.
Billy Campbell
#98. So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.
Malala Yousafzai
#99. Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
Douglas Adams
#100. The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are the necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?'
Eknath Easwaran
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