Top 100 So To Speak Quotes
#1. If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.
Satish Kumar
#2. Perhaps ... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
Antoine Lavoisier
#3. I really want to make this the last stop of my career. I don't want to be a vagabond, so to speak, and be traveling from team to team, year in and year out. I'm not that type of guy. I like to be settled.
Jeff Garcia
#4. In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands.
Eleanor Catton
#5. You're always in the storm's eye, so to speak, when you're with the Yankees.
Joe Torre
#6. I'd retired for about six or seven years. Coming back to the business, I found that I was sort of not quite a has-been, and it wasn't a new career, it was just kind of difficult to crack the nut, so to speak.
Julie London
#7. I think I took my eye off the ball. From about 2005, 2006, 2007, I was out of it. I thought I could oversee movies and have it done for me, so to speak.
Harvey Weinstein
#8. That idea would be embarrassing because there is something excessive about it, it would take to much energy to defend (while the best possible progressive idea, so to speak, defends itself)...
Milan Kundera
#9. 'The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.
John Lahr
#10. There are so many ideas that you just come up with on a day-to-day basis when you're a writer that it's very difficult to want to go back to an old fling, so to speak.
Pierce Brown
#11. I'd love to create my own stuff. I've always written stuff, but it would be nice to have my hand a little deeper in the clay, so to speak.
Reece Thompson
#12. I'm an awfully loyal friend. Once I've started a relationship with someone, it's like they are syrup and I'm a pancake. Their syrup gets into my pancake, so to speak.
Warren Farrell
#13. There are crimes that are truly uncomely. With crimes, whatever they may be, the more blood, the more horror there is, the more imposing they are, the more picturesque, so to speak, but there are crimes that are shameful, disgraceful, all horror aside, so to speak, even far too ungracious ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#14. A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
Honore De Balzac
#15. Every generation has a plague, so to speak, and that kind of prejudice and discrimination could so easily happen again if we're not mindful and careful.
Ryan Murphy
#16. It's really a great asset to be willing to fail and blow it, so to speak, and to be okay with just making stuff, sharing it and getting feedback.
Chase Jarvis
#17. It sometimes seems to me that in this life we've all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump - biff!
P.G. Wodehouse
#18. A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk.
Paul Klee
#19. If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.
Bridget Riley
#20. I like tuna when there's a definite streak of deep pink in the middle, medium rare so to speak, and it comes out best when it's not cut too thick.
Geoffrey Zakarian
#21. The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell
#22. Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
#23. Your physicality is this great thing, but it is also the thing that makes you clumsy and limits you in the world, so to speak.
Amy Ray
#24. You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
Philip K. Dick
#25. For example, when my mother died, the people who showed up just to put an apron on to cook, people who really do the right thing, so to speak, as my momma would always say to show that they care, a sense of community that we've lost so much in our country.
Sela Ward
#26. Apparently, once you got used to regular and spectacular sex, your body had a mind of its own (so to speak) when it was deprived of that recreation; to say nothing of missing the hugging and cuddling part.
Charlaine Harris
#27. That is, so to speak, my own story. If I had a wish, I would wish that the sounds of the turning pages of my story after this encounter would resound like the sound of footsteps.
Sorata Akizuki
#28. The Law has become a person. When we encounter Jesus, we feed on the living God himself, so to speak; we truly eat "bread from heaven.
Pope Benedict XVI
#29. You find yourself in the world, without any power, immovable as a rock, stupid, so to speak, as a log of wood.
Nicolas Malebranche
#30. So who's next...So to speak." I ask "Well if I where to tell you would you be willing to contribute in making sure they survived." I swallowed hard as I felt my stomach drop I nodded slowly I'd never get a chance like this again I had to make the most of it, "I will.
Charon Lloyd-Roberts
#31. I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.
Al Yankovic
#32. A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it ...
Randall Jarrell
#33. We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#34. My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera.
Alton Brown
#35. I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.
Michael Dirda
#36. Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.
Jean Baudrillard
#39. Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
When a vessel is, so to speak, snarked.
Lewis Carroll
#40. I'm just the messenger here. I'm just another representative of my faith, so to speak.
Stephen Baldwin
#41. I think the hardest thing to overcome is judging yourself and being your own worst critic so to speak.
Nile Rodgers
#42. Country music ... doesn't bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it's very English, really. Even though it's been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak.
Mick Jagger
#43. Our relation, all round, exists
it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it
Henry James
#44. God transforms, so to speak, this air into words, into various sounds. He makes you understand these various sounds through the modifications by which you are affected.
Nicolas Malebranche
#45. Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.
David Papineau
#46. Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.
Jodi Picoult
#47. What a unique opportunity to be in town. I love townies. I value it, so to speak.
Justin Vernon
#48. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.
Edward Gorey
#49. I should have been thinking more about my family, how I raised my children, how I maintained life's work, so to speak.
Joe Namath
#50. I don't think it's a black and white issue. If a man's family is starving so to speak, I don't think I'll hold it against him for stealing a loaf of bread.
Zach Braff
#51. With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.
Ernst Haas
#52. I think it's better to have your personal life and your work life separate. That way they don't corrupt each other, so to speak.
Zooey Deschanel
#53. I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.
Chester Bennington
#54. There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Mark Twain
#55. With a terrible script you hustle and try to make it better. But with a good script it can be trouble because you rest on your laurels, so to speak, you think it's going to translate easily.
Robert Downey Jr.
#56. There will be a machina mundi whose centre, so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and He is everywhere and nowhere.
Nicholas Of Cusa
#57. Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.
William Godwin
#58. We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.
Alexander McCall Smith
#59. Redeeming love and retributive justice joined hands, so to speak, at Calvary, for there God showed himself to be "just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.
J.I. Packer
#60. Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.
Gilbert Sorrentino
#61. My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.
John Edgar Wideman
#63. Teeth actually turn out to be one of a couple of good sources of ancient DNA. The teeth, actually the enamel, is quite good at preserving the DNA, so it is a bit of time capsule so to speak.
Hendrik Poinar
#64. Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.
John Calvin
#65. If you say the word amnesty - the 'A-word,' so to speak - it's DOA. If there's even a hint of amnesty in my district, it's dead on arrival.
Randy Weber
#66. Out of the blue Sylvia said, 'People are like boxes. You would like to open them up and see what's inside, but you can't.' Sylvia was interested in people and recognizing how individuals create their own kind of camouflage- the 'lids on the boxes', so to speak.
Elizabeth Winder
#68. Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable ...
Christian Nestell Bovee
#69. As I understand it, the Celts venerated all sorts of plexus-type things: the seashore, dawn, dusk, the edge of the forest - anything that was neither here nor there, so to speak.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#70. Your choice of programming model also is your choice of programming model, so to speak.
Anders Hejlsberg
#71. A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
#72. In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well ... I wasn't entirely alone ... It's not possible to sleep alone ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#73. I like my ladies lady-ish, feminine so to speak. I love jeans and hoodies, but the idea of being an ultimate tomboy does slightly confuse me.
Tom Felton
#74. I always tend to think, even in residential projects, about what a space is being asked to do - where is it located, what are the circumstances, where can I attack the problem, so to speak. How can you create a narrative for people moving through it? How can you convey its character?
Annabelle Selldorf
#75. They were both deciding not to be what others wanted them to be but to brand themselves for the world to see. To do their own packaging, so to speak, and to direct their powers to their specific target audiences.
Sarah Schulman
#76. The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it's their property, so to speak.
Robert Darnton
#77. We the people, so to speak, need to realize that if we can keep ourselves fed, we might get through this long dark tunnel of power down, and mitigate the consequences of CO2.
Wes Jackson
#78. I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.
Michael Symon
#79. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.
Martin Amis
#80. You get a very different type of education if you go out to the desert, to the places of power, places where it is easy to cross over from one dimensional plane to another, where power hovers, so to speak.
Frederick Lenz
#81. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.
G.K. Chesterton
#82. A man, so to speak, who is not able to bow to his own conscience every morning is hardly in a condition to respectfully salute the world at any other time of the day.
Douglas William Jerrold
#83. For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he met in London and Africa.
V.S. Naipaul
#84. A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
Mary McCarthy
#85. I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. The Lord gave you a mind so that you can make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.
Marilynne Robinson
#87. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. Tis beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just IT. Some women will stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.
Rudyard Kipling
#89. However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context ("The Apparition" by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?
Philippe Lejeune
#90. Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.
May Sarton
#91. By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas.
Nicholas Sparks
#92. Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.
Oliver Sacks
#93. All things and all people, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen. They want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. But we can give it to them only through the love that listens.
Paul Tillich
#94. I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.
Tim O'Reilly
#95. Hollywood will put you in a box, so to speak. Some people will have seen you in 'La Bamba' or another dramatic film and think, 'Okay, that's what Lou does.' But they don't really have an idea of the range or diversity that I can bring to a project.
Lou Diamond Phillips
#96. A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It "consents," so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree
Thomas Merton
#97. There is no doubt that many things in life come to us ... at backrounds so to speak. Happiness is one of them.
Stephen Leacock
#98. PORTEOUS: Do you mean to say you were going to steal my car.
TEDDIE: Not exactly. I was only going to bolshevise it, so to speak.
W. Somerset Maugham
#99. I had an advantage over a lot of people who had gone to school and earned degrees in writing and had learned the rules for writing, so to speak. My style was just to tell a story but to tell it well, and that has worked out for me so far.
Robert Kurson
#100. It's so funny the world we live in now. The years where you are most fertile, those are also the fertile years for career and personal growth. And so you're not encouraged to get pregnant in your 20s. But the 30s are when the biology kind of has you by the ovaries, so to speak.
Staceyann Chin
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