Top 100 What We Call Quotes
#1. It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct
"Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"
you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.
Eve Ensler
#2. Especially in quail hunting, where the hunter is so focused on the bird that it makes everything else blurry. The bottom line in terms of bird hunting is what we call shooting zones.
Steven Hall
#3. What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.
Haruki Murakami
#4. What is it?' Stephanie whispered.
'That, my dear Valkyrie, is what we call a monster.'
She looked at Skulduggery. 'You don't know what it is, do you?'
'I told you what it is, it's a horrible monster. Now shut up before it comes over here and eats us.
Derek Landy
#5. What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.
Soren Kierkegaard
#6. The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.
Gerald Murnane
#7. Life is an endless matrix of existence. And as you experience it in that pure form, that's what we call enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
#8. Blisters are a painful experience, but if you get enough blisters in the same place, they will eventually produce a callus. That is what we call maturity.
Harry Herbert Miller
#9. The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
Alain De Botton
#10. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about me.
Miguel Ruiz
#11. These bad boys're what we call Runnie-undies. Keep you, um, nice and comfy."
"Nice and comfy?"
"Yeah, ya know. Your-"
"Yeah, got it." Thomas took the underwear and other stuff.
James Dashner
#12. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.
Raymond Chandler
#14. If what we call love doesn't take us beyond ourselves, it is not really love.
Oswald Chambers
#15. Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.
Leo Ornstein
#16. What we call absurd is our ignorance. The Winners, 1960
Julio Cortazar
#17. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
Sigmund Freud
#18. When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.
Dallas Willard
#19. This is the pain that will inform all other pains from now on. You have lost your mother. That is the primal pain, what we call it in German. There will never be another pain like this pain. You cannot ready yourself for it because it is unimaginable.
David Samuel Levinson
#20. The fight against global warming is a humanitarian issue - how the planet can be preserved - and it is also an issue of considerable economic importance, of what we call green growth.
Francois Hollande
#21. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.
Gabor Mate
#22. What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!
Terence McKenna
#23. I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed.
C.S. Lewis
#24. There comes a time when we can no longer tell the invaders from the invaded. That is what we call "War.
Hiroya Oku
#25. What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. Now, wages in the automobile industry are made up of two components, what we call base rates and the cost of living factor which is fed in by the operation of the escalator.
Leonard Woodcock
#27. The common trait of all evil is nothing other than egoism ... Basically all human evil comes from what we call the selfishness.
Rudolf Steiner
#28. There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.
Calvin Coolidge
#29. Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call football.
Serge Schmemann
#30. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
William, Saroyan
#31. What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#32. Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.
Ian Hacking
#33. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
George Saintsbury
#34. The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the Self.
Frederick Lenz
#35. Life is light and consciousness. Beyond this world and other worlds, beyond time and space and dimension, beyond what we call duality, is God
Frederick Lenz
#36. My wife and I take what we call our Friday comedy day off. We watch standup comics on TV. The raunchier the better. We love Eddie Izzard.
Gene Hackman
#37. The love of God is no human projection, but the wrath of God is. In fact, what we call the wrath of God is really the love of God experienced by a fool.
Peter Kreeft
#38. A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.
Patrick McGrath
#39. I am always sorry to hear that such and such a person is going to school to be educated. This is a great mistake. If the person is to get the benefit of what we call education, he must educate himself, under the direction of the teacher.
Fanny Jackson Coppin
#40. Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.
Jindrich Styrsky
#41. What we call as burden of life is nothing but the human failure on the matter of creating a just world!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#42. What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#43. If we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#44. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There's something different. They are somebody who - they don't exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other.
Michael Emerson
#45. What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.
Havelock Ellis
#46. At the moment you're suffering from what we call Maya. Maya is illusion. Maya is a Sanskrit word that suggests that we have forgotten. We've forgotten the purpose of life.
Frederick Lenz
#47. I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.
Marc Garneau
#48. The message is unmistakable; our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.
Robert A. Johnson
#49. My ability to persuade my wife to marry me [was] quite my most brilliant achievement ... Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one's better half.
Winston Churchill
#50. I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.
Dave Barry
#51. Principles are laws that are established by the creator or the manufacturer by which a product functions. If you violate those laws, then you produce malfunction, which is what we call failure. If you obey those laws and align yourself with those laws, then you are guaranteed success.
Myles Munroe
#52. What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.
David Hume
#53. A rude tourist was looking at paintings in a museum. He didn't find anything interesting and turned to the attendant while pointing to a large frame. Tourist: (making an ugly face) Is this what you call art? Attendant: No sir, this is what we call a mirror.
Johnson C. Philip
#54. What we call 'normal' [sane] is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on our experience" (R. Laing, 1967, p. 27).
Michael Guy Thompson
#55. In fact most of what we call anxiety is overconcern about what someone thinks of you.
Albert Ellis
#56. Realize the complicated specials of what we call the "inferiority complex." In other words, what, Miss Thing, is so damn special about you to make you feel so specially inferior to any other jerk?
Perry Brass
#57. If time be of all things most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough. Let us then be up and doing, and doing to a purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity
Benjamin Franklin
#58. There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?
Joseph Campbell
#59. It doesn't matter what we call it," ... "We still are what we are.
Sarah Elizabeth
#60. He's always had more than his fair share of what we call cheek and what Americans call can-do spirit.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#61. The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
Sigmund Freud
#62. I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#63. In the phusical sense, 'playing a fret less instrument in tune' is an impossibility. Hence what we call 'playing in tune' is no more than an extremely rapid skilfully carried out improvement of the originally inexactly located pitch.
Carl Flesch
#64. What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.
Terence McKenna
#65. I have exposed myself and am not ashamed to stand there naked. "Shame" is what we call the monster that attached itself to men when they aspired beyond the animals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. What we call the heart is a nervous sensation, like shyness, which gradually disappears in society. It is fervent in the nursery, strong in the domestic circle, tumultuous at school.
Benjamin Disraeli
#67. Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.
William Glasser
#68. I regard Abraham as my ancestor. Some of the greatest inspiration I have got has come from what we call the Old Testament prophets and what Jews would say "our prophets."
Desmond Tutu
#69. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
#70. I look at what we call faith, and all I see is superstition and subjugation. All religions [ ... ] They create false divisions, and enslave us to fantasies, when we need to focus on the here and now.
Helene Wecker
#71. I got pulled over when I was behind the wheel of a Porsche in Philly once for what we call DWB - Driving While Black.
Charles Barkley
#72. What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Havelock Ellis
#73. The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.
Gilles Deleuze
#74. Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.
Anita Shreve
#75. The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen - an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love";
Henrik Ibsen
#76. What we call spirit is our universal consciousness. We can also call it atomic consciousness. Every atom is conscious and knows everything that is going on around it at every moment.
Debasish Mridha
#77. People's need to protect their own egos know no bounds. They will lie, cheat, steal, even kill, to do whatever it takes to maintain what we call ego boundries.
Andrew Samuels
#78. "Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.
Sydney J. Harris
#79. There are no honorable causes. There is no good or evil. Evil is only what we call those who oppose us.
Michael Sullivan
#80. From time immemorial, soups and broths have been the worldwide medium for utilizing what we call the kitchen byproducts or as the French call them, the 'dessertes de la table' (leftovers), or 'les parties interieures de la bete', such as head, tail, lights, liver, knuckles and feet.
Louis Pullig De Gouy
#81. Tybalt's what we call 'Cait Sidhe' - the fairy cats. Which explains the attitude. And the eyes."
"Meow," said Tybalt, deadpan.
Seanan McGuire
#83. In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.
Tyler Cowen
#84. That's what I love about the mockumentary style, is the added thing of people knowing they are on-camera, which changes your behavior. That's why we sometimes do what we call spy shots.
Paul Feig
#85. The Kundalini resides in the base of the spine. It's a bit of a misnomer because the kundalini really is not so much in the physical body, as in what we call the subtle physical body, the body of energy.
Frederick Lenz
#86. I understood that if I wanted to work, the saxophone was the main instrument. The clarinet was what we call a double.
Lee Konitz
#87. What we call disorder or chaos might actually be order, if order is seen as a random distribution and not as a static, idealized condition.
William Lanouette
#88. Birds seem to be the happiest creatures on earth, yet they have none of what we call the comforts of life.
Olive Thorne Miller
#89. Yet I know that good is coming to me - that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.
George MacDonald
#90. what we call existence is a womb of infinitude, and is itself only incubatory - that eventually all attempts are broken down by the falsely excluded.
Charles Fort
#91. A Republican moves slowly. They are what we call conservatives. A conservative is a man who has plenty of money and doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't always have plenty of money. A Democrat is a fellow who never had any, but doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't have some.
Will Rogers
#92. How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?
Philip K. Dick
#93. What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
C.S. Lewis
#94. Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Wendell Berry
#95. True zazen is surrendering every moment. But surrendering to what? It really does not matter what we call it: God or the Tao or the Dharma or the Buddha or our true nature ... It is the act of letting go, of surrendering, that matters. The very act of letting go opens us up completely.
Dennis Merzel
#96. What we call the past is built on bits. - John Archibald Wheeler
James Gleick
#97. What we call birth
Is but a beginning to be something else
Than what we were before; and when we cease
To be that something, then we call it death.
Ovid
#99. Definition: Alpinism is the art of going through the mountains confronting the greatest dangers with the biggest of cares. What we call art here, is the application of a knowledge to an action.
Rene Daumal
#100. Business needs to move to adopt much more scalable pull platforms. When we talk about pull platforms, often people focus on one level of pull, which is what we call access. It's simply, if I have a need, I can make a request, get the resource or the information I need when needed.
John Hagel III
