Knives quotes
601 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside knives — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning"
"Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn't so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other."
"But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing."
"His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it."
"Your appearance can be a weapon. As powerful as any knife or gun."
"We should not have either a blunt knife or a freedom of speech which is ill-managed."
"Enter my first neighbor - a woman who spoke in complete, coherent sentences, who ate with a knife and fork and who only cried at weddings. I couldn't help myself. In a dramatic gesture, I bolted the door and threw my body across it to prevent her exit. She understood."
"Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life."
"Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience."
"I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon."
"The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives."
"Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner. BENEDICK Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains. BEATRICE I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me: if it had been painful, I would not have come. BENEDICK You take pleasure then in the message? BEATRICE Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point ... You have no stomach, signior: fare you well. Exit BENEDICK Ha! 'Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner;' there's a double meaning in that... (Much Ado About Nothing)"
"The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god)."
"Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives."
"A woman's eyes cut deeper than a knife."
"With my teethI have seized lifeUpon the knife of my youth.With my lips today,With my lips alone..."
"...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance."
"Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions."
"If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress."
"Give me a good sharp knife and a good sharp cheese and I’m a happy man."
