"The phrase surgical strike might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives."
Phrases quotes
Phrases
442 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Phrases quotes (page 4 of 23)
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"I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls, The burial-ground God's-Acre."
"One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning."
"Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast."
"We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men."
"I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing."
"Telling is not selling; never make a statement if you can phrase it in the form of a question."
"[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know."
"There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."
"If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war."
"Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey."
"And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors."
"..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it."
"There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see."
"'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become."
"The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything."
"Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome."
"Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase "Black feminism"."
"If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the "enthusiasm for truth and justice" using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot."
"I keep coming back to the phrase "Dance with the system" - not just march onwards no matter what happens."