Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
House Speaker Paul Ryan has actually started using a phrase lately - 'Raise our gaze.' He's exactly right, too. That's what I'd like to see in a presidential candidate. I don't like the bricks being thrown back and forth. That's not inspiring to me and to most of our electorate, I think.
I have employees that are, you know, other types of diversity, coming to me and saying 'Well, why aren't we focused on these other areas as well?' and I said yes, we should focus them, but, you know, the phrase we use internally is, 'If everything is important, then nothing is important.'
'Globalization' has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it's nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology - either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.
A lot of people think the orchestra is playing and the conductor doesn't do very much, but the conductor's the person that gives shape to the music, gets the phrasing, and if he has really fine musicians in solo spots, the question is does he try to help them phrase, or does he let them go?
Grief is like wandering through a minefield, as my mother puts it: however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere. A song played in a supermarket; an overheard phrase; someone in the distance who your mind cruelly suggests is your loved one for a fleeting moment.
I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it's definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I've always gravitated towards that feeling.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
Although at the time I didn't realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, 'If it's all right with you.' If I thought I'd done anything to make someone unhappy, I'd agonize.
When people hear the phrase 'risk-taker', two images come to mind. One is the negative idea of someone who's reckless and unpredictable, sometimes succeeding and at other times crashing out. The other is a more positive view of a fearless innovator who takes risks when others nervously stand back.
I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.
The notion of 'world leadership' is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous country by 2034?
Came from a song that I made from, like, 2012 - there was some phrase like 'Rap Monster', and I just, I thought it was so cool. But as I grow up, and as I came to America, I think it felt like too much. So I just abbreviated it to 'RM', and it could symbolize many things. It could have more spectrums to it.
I was a contestant on 'The Apprentice: Martha Stewart' and more than her telling me I learned from her that authenticity is key. She had a huge issue with a contestant using the phrase 'fake it 'til you make it' and fired her that same episode. She taught me that you can't fake being a master of your craft.
'Carpe Diem' is a phrase that I try to embrace. It means seize the day, to make the most of the present and to give little thought to the past or future. In the time that I have here, I want to love and live life to the fullest while being a positive influence on others. And I want a full life for everyone.
I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.
When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that 'civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.' The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force.
One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is 'Out of the Box.' The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn't.
Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase 'Don't tell anyone.' But not about creepy things. I don't want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like, I wouldn't make the soccer team, and my father would say, 'Don't tell anyone.'
The very phrase 'Make America great again' implies some kind of reset to a time long since passed. A mission to restore America to a previous default setting where American economic superiority was without peer, factories and manufacturing plants were humming, and jobs were plentiful for anyone who wanted one.
As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.
I reject the idea of work-life balance. The phrase is a bald-faced lie, designed to hang over the human psyche like the Sword of Damocles, because balance presumes an even distribution of weight, of value. But anyone who has ever lived understands that no set of tips or tricks can create a lifestyle equilibrium.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.'
Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future.
When you say 'I want to be an inspiring leader,' the operative phrase is 'I want.' This is inherently me-centered and self serving whether or not you recognise it. What you are really saying is 'I want to get people to do what I would like them to.' Perhaps they don't want to do that. So you have to somehow get them there.
So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country's history, we've expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. That's what it means to move forward.
It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.
The United States has been fighting African pirates since the early days of the republic - battles so formative that, among other things, they established a long-standing pattern of dealing with foreign policy problems through armed interventions and also inspired the iconic phrase 'the shores of Tripoli' in the Marine Corps hymn.
From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged.
There's a great phrase, written in the '70s: 'The definition of today's AI is a machine that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire.' It really speaks to the limitations of AI. In the next wave of AI research, if we want to make more helpful and useful machines, we've got to bring back the contextual understanding.
Super polished signage is not always a good sign. I'm always looking for places that you have to know about to find. Also, just food-wise, if I'm eating ethnic cuisine - I hate that phrase, but still - If I'm eating Mexican food, I'm looking to see that there are Mexicans in the restaurant. They know if the food is being made right.
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
I would bring a $100 bill, and I would say, 'Alright, first person' - and everybody has their iPhone - and I would say, 'First person to find in the Constitution the phrase 'separation of church and state' gets this $100 bill'... And you know what - and everybody knows that, right? - that phrase isn't in the U.S. Constitution. It's nowhere.
The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.
On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.
There is one particular argument that I call our 'ancient war.' If it could be summed up in one phrase, it would be, 'You don't get it. You don't understand what it's like to be me living with you.' There is such truth in that statement. None of us can really appreciate what it is like to be the other person, what that point of view feels like.
There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called.
