Can You Paraphrase Quotes & Sayings

To paraphrase Augustine, if you want to know your God-given gifts, first know that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to bring unity to the church. Then "love God and do what you feel like doing." But there is more to the unleashing of gifts in the body. One of the bad fruits of an "I" church is that we don't tell people when they bless us. If someone has taught Sunday school and helped us understand a passage of Scripture, then we should tell the person and encourage his or her gift. If worship leaders left us rejoicing that we have been with God's people in his presence, then thank them for the specific ways they blessed you and the church. No one should have to ask what their gifts are; we should tell people their gifts as they minister to us. Can — Edward T. Welch

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced ... that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed. — John Cage

Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ. — Kenneth Rexroth

A struggling writer, 'I get hundreds of rejection letters each day. I am depressed with this life, Can you please help?' The Wise-man, 'No, I can't help. It is good that you are being rejected. The more you get rejection letters, the better your writing will become. Always remember, first they will reject you, then they ... ignore you, then they will laugh at you and finally, they may accept you. — Santosh Kalwar

God does not merely require our petitions but our selves, and no one who begins the hard, lifelong trek of prayer knows yet who they are. Nothing but prayer will ever reveal you to yourself, because only before God can you see and become your true self. To paraphrase something is to get the gist of it and make it accessible. Prayer is learning who you are before God and giving him your essence. Prayer means knowing yourself as well as God. — Timothy Keller

History is not a manifesto for action, a list of crimes to be avenged, a litany of positions to be reversed or a collection of rights to be wronged. History is, to paraphrase the great A.J.P. Taylor, the answer you give a child when he or she asks you: 'What happened?' It is a description of what happened. — Sidin Vadukut

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. — Vladimir Nabokov

My mother used to say: 'It's not enough to be Hungarian. You still need a little talent, too.' To paraphrase her, its not enough to be conservative, you still need to have the brainpower to be a Supreme Court justice. And, if Harriet Miers is confirmed, she likely won't be in the same league with her colleagues in terms of gray matter. — Dick Morris

You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public — Scott Adams

I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system. — Nouriel Roubini

Witch' is just a religion, okay? No baby-sacrificing, no Black Masses, no sending imps out to scare the dog-snot out of kids, trying to make them think they're crazy. We don't do things like that. Our number-one law is 'Have fun in this lifetime, but don't hurt anybody.'
Nice little paraphrase of "An it harm none, do as ye will" if I do say so myself. — Mercedes Lackey

The truth is, I hate not being the first person narrator all the way through! To paraphrase David Copperfield, I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it? — Anne Rice

I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here ... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness ... give me truth. — Jon Krakauer

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side. — Mark Twain

Jesus confronted many of the important issues of His time. He went into the temple, taught the New Testament message, and took action against those who were buying and selling on holy ground. He healed the widow, forgave the adulterer, and by His example, the righteous walked away in shame. He had said, whoever is without sin, cast the first stone (John 8:7 - paraphrase)! Not one pebble, nor one rock was thrown. He who had that right to judge, Jesus Christ, did not cast judgement either. He looked upon the sinner lovingly, and embraced them. He guided them to change and opened blind eyes to see. By Christ alone, was and is salvation attained. Truth is in the New Testament, and a Holy Spirit-guided understanding of it. It must be read without regard for self. For when self enters in, that is when misinterpretations and heresies arise. — Zechariah Barrett

There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Encyclopedia is a Latin term. It means "to paraphrase a term paper." — Greg Ray

Let me paraphrase what Paul is saying here: Jesus married the Church - Christians, you and me, us. The Church is His literal bride. He laid His life down for the Church. And Paul writes that husbands should love their wives in the same way that Jesus loved The Church, and vice-versa.
What a daunting task.
But what is made clear in this passage is that marriage was designed to display the love that Jesus has for the Church, His bride. It's the closest thing we can get to tasting the kind of love that He has for us - a sacrificing love, a serving love, a selfless love.
Do you see what this means?
Marriage isn't really about us.
It's not.
It's about God.
It's about the Gospel. — Cole Ryan

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a vast fortune must be in want of a newer, younger wife. — Bruce Feirstein

To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone. — Robert Mankoff

To paraphrase Paul from the New Testament, he has a great soliloquy about love, where he's basically saying, if I've figured out the secrets of the universe but I don't have love, figuring out the secrets of universe means nothing. — Moby

It's perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole. — Stephen King

If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide. I do not counsel this. But I beg him to lay aside the mask of erudition. And I the must deal with Latin I suggest he paraphrase some accurate translation. And then employ some respectable student of the language to save him from the blunders which might still be possible. — William Gardner Hale

I once mentioned in a school report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning,

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?

turned this line into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?

was, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" If one is driven to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's diameter, but aware that "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" is bad, than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things the other way — Matthew Arnold

To paraphrase Voltaire: if they can make you believe in their absurdities, they can make you commit their atrocities. — Voltaire

In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small's personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand. — Martin Small

To paraphrase the disappeared Jimmy Hoffa, who certainly didn't go down in history for his foolish worries: "Eighty-five percent of what you worry about won't ever come to pass. And you can always deal with that other fifteen percent." Of course, look what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. — M.A. Harper

I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention. — Kurt Vonnegut

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed SOMETIMES, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. — Chad Harbach

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there. — Donna Tartt

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's."
Bokonon's paraphrase was this:
"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on. — Kurt Vonnegut

To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, cynicism of intellect; promise of the present. — Bill Grigsby

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message. — Chester Elijah Branch

To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it. — Mark Galli

I do not want to presuppose anything as known. I see in my explanation in section 1 the definition of the concepts point, straight line and plane, if one adds to these all the axioms of groups i-v as characteristics. If one is looking for other definitions of point, perhaps by means of paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then, of course, I would most decidedly have to oppose such an enterprise. One is then looking for something that can never be found, for there is nothing there, and everything gets lost, becomes confused and vague, and degenerates into a game of hide and seek. — David Hilbert

To paraphrase the great humorist, Will Rogers . . . "We're all ignorant, but only on different subjects". — Wilson Casey

To paraphrase the famous Walt saying, Cast Members are there to work so Guests can play. — Leslie Le Mon

To paraphrase something the anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said, the way I change my life is to act as if I'm the person I want to be. This is, to me, the simplest, wisest advice you can give anyone. When you wake up and act like a loving person, you realize not only that you are altered, but that the people around you are also transformed, because everybody is changed by the reception of this love ... — Bernie Siegel

I believe that our world needs an instrument of global action as never before in history. I believe that the United Nations is the instrument for securing peace and for giving people everywhere, in poorer countries as in richer, a real stake in that peace by promoting development and encouraging cooperation. But the United Nations is only an instrument, an actor in need of props and cues from its directors, And so I will paraphrase Winston Churchill: Give us the tools-the trust, the authority and the means-and we will do the job. — Kofi Annan

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma. — Rabih Alameddine

You really care for them, don't you? I wouldn't have expected it."
"Well, to paraphrase a famous fictional ogre, dragons are like onions - we have layers. — Julie Kagawa

Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought - to paraphrase Margaret Atwood - with good reason, he could get away with it. — Victor Davis Hanson

Though they were not familiar with the expression,to paraphrase the saying, when any country in the Sahel sneezes, the rest of the region catches pneumonia, the men there would have clicked their tongues and ruefully nodded their heads that 'woolayi' this was the truth. — T.K. Naliaka

dreamers--which the English call splash; Arabian poets gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only translate by a paraphrase--the noise of water falling into water. — Alexandre Dumas

They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year. — Thomas Pynchon

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. — James Bovard

To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible. — Robert Krulwich

To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? — Marc Goodman

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. — Susan Sontag

If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there — George Harrison

To paraphrase Hemingway, people go broke slowly and then all at once. We've been slowly going broke for years, but now it's happening all at once as the world's capital markets are demanding action from us, yet Obama assumes we'll just go borrow another cup of sugar from some increasingly impatient neighbor. We cannot knock on anyone's door anymore. And we don't have any time to wait for Washington to start behaving responsibly. We'll be Greece before these D.C. politicians' false promises are over. We must force government to live within its means, just as every business and household does. — Sarah Palin

If you read one book you are a clone. If you read two books you are confused. If you read ten books you have your own voice. And if you read one hundred books you are wise. (paraphrase) — Timothy Keller

Ministry. Sadly, there has never been a city on earth that is not saturated with human sin and corruption. Indeed, to paraphrase a Woody Allen joke, cities are just like everywhere else, only much more so. They are both better and worse, both easier and harder to live in, both more inspiring and oppressive, than other places. As redemptive history unfolds, we begin to see how the tension of the city will be resolved. The turn in the relationship between the people of God and the pagan city becomes a key aspect of God's plan to bless the nations and redeem the world. In the New Testament, we find cities playing an important role in the rapid growth of the early church and in spreading the gospel message of God's salvation. — Timothy Keller

To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, love was too weak a word for what I felt for that tiny crying creature who had my eyes, my mouth, my hair. I lurved my daughter, my Ava. I looved her. I lurfed her. — Melissa Senate

The right wing conservatives think it's a decision that you can be cured with some treatment and religion.//Manmade rewiring of a predisposition//Oh no here we go, America the brave still fears what we don't know//But we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago, I don't know ... — Macklemore

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase. — David Lodge