Get Manual Quotes & Sayings

There's no doubt that I'm a better president now than when I first took office. This is not a job where there's a manual, and over time you get a better sense of what's important, what's not, how to see around corners and anticipate problems, as opposed to just managing problems once they've arrived. — Barack Obama

Rest assured, dear friend, that many noteworthy and great sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women, both in cognitive speculation, demonstrated in writing, and in the arts, manifested in manual works of labor. I will give you plenty of examples. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 1405 — Elizabeth Gilbert

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who
always reads the handbook. Anything people build,
any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific
purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already
understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open
areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual,
man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.
And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do
something you never thought of. — William Gibson

I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. — John Steinbeck

In any ten step instruction manual and every book of doctrines, there is complex advice that serves the very simple function of helping the lonely person find some similarity with the world around him.
He connects and, suddenly, there is a burst of joy, a ray of hope. He believes that it was those steps or that book, specifically, that brought him happiness, when really he has simply been triggered into his natural state. — Vironika Tugaleva

Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down. — Dan Brown

We are assailed by the temptation of the love of money. If you wish to acquire riches ? they are the bait of the fishers hook ? by greed, by trafficking, by violence, by ruse or by excessive manual work that deprives you of leisure for the service of God ? in a word by any other means ? if you have desired to pile up gold or silver, remember what the Gospel says, 'Fool! They will snatch your soul away during the night! Who will get your hoard' (cf. Lk. 12:20)? Again, 'He piles up money without knowing to whom it will go' (Ps. 39:6). — Pachomius The Great

Babies used to make me nervous, but these squirmy things are awesome once you've read the manual. — David Z. Hirsch

I explained Crime 101 to the kid. "Guns escalate things. They're only good for crowd control. We're going in after closing hours, so we don't need crowd control." "Yeah," Augie said, "but what about security? What if they start bustin' caps?" Bustin' caps. I wondered how many hip-hop posters he had on his bedroom wall. "Site's handled by Gold Star Security Northwest," I explained. "They don't carry guns, just Tasers and pepper spray. They also make thirteen bucks an hour, and heroics are highly discouraged in their training manual. Their standing orders in case of a burglary are to retreat to safe ground and call the real cops. That gives us plenty of time to bug out if we get spotted and blow it." "Cool," Augie said. — Craig Schaefer

Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it's badly translated, hard to figure out. — Hugh Laurie

The poet's life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We're hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both. — Eileen Myles

Manual Lynn? Find out what that is. He wrote every single word in the play, and then everyone just rapped their parts. Imagine if like, Eminem wrote a play, that's what it sounded like to me. — Ryan Montgomery

It's always hard, when introducing readers to a new world/set of rules, not to lay it all out manual-style in the opening chapters but make sure to put the action and the characters at the front. If people don't become invested in them and in the story, the world in which it's set will become a burden. — V.E Schwab

That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.'
'You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.
Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' ("Gin Comes In Bottles") — Fletcher Pratt

Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence Manual. — Ian Fleming

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. — Terry Pratchett

A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn't — Douglas Adams

No one has a monopoly on our unending story of nationhood; no one has the manual for our nationhood. — John Tamihere

Sage," Adrian declared. "These hands don't do manual labor. — Richelle Mead

There wasn't much white people would allow us to do in those days. You could be a schoolteacher or an athlete to get away from the manual labor and servant-type jobs, but there wasn't much else they were going to allow you [to] do. — Hank Aaron

Tool," William said, ... "As in a device to perform or facilitate mechanical or manual labor?"
"That's right Encyclopedia Britannica. Or in layman's terms: screwdriver, hammer - "
"How about a wrench," William interrupted,"
"You've got a quick learner on your hands, Bryn," Paul said ... "Sure, wrench works just fine as well," ... "Whatever blows your skirt up buddy." ...
"Well a wrench would come in handy right now," William mused. "Because you definitely have a couple screws loose. — Nicole Williams

They maintain he wrote The Art of War. Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface, The Art of War is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies' terms. With regard to power, women don't have the vanity men have. They don't need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can't learn that, Spiuni. — Jo Nesbo

For me, it's really easy to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came into this world with a manual about how to get it all right. We are ultimately a product of our biology and environment. Consequently, I choose to be compassionate with others when I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around. I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally. Your stuff is your stuff, and my stuff is my stuff. — Jill Bolte Taylor

The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty. — Charles Stross

If there were a Jessica Chase instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing. — Olivia Cunning

Card five hundred and thirty-four," repeated Artemis. "Of a series of six hundred standard inkblot cards. I memorized them during our sessions. You don't even shuffle."
Argon checked the number on the back of the card: 534. Of course. "Knowing the number doesn't answer the question. What do you see?"
Artemis allowed his lip to wobble. "I see an ax dripping with blood. Also a scared child, and an elf clothed in the skin of a troll."
"Really?" Argon was interested now.
"No. Not really. I see a secure building, perhaps a family home, with four windows. A trustworthy pet, and a pathway leading from the door into the distance. I think, if you check your manual, you will find that these answers fall inside healthy parameters."
Argon did not need to check. The Mud Boy was right, as usual. — Eoin Colfer

What being in the War and being in the Army had shown him was that people tend naturally toward light, toward its source, as sunflowers do in a field.
People lean, either in their dreams or in their actions, toward that place where they suspect their inner lights are coming from. Whether they call it God or conscience or the manual of Army protocol, people sublime toward where their inner fire burns, and given enough fuel for thought and a level playing field to dream on, anyone can leave a fingerprint on the blank of history. That's what
Fos believed. — Marianne Wiggins

Their most notable defect was that they considered work a virtue, even manual labor. They were materialists, conquerors, and they were infused with a messianic enthusiasm for reforming those who did not think as they did; they did not, however, represent an immediate threat to civilization. No — Isabel Allende

The faculties of our souls are improved and made useful to us just after the same manner as our bodies are. Would you have a man write or paint, dance or fence well, or
perform any other manual operation dexterously and with ease, let him have ever so much vigour and activity, suppleness and address naturally, yet no body expects this from him unless he has been used to it, and has employed time and pains in fashioning and forming his hand or outward parts to these motions. Just so it is in the mind; would you have a man reason well, you must use him to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connection of ideas and following them in train. — John Locke

Computer, what evasive action can we take?" "Er, none, I'm afraid, guys," said the computer. "Or something," said Zaphod, " ... er ... " he said. "There seems to be something jamming my guidance systems," explained the computer brightly, "impact minus forty-five seconds. Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax." Zaphod tried to run in several equally decisive directions simultaneously. "Right!" he said. "Er ... we've got to get manual control of this ship. — Douglas Adams

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. — Donna Tartt

No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm. — Paulo Coelho

In practice, I always get you to give me the red M&M's."
"That was a device to let you know when you were using enough charm to affect a human," he snapped. "I got it from a human parenting manual. I didn't think you were stupid enough to believe you could use your charm against me."
My eyes flashed. I remembered mother telling me the only way she'd found to potty train me was giving me M&M's. I was not flattered by the comparison. — Kaitlin Bevis

Not sure how you can get them to him without looking like a crazy stalker chick," Micah says.
"You think I'm a crazy stalker chick?"
"You're using an ancient war manual to try to win back your boyfriend. I think you're a girl who will do whatever it takes to get what she wants," he says. "Hey, at least you're committed. — Paula Stokes

We completed meetings with leaders from over a dozen ministries over a ten-day period. Toward the end of our journey, we asked our Sri Lankan host for his feedback. After about the fourth day, he had become convinced that we were actually there to listen, so his feedback was honest. He said (and I'm paraphrasing):
Paul and Christie, you and your leadership training are welcome here in Sri Lanka. If you host your training in a nice Colombo (Sri Lanka's capital) hotel with a nice venue and a buffet lunch, we can get fifty to one hundred pastors and ministry leaders to come. They will come, and you can get some great pictures for
your newsletter. Then, after the seminar, they will take your manual home with them and put it on the shelf with [U.S. megachurch pastor's] training manual and [another U.S. megachurch pastor's] training manual and [a well-known U.S. leadership trainer's] training manual, and they will go about their own ministry in their own way. — Paul Borthwick

Please, ma'am. Please help me. You seem like someone who really appreciates knowledge and learning, and I'd be so grateful if you'd share just a little of your wisdom."
"Why should I help?" she asked. I could tell she was intrigued, though. Flattery really could get you places. "You don't have any superior knowledge to offer me."
"Because I'm superior in other things. Help me, and I'll ... I'll fix your car out front. I'll change the tire.
That threw her off. "You're in a skirt."
"I'm offering you what I can. Manual labor in exchange for wisdom."
"I don't believe you can do it," she said after several long moments.
I crossed my arms. "It's an eyesore."
"You have fifteen minutes," she snapped.
"I only need ten. — Richelle Mead

As the taste for what may be called book-learning increases, manual labor should not be neglected. The education of the mind and the education of the body should go hand in hand. A skillful brain should be joined with a skillful hand. Manual labor should be dignified among us and always be made honorable. The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow among us ... Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone. Our children should be taught to sustain themselves by their own industry and skill, and not only do this, but to help sustain others, and that to do this by honest toil is one of the most honorable means which God has furnished to His children here on earth. The subject of the proper education of the youth of Zion is one of the greatest importance. — Wilford Woodruff

Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture.
We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt
two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives. — Barbara Kingsolver

The Doctor: This is bad, I don't like this. [kicks console and yells in pain] Never use force, you just embarrass yourself. Unless you're cross, in which case ... always use force!
Amy: Shall I run and get the manual?
The Doctor: I threw it in a supernova.
Amy: You threw the manual in a supernova? Why?
The Doctor: Because I disagreed with it! Now stop talking to me when I'm cross! — Steven Moffat

Creative business seminar. Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized. Very transparent and easy to grasp. And quite a few people get positive encouragement from this. But the fact remains that it's nothing more than an infusion of the hypnotic into a system of thought that suits their goal, a conglomeration of only those theories and statistics that line up with their ultimate objectives. — Haruki Murakami

Once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual — Stephen King

Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon. — Siri Hustvedt

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time. — Hilary Mantel

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's really easy to insist that people read the manual. It's really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, or for not caring enough to pay attention. — Seth Godin

Doing a background check is still a very manual process, because the government agencies that create the records are largely paper-based systems. I'm not going to deny that there are errors, because in any system that involves human beings or technology, there are going to be errors. — James Lee

From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations. — Frank Herbert

You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn't get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see. — Heather O'Neill

Although they're doing manual labor, they're both wearing tailored slacks and dressy leather shoes, which — Jen Lancaster

Because I'm superior in other things. Help me, and I'll ... I'll fix your car out front. I'll change your tire."
That threw her off. "You're in a skirt"
"I'm offering you what I can. Manual labor in exchange for wisdoms."
"I don't believe you can do it," she said after several long moments.
I crossed my arms. "It's an eyesore."
"You have fifteen minutes."
"I only need ten."
Naturally Adian felt the need to "supervise" my work. "Are you going to get made if I tell you how hot this Is? — Richelle Mead

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it's a sound that hasn't been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing. — Yvette Walker

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them — Damion Searls

I hate having to read the manual. — Trevor Horn

Each profession, intellectual or manual, deserves consideration, whether it requires painful physical effort or manual dexterity, wide knowledge or or the patience of an ant. — Mariama Ba

Correlation across replicated environments adds a whole new dimension of complexity of the environment, ... You would expect most application groups to have the same set of policies. In reality, you have differences in policies. That reflects back to that whole process of manual storing in the environment. — Andrew Bird

I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness ... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text. — Charles Krauthammer

In a world full of quitters, it takes true courage to commit to marriage renewal. If you want a field manual for restoring your relationship, get The Phoenix Marriage: God creates beauty out of ashes. — Tony Jeary

The Constitution is an equally forthright piece of work and quite succinct ... giving the complete operating instructions for a nation of 250 million people. The manual for a Toyota Camry, which only seats five, is four times as long. — P. J. O'Rourke

Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money. — James Spader

To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you. — Ernest Hemingway,

I thought you people had a manual for this kind of thing."
He laughed. "We have a manual. Magic doesn't. — Devon Monk

I learned what education was expected to do for an individual. Before going there I had a good deal of the then rather prevalent idea among our people that to secure an education meant to have a good, easy time, free from all necessity for manual labor. At Hampton I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labor, but learned to love labor, not alone for its financial value, but for labor's own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings. At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy. — Booker T. Washington

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process. — Paul Rand

Differences of age or of race may set up postitions of manufactured superiority: the manual worker from Germany flies to Thailand and because of the historical advantage of his economy and exchange rate, feels and behaves like a millionaire. The plodding Englishman arrives in a small North American town and, simply on account of his exotic accent, may be welcomed as charmingly original and sophisticated. — Alain De Botton

Why doesn't love come with an owner's manual? — Ellen Hopkins

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person. — Edward Abbey

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual. — Gloria Steinem

The degree to which the child-rearing professionals continue to be out of touch with reality is astounding. For example, a widely read manual on breast-feeding, devotes fewer than two pages to the working mother. — Sylvia Ann Hewlett

How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan's fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. — Charles C. Mann

Our minds must meditate on some object. According to what he thinks, a man can create an atmosphere of radiance, exuberance, buoyancy; and this brings joy. Or he can carry gloom with him. It is a matter of the habit of thought. We must build up our own life by our thoughts. There are many ways by which we can do this. Art, music, even manual work, all can bring ripening to the soul. — Swami Paramananda

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands. — Timothy Ferriss

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation. — James Joseph Sylvester

A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation. — David Nicholls

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house. — W. Somerset Maugham

Humans don't excel at performing repetitive manual work. — Bernard Golden

I recall the eerie pleasure of getting a copy of the U-2 Users' Manual. — George Smoot

I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post. — Lee Child

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. — Karl Marx

We don't know what we can achieve because no instruction manual accompanies our birth — Asoka Nimal Jinadasa

Manual control, please."
"Are you sure, Frank?"
"Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you."
Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simpleminded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides ('How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings'; 'Artificial Intelligence
Real Irritation' were some of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well. — Arthur C. Clarke