Grist For The Mill Quotes & Sayings

If you feel no love for people - don't get up from your chair.' Nekhlyudov was thinking of himself. 'Stay involved with yourself, and things, anything you like, but don't get involved with people. Just as you can eat healthily and profitably only when you are hungry, so you can have profitable and healthy dealings with people only when you have love for them. But if you let yourself deal with people without any love for them, as you did with your brother-in-law yesterday, there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality you can inflict on others - as I have seen today - and no limits to the suffering you can bring on yourself, as I can see from the whole of my life. — Leo Tolstoy

When God sends no answer and "the cloud remain[s]," we must wait. Yet we can do so with the full assurance of God's provision of manna, water from the rock, shelter, and protection from our enemies. He never keeps us at our post without assuring us of His presence or sending us daily supplies. — Lettie B. Cowman

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years. — David Whyte

On Becoming Who You Are Wherever you've been, and whatever you've done so far, your entire life was building up to this moment. Now is the time to burst forth into your greatness, a greatness you could never have achieved without going through exactly the things you've gone through. Everything you've experienced was grist for the mill by which you have become who you are. As low as you might have descended, in God there are no limits to how high you can go now. It is not too late. You are not too damaged. In fact, you are better than you know. — Marianne Williamson

Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill. In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most - you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? - they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don't mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don't care about. — Jon Stewart

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool. — Hans Christian Von Baeyer

If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery. — Lemony Snicket

The grist for my mill is the human body and the art of healing. — Richard Selzer

Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It's been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt. But I suppose that's okay. For artists, everything is grist for the mill. Artists are like cockroaches; we can't be stamped out. — Elaine De Kooning

My wife's a lot younger than me ... thirty years difference ... You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you ... Never ... — Patrick Modiano

The Adventures of Dickson McCunn, Adam Bede, Eric or Little by Little, these and many others, old and new, good bad and indifferent were grist to Duggie's mill. He found a novel by Rhoda Broughton entitled Not Wisely But Too Well and read it all through. He read an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe, and Under Two Flags and Coral Island with equal concentration. He read Little Women and Wuthering Heights. Cheyney he found difficult, for the people seemed to speak an unfamiliar language, but he struggled on manfully all the same. Needless — D.E. Stevenson

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable. — Robyn Schneider

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why. — Keri Hulme

I love commercials. I love to hate commercials, too. I talk back to them. — Hank Stuever

You will either have value, or be grist for the mill - nothing more. — Bryant McGill

Authors of books are not given very much control over the films that are made from their books. — Chris Van Allsburg

Theologians have a great problem because they're seeking to speak about God. Since God is the ground of everything that is, there's a sense in which every human inquiry is grist to the theological mill. Obviously, no theologian can know everything. — John Polkinghorne

View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate. — Henepola Gunaratana

The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers ... — Alice Childress

Until we're pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything's coming up roses - for me and for you. — Gina Barreca

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. — Grant Morrison

What a wonderful life? — Lailah Gifty Akita

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. — Terry Pratchett

I am not suggesting that everything bad that happens to us is sent directly by a knowing hand - cooked up specially for our personal development. Nor do I mean that by using the stuff of life as grist for the mill you will learn what you need to learn and move on into a problem-free world. And I also don't recommend courting drama and disaster so that you can be broken open to the truth. A catastrophe is not a sign that God has singled you out for greatness. What I do mean is that you can use anything - everything - as a wake-up call; you can find a treasure trove of information about yourself and the world in the big trials and the little annoyances of daily life. If you turn around and face yourself in times of loss and pain, you will be given the key to a more truthful - and therefore a more joyful - life. — Elizabeth Lesser

You will never gain anyone's approval by begging for it. When you stand confident in your own worth, respect follows. — Mandy Hale

It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art.
Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill.
... The artist is the only free man. — W. Somerset Maugham

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis. — Helen Suzman

When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel. — Laird Barron

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds. — Lee Hall

Artists are like cockroaches; everything is grist for the mill. — Elaine De Kooning

NO ONE starts a trip thinking that they might crash. Even though there is always a possibility, no one in their right mind ever begins a journey thinking that it's going to end in failure. There are only two types of people in the world who are aware and plan on crashing before they ever start : test pilots and teenage boys. — John Goode

I wanted to show how lightness was possible in the 1960s, but how life is more difficult in the 2000s. — Christophe Honore

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill. — Jane Green