Judicious Quotes & Sayings

The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines. — H.P. Lovecraft

It is a fundamental rule with me not to vote for a loan or tax bill till I am satisfied it is necessary for the public service, and then not if the deficiency can be avoided by lopping off unnecessary objects of expenditure or the enforcement of an exact and judicious economy in the public disbursements. — John C. Calhoun

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. — M. Scott Peck

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art
novels, poems, plays, paintings or films
can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. — Alain De Botton

Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. — Alexander Hamilton

Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard. His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity. The protracted consideration of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues. Now, however, it is clear that his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster. — George Will

Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest ... Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. — James Webb Young

(R)eality TV (is) a medium dedicated to the proposition that with the help of judicious editing, carefully chosen half-wits can hold the attention of millions of their fellow half-wits for weeks on end. — Terry Teachout

Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren't helpless dick-driven maniacs who can't help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE. — Emily Nagoski

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease. — Caroline Kettlewell

It's best to lay out your makeup as you would when planning your outfit. If you're using a brightening primer, then be judicious with your use of shimmer and sparkly things. I like to play with texture a bit, so you can always find a balance. — Tim Quinn

Judicious absence is a weapon. — Charles Reade

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind. — Samuel Johnson

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close. — William Cowper

We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea. — Francis Galton

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. — Algernon Blackwood

Your only guidepost is your own instinct and judicious editing. In my stand-up act I learned that in the first 10 minutes I could say anything and it would get a laugh. Then I'd better deliver. In the movie it's the same thing. You get a lot of laughs when people first sit down and then the story better kick in. Many years in front of an audience, I would hope, give me a sense of what works. — Steve Martin

All that are upright are not equally fitted for the work, and many that are learned, judicious, and more able to teach the riper sort, are yet less able to condescend to the ignorant, and so convincingly and fervently to rouse up the secure, as some that are below them in other qualifications; and many that are able in both respects, have a barren people; and the ablest have found by experience that God hath sometimes blessed the labours of a stranger to that which their own hath not done. — Richard Baxter

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, - how could he affect her as a lover? The — George Eliot

Return telephone calls promptly but be judicious about the time spent on the phone. — Mary Kay Ash

I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's — Irvin D. Yalom

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. — David Foster Wallace

To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level. The man who submits to the shafts of envy for the sake of noble objects pursues a judicious course for his own lasting fame. Hatred dies with its object, while merit soon breaks forth in full splendor, and his glory is handed down to posterity in never-dying strains. — Thucydides

The advice of friends must be received with a judicious reserve; we must not give ourselves up to it and follow it blindly, whether right or wrong. — Pierre Charron

A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him. — Thomas Carlyle

Few things in this world more trouble people than poverty, or the fear of poverty; and, indeed, it is a sore affliction; but, like all other ills that flesh is heir to, it has its antidote, its reliable remedy. The judicious application of industry, prudence and temperance is a certain cure. — Hosea Ballou

The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them; not indiscriminately, for then it would have little effect; but, if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out, both by tones and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments. — Mary Wollstonecraft

In the fall of 2004, after both WMDs and easy victory were revealed as mirages, a presidential aide made an astounding admission to The New York Times Magazine. The White House, he said, didn't waste time worrying about those "in what we call the reality-based community" who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." That, the aide said, "is not the way the world really works anymore. . . . When we act, we create our own reality. — Seth Mnookin

It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages. You must surely have seen instances enough of that frailty. You have yourself heard many such marvellous relations started, which, being treated with scorn by all the wise and judicious, have at last been abandoned even by the vulgar. Be assured, that those renowned lies, which have spread and flourished to such a monstrous height, arose from like beginnings; but being sown in a more proper soil, shot up at last into prodigies almost equal to those which they relate. — Christopher Hitchens

A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life. — Lord Chesterfield

It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country. — Adam Smith

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; — Edwin A. Abbott

However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. "As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy," he said, "I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship." But, he said, "on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war." So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, "If that's unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances? — Erik Larson

the very judicious plan of dividing the two acts of the opera with a ballet, — Alexandre Dumas

And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's soul could never be fully surveyed. — Dexter Palmer

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him." — Thomas Carlyle

There must be a judicious arrangement of all the parts. Considered conversely, the artist's task is to fill his panel with a design that conforms to its shape and is beautiful in itself. — Walter J. Phillips

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts - eighteenth-century Reader's Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for "delicious morsels," one that spits out "every thing which is plain." Good books, in contrast, require good readers: "In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them. — Karen Swallow Prior

Society is an organism which obeys the immutable law of progress; and change, judicious and cautious change, is necessary for the well being, and indeed the preservation of the social system. — Swami Vivekananda

You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit. — Molly Ivins

High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts. — Finley Peter Dunne

Though she liked him for his attentions, and thought them all, whether in friendship, admiration, or playfulness, extremely judicious, they were not winning back her heart. — Jane Austen

Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko's is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars. — Jack F. Matlock Jr.

Our love is principle, and has its root
In reason, is judicious, manly, free. — William Cowper

Allow grief room to air itself," Maurice had taught her."Be judicious in using the body to comfort another, for you may extinguish the freedom that the person feels to be able to share a sadness. — Jacqueline Winspear

Mr Cobb would acquaint him, that when he was his age, his father thought no more of giving him a parental kick, or a box on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or some little admonition of that sort, than he did of any other ordinary duty of life; and he would further remark, with looks of great significance, that but for this judicious bringing up, he might have never been the man he was at that present speaking; which was probable enough, as he was, beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party. — Charles Dickens

What remained? Loneliness, or worse still, far worse because it so deeply degraded the spirit, a life of perpetual subterfuge, of guarded opinions and guarded actions, of lies of omission if not of speech, of becoming an accomplice in the world's injustice by maintaining at all times a judicious silence, making and keeping the friends one respected, on false pretences, because if they knew they would turn aside, even the friends one respected. — Radclyffe Hall

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them. — Samuel Johnson

It may seem like improv because it flows quite naturally, and a little bit of leeway for improvisation is good, but you have to be judicious with it. So it's good, but sometimes people deify it. You can't improvise your way out of a paper hat. — Steve Coogan

I do not like punishments. You will never torture a child into duty; but a sensible child will dread the frown of a judicious mother more than all the rods, dark rooms, end scolding school-mistresses in the universe. — Henry Kirke White

What is our life? A play of passion.
Our mirth the music of division.
Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be,
Where we are drest for this short Comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss,
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun,
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest. — Walter Raleigh

Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious. But for the same reason everyone is eager to instruct his neighbours. To be wise or to be virtuous is to buy dignity and importance at a high price; but when nothing is necessary to elevation but detection of the follies or faults of others, no man is so insensible to the voice of fame as to linger on the ground. — Samuel Johnson

The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose. — Lewis Mumford

Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice. — George Eliot

The effect of sailing is produced by a judicious arrangement of the sails to the direction of the wind. — William Falconer

Ignorance, far more than idleness, is the mother of all the vices; and how recent has been the admission, that knowledge should be the portion of all? The destinies of the future lie in judicious education; an education that must be universal, to be beneficial. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Men don't want to be brothers - they may someday, but they don't now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won't turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile - but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I will still believe in the brotherhood of man, but it's not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It's no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process. — Agatha Christie

A gentle mixture of furniture expresses life and continuity but it must be a judicious mixture that flows and mixes well. It is a bit like mixing a salade. (I am better at room than salads). — Nancy Lancaster

Zealous men are ever displaying to you the strength of their belief, while judicious men are showing you the grounds of it. — William Shenstone

They say that 'history is an argument without end.' In Thompson's skillful hands, this momentous argument between two old friends on the most critical issue of the last century is thus history at its best. Thompson's judicious and delicious depiction of Nitze and Kennan will fascinate anyone who cares about the Cold War or the ways that human beings shape the future. — Jonathan Alter

One has no room for vengeance,' says Shara, 'when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless. — Robert Jackson Bennett

What does it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that they could insert these little annoyances into Christ's great "compassion" so that they somehow became part of the treasury of compassion so greatly needed by the human race. In this way, even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love. Maybe we should consider whether it might be judicious to revive this practice ourselves. — Pope Benedict XVI

(The pig) hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure - and for such a tomb might be content to die. — Charles Lamb

A person who is anxious to be a leader of the fashion, or one of the first to follow it, will certainly appear in the eyes of judicious men to have nothing better than a frequent change of dress to recommend him to notice. — George Washington

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion. — Tim Wu

You can develop good judgement as you do the muscles of your body - by judicious, daily exercise. — Grenville Kleiser

If it was not intended as a veto, then it must have been intended for commanders to interpret as they saw fit, which brings the matter to that melting point of warfare - the temperament of the individual commander.
When the moment of live ammunition approaches, the moment to which all his professional training has been directed, when the lives of men under him, the issue of the combat, even the fate of a campaign may depend upon his decision at a given moment, what happens inside the heart and vitals of a commander? Some are made bold by the moment, some irresolute, some carefully judicious, some paralyzed and powerless to act. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Nothing earns better interest than judicious questions, and the man who invests in more knowledge of the business than he has to have in order to hold his job has capital with which to buy a mortgage on a better one. — George Horace Lorimer

But he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise. — Jane Austen

An image of her shackled to my bench, peeled gingerroot inserted in her ass so she can't clench her buttocks, comes to mind, followed by judicious use of a belt or strap. — E.L. James

Though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve. — William Shakespeare

With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index. — Rossiter Johnson

Comprehensive, judicious, evenhanded, original. An Unfinished Life has the sober judgment and nuanced accuracy that make it ring true in all the controversial and tricky parts. — Jack Newfield

In anger nothing right nor judicious can be done. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women. — Mark Twain

Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is ... True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care
with no one there to see or cheer. — David Foster Wallace

I mention this only to shew that the citations of the most judicious authors frequently deceive us, and consequently that prudence obliges us to examine quotations, by whomsoever alleged. — Pierre Bayle

Revised regulations will never suppress federal workplace retaliation; nor will it cure the inaction of an EEOC official when justice demands fair, prompt and judicious decision-making. — Tanya Ward Jordan

Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. — Christian Nestell Bovee

There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House. — Herman Melville

It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white. — Frederick Douglass

Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart ... — Mary Wollstonecraft

Through the judicious employment of symbols, diagrams, and calculations, mathematics enables us to acquire significant facts about extremely significant things (universal laws, even), not by first forging out into the cosmos with teams of scientists, but rather from the comforts and confines of coffee tables in our living rooms! p. 72 — G. Arnell Williams

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. — Charles Lamb

I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark. — Jonathan Swift

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe
without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced. — H.L. Mencken

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. — Charles Lamb

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist. — Haruki Murakami

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm. — Jonathan Swift

Good intentions are not sufficient to creat a positive outcome; you must act. As you take part and become actively engaged, answers to your questions will appear. Lastly, like a great rock is not disturbed by the buffetings of the wind, the mind of a judicious man is steady. He exists as a stanchion, a stalwart support. Others can cling to him, for he will not falter. — Colleen Houck

After you defined Quality, it was the turn of quantity. Now apply judicious quality control. Select what can be improved? Strive for achieving the perceived Quality as above. Practically, a virtuous circle to this Quality is followed through deploying Deming's PDSA — Priyavrat Thareja

The zealous display the strength of their belief, while the judicious show the grounds of it. - WILLIAM SHENSTONE, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POET AND LANDSCAPE DESIGNER — Josh Kaufman

I'm not lazy. I'm simply judicious about excess movement. — Jen Lancaster

We are not judicious in love; we do not select those whom we ought to love, but those whom we cannot help loving. — George Henry Lewes

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats. — Stephen Leacock

There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power. — J. William Fulbright

In an environment where there are too many choices, too many decisions, too much information, and too many demands on our cognition, it pays to be judicious about the complexity we voluntarily sign up for. When we make the decision to streamline our lives, we also create time and room to think with focus and intent. In a complex world, time to stand back and look at the big picture, time to consider our options more carefully, time to make more deliberate decisions, and time to breathe are necessities for survival. — Rebecca D. Costa

It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people's love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity. — Anthony Powell