Nutshell Quotes & Sayings

I think it is a simple statement of principle that in a democracy you should make your MPs work harder for your vote and try and get at least majority support in their local area, and that in a nutshell is what AV does. — Nick Clegg

I can give you the cause of anaphylactic shock in a nutshell. — Gary Delaney

Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it tuns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, in a nutshell: 0-8 yrs. happy, no reason; 9-19 happy, wrong reasons; 20-33 unhappy for all the right reasons, 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason. — Charles Yu

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space. — William Shakespeare

I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell ... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ. — W. Somerset Maugham

So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And Communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. — Colin Cotterill

In a nutshell though, it's just all about opening up to the people that really care about my career and really listening to everybody who is listening to me. It's just made me stronger, to really be able to open up that door and listen to everybody else's opinions. — Raekwon

Anything that can be put in a nutshell, should remain there. — Gregory David Roberts

My politics in a nutshell: let's stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need. — Kurt Vonnegut

This is beautiful." Eugenie ran her fingers along a massive mahogany sideboard, on the top of which rested a red velvet sash with fine embroidery on it and, on top of the sash, a silver dagger. That little vignette was Jean Lafitte in a nutshell. Refined gentleman and renegade. Velvet and violence. — Suzanne Johnson

In the course of the history of the earth innumerable events have occurred one after another, causing changes of states, all with certain lasting consequences. This is the basis of our developmental law, which, in a nutshell, claims that the diversity of phenomena is a necessary consequence of the accumulation of the results of all individual occurrences happening one after another ... The current state of the earth, thus, constitutes the as yet most diverse final result, which of course represents not a real but only a momentary end-point. — Bernhard Von Cotta

The doctrine of sola Scriptura, in a nutshell, asserts that Scripture is our sole source of normative, infallible apostolic revelation, and that "all things necessary for salvation and concerning faith and life are taught in the Bible with enough clarity that the ordinary believer can find them there and understand."6 Truths that are not found in the Bible (e.g. the date of your birth, the structure of protein molecules) are not necessary for salvation. — Keith A. Mathison

in a nutshell, the key of the authentic Kriya Yoga: "Breath control is self-control. Breath mastery is self-mastery. Breathlessness stage is deathlessness stage. — P. Hariharananda

In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable. Welcome to the cosmos, full of mass you can measure but not manhandle, driven by a force you can infer but not explain. — Tim Radford

To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell. — Michael Frayn

I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting. — Steven Spielberg

It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi ... They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).
...
"The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline
well, it can fall the most self-possessed of individuals. — Marisha Pessl

In a nutshell, we are shocked by cybercrime, but also expect to be shocked by it because we expect it to be there, but - confusingly - we appear to be shocked if we are not shocked (if we don't find it)! — David S. Wall

Sincerity is one of those rare human qualities that feels a bit like discovering a lost treasure. It is a rare commodity but once found, it absolutely priceless. That was Callum, pretty much in a nutshell. — Fisher Amelie

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. — Oliver Stone

Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn't that the American dream in a nutshell. — Josh Stallings

In a nutshell, the fountain of happiness can be found in how you behave, what you think, and what goals you set every day of your life. — Sonja Lyubomirsky

Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day - and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results. You could call these "little virtues" or "success habits." I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge. — Jeff Olson

Bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell. — Raegan Butcher

Okay. Morality in a nutshell. Don't hurt people if you can avoid it. Don't steal stuff unless you're starving or it's really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don't eat anything that talks. If it doesn't fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can. — Ursula Vernon

Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell. — Mark Leibovich

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. — Sydney J. Harris

We Chase misprinted lies, We face the Path of time
And Yet I fight, Yet I fight This Battle all alone
No One to cry to, No Place to call home

My Gift of self is Raped, My Privacy is Raked
And Yet I find, Yet I find Repeating in my head
If I cant be my own I'd feel better dead — Alice In Chains

The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page. — Daniel Hannan

In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. — Pema Chodron

[Footnote:] To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver
the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell. — Will Cuppy

I cook and I chat. That's what I do. I love to write recipes, but basically, if you had to put it in a nutshell, I cook and I chat. — Rachael Ray

I'm a girl in boy's clothing. I like to get a little rough. I prefer mud to makeup. That's me in a nutshell. — Sarah Shahi

Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food. — Mary Roach

That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway. — Zoe Whittall

Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell. — Jennifer Crusie

In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime's pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.
So why not be an owl poet? — Ian McEwan

In a nutshell-I fear authority but at the same time I resent it-the authority and my own fear. So I rebel. — Philip K. Dick

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change. — Marquis De Sade

In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back. — Philip Yancey

There are things in life you hope to do some day - like ride in a hot air balloon or go to Paris- and there are things that you know you will never do because, in a nutshell, the desire isn't there. — Alice J. Wisler

All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell. — Noam Chomsky

I think I'd like a short, direct answer to every question,' I replied, laughing. He raised an eyebrow at the foolishness of my flippant response and then shook his head slowly. 'Do you know the English philosopher Bertrand Russell? Have you read any of his books?' 'Yeah. I read some of his stuff - at university, and in prison.' 'He was a favourite of my dear Mr. Mackenzie Esquire,' Khader smiled. 'I do not often agree with Bertrand Russell's conclusions, but I do like the way he arrives at them. Anyway, he once said, Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there. And I do agree with him about that. — Gregory David Roberts

The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic was Israel Regardie's last book, the final token of his True Will. Through this book he bequeathed to us the means to carry on the Great Work of the Golden Dawn which, in a nutshell, is Initiation. — David Cherubim

To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what the Old World had achieved by the time of the Han, the Gupta, and the Hellenistic age. The fact is that the Amerindian high cultures were a human modality of their own, and those Spaniards who came among them first would have had the sensation, if they had ever heard of such literature, of treading in a world of imaginative science fiction. But it was real, and the Amerindian achievements deserve all our sympathy and praise. — Joseph Needham

What's more powerful than a priestess?" I didn't really want to know, did I?
"A bokor."
The name rang a few tiny bells inside my head, but not enough to put it together on my own. "Explain."
"In a nutshell, they're the equivalent of a sorceress, and they deal primarily with the dead. — Amanda Carlson

You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. — Robert Gottlieb

I do not seek the mantle of genius. I am an appreciator, an observer, a preposition, and content in that, and that's me in a nutshell. — Matthew Pearl

I devotedly believe that the essence of my being - my spirit - is not truly a part of the universe, it is a part of Chaos. My spirit is a fragment of the Hidden God beyond the nutshell we call the cosmos; thus being trapped in a human body is only a prison in my eyes. — Vexior 218

The secret of getting
successful work out of your trained men lies in one nutshell - in
the clearness of the instructions they receive. — Robert Baden-Powell

The critical ingredient is a maverick mind. Focus on trading vehicles, strategies and time horizons that suit your personality. In a nutshell, it all comes down to: Do your own thing (independence); and do the right thing (discipline). — Gil Blake

In a nutshell, this United Nations non-profit organization [World Food Programme] feeds millions of starving children at schools in third world countries as an incentive for them to attend school, which in turn might better their futures. They do so much more but I was so struck by this story. — Sheryl Crow

What's the problem? In a nutshell?"

"I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.] — Andrew Pyper

In a nutshell, Buddhists understand that all negative memories are associated with problems from the past, even if only a few seconds into the past, and they understand that all negative worries are associated with problems of the future, even if only a few seconds into the future. So, by taking note of what's occurring right now, in real time, people can escape from negative memories and worries. — Andrew Daley

And most likely, that was the future in a nutshell, Sumire growing ever more distant. It made me sad. I felt like I was a meaningless bug clinging for no special reason to a high stone wall on a windy night, with no plans, no beliefs. Sumire said she missed me. But she had Miu beside her. I had no one. all I had was-me. Same as always. — Haruki Murakami

Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.'
'Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'
Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

There you have it: our lives in a nutshell. Emphasis on nut.
But if the above whipped your mind into a frenzy, here's something even more interesting: Fang started a blog. Not that he's self-absorbed or trendy or anything. Nope, not him. — James Patterson

That's calculus in a nutshell. It takes a problem that can't be done with regular math because things are constantly changing - the changing quantities show up on a graph as curves - it zooms in on the curve till it becomes straight, and then it finishes off the problem with regular math. — Mark Ryan

It was once necessary to proclaim the entire doctrine of Yoga in the fewest possible words ... I did so.
"Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!"
The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage. — Aleister Crowley

Imagine being startled repeatedly during the day. This is stress in a nutshell. There is always a buildup of tension, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. We need to accept the truth that we all get stressed every day and we all need to seek balance to counteract the detrimental effects of stress. — Gudjon Bergmann

crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That's - strikes in England, - riots in the Northern US, - and the threat of slave insurrections in the South. — Anonymous

Something is indeed returning today - but the conventional wisdom that this is religion making its reappearance is insufficient to satisfy critical inquiries. Nor is it the return of a factor that had vanished, but, rather a shift of emphasis in a continuum that was never interrupted. The genuinely recurring element that would merit our full intellectual attention is more anthropological than 'religious' in its implications - it is, in a nutshell, the recognition of the immunitary constitution of human beings. — Peter Sloterdijk

Better say gays are bad, or people might think I am gay.

That's homophobia, in a nutshell. — Robert Black

I was so sure I was right, until I realized I was wrong: my life in a fucking nutshell. — S.L. Grey

Fifty years ago people believed, accurately, that they were entitled to seek the blue bird, whereas today they believe, mistakenly, that they're entitled to find it and take it home, in a complimentary cage with a month's supply of birdseed ... Those who think they've a right to catch whatever they are free to chase, are doomed to disappointment. That's our generation in a nutshell. — George Jonas

That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e. so long as it isn't democracy. — Noam Chomsky

She liked him, so she was torturing him. Her Grace in a nutshell. — Ilona Andrews

After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female. — Rebecca Solnit

An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the truck was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize. — Philip Wylie

It's the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it's fun, it's jolly; because it's a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult.
It's a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell. — Stephen Fry

Each thought was epic yet minuscule. — Aleatha Romig

Any good argument can be put into a nutshell. There — Mortimer J. Adler

To put it in a nutshell- in Africa, your utmost strength is not enough to exhaust all the possibilities of life; in Europe your strength is exhausted before it is possible to life at all. A man with sound instincts, with the capacity and the strength to get things done, will always feel drawn to go where all his powers will be called upon. — Werner Junge

I started playing around with local rock band swith the alto. And then, in a nutshell, somebody fell ill one night, the lead singer of one of the bands, and they knew I could sing, so they asked me if I would stand in. And I quite enjoyed it, actually, I must say, at 14. It was a real trip to have girls wave at you and smile and everything just because you opened your mouth and sang. — David Bowie

In a nutshell, Harry, they're two sides of the same coin. Life becomes a living hell, but the alternative is even worse. Ha — Jo Nesbo

This is why, in a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it's got a limited chance of making its way into your brain's hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially. — Michael Bungay Stanier

I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?' — Dennis Haysbert

I had everything summed up in a nutshell unfortunately I lost the nut. — Benny Bellamacina

Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war. — Steven Pinker

The Bible is man in a nutshell. Good and evil live side by side in the same book. That's why it's cherished. The good find in it encouragement, the weak solace, the evil, justification. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

The Universe in a Nutshell — Stephen Hawking

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell. — David Rakoff

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell - ' He continued, 'And count myself a king of infinite space - ' 'Were it not that I have bad dreams,' she whispered. He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall. Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality. The — Terry Pratchett

Marland sighed. Her guesses were pretty good, but that was the bulk of her career in a nutshell. — Luke Taylor

Joey broke the silence. "MS?" he asked.
"Microsoft," said Calvin. "Or multiple sclerosis. Computer programs everyone has to use, or a debilitating disease. That's life, in a nutshell. — David Pratt

Some people have heard of The Method, which originally goes back to Stanislavski ... he gave you six major pointers whereby you became that character and tried to fool your mind psychologically. That's it in a nutshell. Daniel Day Lewis is an example of somebody like that who stays in character between takes. — David Wenham

When she didn't say anything more, he frowned, thinking this was the pair of them in a nutshell: Standing three feet away from each other and being separated by miles. — J.R. Ward

A jail is just like a nutshell with a worm in it, the worm will always get out. — John Dillinger

The best indicator? People do predictable things as they age. That's it in a nutshell. So, — Harry S. Dent Jr.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. — Anders Ericsson

[I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. — Steven Pinker

In a nutshell, the idea of Juche means that the masters of the revolution and the work of construction are the masses of the people and that they are also the motive force of the revolution and the work of construction. In other words, one is responsible for one's own destiny and one has also the capacity for hewing out one's own destiny. — Kim Il-sung

I consider myself very lucky. I'm known for photographing celebrities, but, in a nutshell, my first love is photography. — Douglas Kirkland

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You're doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great. Much — Andrew Klavan

This, in a nutshell, is what "self-improvement" is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, — Mark Manson

Unfortunately too much emphasis is still placed on two things: the aesthetics of the website and how to best drive traffic to it. Very little emphasis is placed on the actual visitors to the website and how well it engages and converts them for key goals like purchase or signup - in a nutshell, how well optimized the website is. — Rich Page

Abbott says, 'Biggest ... difference ... between ... people ... is ... quality ... of ... attention.' And since a person's quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she better damn well do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you've got my philosophy of life. Abbott's too. And you don't need religion for that. — Russell Banks

In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population. The products of the opposing two vectors in natural selection are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection. — Edward O. Wilson

In a nutshell: Stress is stress - no matter whether it's from exercise or from lifestyle - and the more stress you're placing on yourself from your lifestyle, the less stress you'll be able to place on yourself from exercise. — Ben Greenfield

So in a nutshell," he says, "something snapped. That's what people say, isn't it? But to be honest, now I hear myself saying it, I don't think that's right. I wonder if something mended. Maybe something joined up. — Rachel Elliott