Phrases That Set Up Quotes & Sayings

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier ... In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Here's a practice idea for right now. Choose one of those sets of phrases. ... Plan on taking some time to say those words over and over, as you would an ardent prayer. Set some time aside for this. (Fifteen minutes would be a good start.) Then sit comfortably. Later on, you can say these phrases walking about or doing chores or even riding your bike--but for now, just sit. That way you can look at the words.
"Say each phrase as if you expect it will feel different in your mind--they are slightly different wishes--and feel how each of them echoes in your mind and body. [pp. 72-73] — Sylvia Boorstein

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases ... but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book. — Robert Frost

One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own. — John O'Donohue

Can we really put Ben (hereby representing all men) on such a pedestal? Having tamed those beasts set aside for him, is it not like Ben to seek out that which has historically (regardless of how brief a history) been set aside for women? Woolf criticizes the masculine in her work with the repetition of the phrases uttered by that inconsiderate individual who makes the claim that women cannot paint or write. Is Ben not committing the same crime as that unfortunate character?
In stating "[b]etter like this, bitch," Ben employs a word that I would consider to be demasculinizing, rather than feminine. In using the word bitch, he seizes this scholarly investigation and, if you will, pisses on it, claiming it as his own. His statement is an outright challenge. This is a book I stole from women, and I urinated on it. You'd better appreciate my conquest or I will also urinate on you. — Caris O'Malley

When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another. — Samuel Johnson

I pondered on this desert hospitality and, compared it with our own. I remembered other encampments where I had slept, small tents on which I had happened in the Syrian desert and where I had spent the night. Gaunt men in rags and hungry-looking children had greeted me, and bade me welcome with the sonorous phrases of the desert. Later they had set a great dish before me, rice heaped round a sheep which they had slaughtered, over which my host poured liquid golden butter until it flowed down on to the sand; and when I protested, saying 'Enough! Enough!', had answered that I was a hundred times welcome. Their lavish hospitality had always made me uncomfortable, for I had known that as a result of it they would go hungry for days. Yet when I left them they had almost convinced me that I had done them a kindness by staying with them — Wilfred Thesiger

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame. — George Eliot

Breathe slumbrous music round me, sweet and slow,To honied phrases set!Into the land of dreams I long to go.Bid me forget! — Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

I ran because I became convinced after King was shot and killed, and Martin Luther King was one of the great heroes of my life, that politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live. If we don't like how we live, we can participate in the perfect most revolutionary act in a democracy, it's called voting. — Maynard Jackson

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. — Robert Jordan

George Orwell, on how to avoid thinking when you speak:
You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. they will construct your sentences for you
even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent
and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear ...
It does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this, is that it is easy. — George Orwell

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. — John Dos Passos

Coffee or I'll cut you! — Alanea Alder

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. — George Orwell

As a host, Lincoln was "never at a loss as to the subjects that please the different classes of visitors and there is a certain quaintness and originality about all he has to say, so that one cannot help feeling interested. His 'talk' is not brilliant," Villard observed. "His phrases are not ceremoniously set, but pervaded with a humorousness and, at times, with a grotesque joviality, that will always please. I think it would be hard to find one who tells better jokes, enjoys them better and laughs oftener than Abraham Lincoln. — Harold Holzer

Mapping out your own future in the form of images, phrases, and inspirational words that you are able to see every day will help reinforce your desires to attain what you set out to achieve. — Robert Cheeke

MANTRAS: These are often referred to as sacred sounds because they are part of the practice of different religious traditions. Mantra is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is "that which protects and purifies the mind." Here mind represents not only thought but also feelings. These sounds, each of which is a kind of germinating seed (in Sanskrit bija) that is implanted in the mind, are catalysts for ridding ourselves of traits that impede our spiritual unfoldment. Like toning and chanting they are sounded repetitively in a steady rhythm. They can be sounded either inwardly or aloud. Done inwardly within the mind, no tone is needed. Only the rhythm is necessary. This inner repetition is useful because it can be set in motion at any time and in any situation. CHANTING: This is actually a form of singing characterized by the repetition of short phrases of tones, fairly narrow in range, often wedded to some kind of sacred text and done as part of a — James D'Angelo

After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession ... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love. — John Gresham Machen

I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11) and many have written books, can good come out of ignoring them, let along parading that ignorance as glorifying God? God's work is never a one-man show. The one who represents the visible part of the iceberg must ever ackowledge his or her debt to others. I like to remember that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was from Paul and Sosthenes (1 Cor. 1:1) and that the Epistle to the Colossians was from Paul and Timothy. — Leslie Allen

Of course there are teachers who can teach a subject, in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren't many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all. — Haruki Murakami

the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters. — Francis Wheen

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air. — Sylvia Plath

Clutching my cure
I tightly lock the door
I try to catch my breath again
I hurt much more
Than anytime before
I had no options left again — Linkin Park

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history. — John Dos Passos