Scrutinizing Quotes & Sayings

Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave respect for darkness. — Victor Hugo

The all-seeing government can be very nearsighted when it comes to scrutinizing the actions of its own appendages. — Neal Shusterman

I think the media can be a very positive influence by essentially holding people to task about the importance of high quality medical care. And when the media is scrutinizing you, then I think that's a very good, positive thing for the field of medicine. — Anthony Fauci

There is no way you can share your inner self because you are an object of contempt to yourself. When you are contemptible to yourself, you are no longer in you. To feel shame is to feel exposed in a diminished way. When you're an object to yourself, you turn your eyes inward, watching and scrutinizing every minute detail of behavior. This internal critical observation is excruciating. It generates a tormenting self-consciousness that Kaufman describes as "creating a binding and paralyzing effect upon the self." This paralyzing internal monitoring causes withdrawal, passivity and inaction. The severed parts of the self are projected in relationships. — John Bradshaw

I'm . . . concerned. You appear to be upset. What's wrong?" His voice gentled and his eyes searched mine. "What's happened? And what can I do to help?"

I crossed my arms because my stupid heart was fluttering again. He caught me off guard. I was not at all prepared for Cletus Winston's concern.

"Nothing. Nothing is wrong. I just wanted to bring y'all muffins. Can't I bring y'all muffins?"

He was scrutinizing me again. "No. Something's off. Is it Jackson James? Do I need to maim him? Because I will. I could give him leprosy, you know. Armadillos are carriers."

My mouth fell open and a bubble of laughter emerged unchecked. "Cletus Winston, you will do no such thing."

"Sheriff's deputy or not. Just say the word. It might improve him, actually."

"You are terrible." I laughed, even though he was terrible, and I felt terrible laughing at such a terrible joke.

At least, I hope it's a joke — Penny Reid

Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being. — Richard Dawkins

Glennard did himself injustice. it was from the unexpected discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure. — Edith Wharton

At best, people are open to scrutinizing themselves and considering their blind spots; at worst, they become defensive and angry. — Sheryl Sandberg

Roza ... "
The voice caressed my skin, cold and deadly. Still scrutinizing his surroundings, Dimitri took one step forward. Then another. And then another.
I think it occurred to him to look up the instant I jumped. My body slammed into his, knocking him to the ground back first. He immediately tried to throw me off, just as I tried to drive the stake through his heart. Signs of fatigue and fighting were all over him. Defeating the other Strigoi had taken its toll, though I doubted I was in much better shape. We grappled, and once, I managed to rake the stake over his cheek. He snarled in pain but kept his chest well protected. Over it, I could see where I'd ripped his shirt the first time I'd staked him. The wound had already healed. "You. Are. Amazing," he said, his words full of both pride and battle fury. — Richelle Mead

Just look, Letty." Miss Blacklock looked. Her eyebrows went up. She threw a quick scrutinizing glance round the table. Then she read the advertisement out loud. "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation. — Agatha Christie

I knew I was going to be a cellular biologist whose research would focus on scrutinizing every nuance of the cell's ultrastructure to gain insights into the secrets of cellular life. — Bruce H. Lipton

You have more independent eyes scrutinizing the decision-making and financial statements of companies. — Steve Odland

Even if we're not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don't think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable. — Glenn Greenwald

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It's not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination. — Scott Lynch

There is nothing better than picking up sun-warmed tomatoes and smelling them, feeling them and scrutinizing their shiny skins for imperfections, dreaming of ways to serve them. — Jose Andres

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone. — Colm Toibin

Look at your daughter,' she whispered. 'As brave as ... as.. She wanted to compare Meggie to a hero in some story but all the heroes she could think of were men, and anyway none of them seemed to her brave enough for comparison to the girl standing there, perfectly straight, scrutinizing Capricorn's Black Jackets, with her chin jutting out defiantly. — Cornelia Funke

Your patterns of thought, existing bodies of knowledge, beliefs, predispositions, etc. are the 'stuff of your mental universe'. We are always subject to the power of our mental inertia. The waves in our mental oceans can never be magically stilled, and are therefore always impacting our new beliefs, even when we become scrutinizing adults. It is simply impossible to 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. These effects remain with us throughout our entire lives. Even the beliefs that we later discard are difficult to completely negate, and leave their own residual effects. — Daniel Ionson

I remember scrutinizing his face. I remember drinking his face down to the last drop, trying to elucidate the character, the psychology of such an individual. And yet the only thing about him that has remained is my memory of his ugliness. — Roberto Bolano

Become a very cautious consumer scrutinizing everything that you allow into your mind and body. — Bryant McGill

They will, on the one hand, have sex with just about anything that moves, given an easy chance, like males in a low-MPI species. On the other hand, when it comes to finding a female for a long-term joint venture, discretion makes sense; males can undertake only so many ventures over a lifetime, so the genes that the partner brings to the project - genes for robustness, brains, whatever - are worth scrutinizing. The — Robert Wright

I think I read in at least two ways. First, by following, breathlessly, the events and the characters without stopping to notice the details, the quickening pace of reading sometimes hurtling the story beyond the last page < ... >. Secondly, by careful exploration, scrutinizing the text to understand its ravelled meaning, finding plesasure merely in the sound of the words or in the clues which the words did not wish to reveal, or in what I suspected was hidden deep in the story itself, something too terrible or too marvellous to be looked at. — Alberto Manguel

I smile back at her. "I must be stronger than I look." "All women are," my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges. Clint — Hope Jahren

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them. — Carl Jung

That night the housekeeper burned all the books there were in the stable yard and in all the house; and there must have been some that went up in smoke which should have been preserved in everlasting archives, if the one who did the scrutinizing had not been so indolent. Thus we see the truth of the old saying, to the effect that the innocent must sometimes pay for the sins of the guilty. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Because I want to have sex with him
and because that's sinful
I'm blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny. — Jess C. Scott

And yet Xiao Li always spoke of her mother as if her image were mounted in a red-and-gold picture frame resting on a shrine in the corner of a tidy house, to be venerated and pleased at all times, like a deceased ancestor ever-present and scrutinizing her progeny. — Victor Robert Lee

Sin scorches us most after it comes under the scrutinizing light of God's forgiveness and not before — Karl Barth

Adherents of homeopathy claim that the greater the dilution, the more effective the drug, particle physics say the rarer the event, the more important it is. It is an ideology, nothing else than a steady transition to nontestability: while scrutinizing this almost-nothing they head for knowing everything on nothing. — Alexander Unzicker

Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again
not half, by a long way. — Joseph Conrad

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them. — Doris Lessing

He appreciated all beautiful things. As she stood before him poised, scrutinizing every inch of his face, liable to strike him, he thought she was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life. She didn't step away from fear, she walked up to it. — Nicki Salcedo

Derek Bok's most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges, is worth scrutinizing ... Bok is ... on solid ground in pointing out that our colleges underachieve in preparing students for citizenship. — George Leef

Her head practically swiveled, and her laser-beam stare honed in on Ryan, thoroughly scrutinizing him. He'd felt less violated after a TSA strip search. — Tracy Brogan

Dreaming is a form of action. Idleness is a form of action. The idle man stares at the sky and sees what constitutes our eternal ceiling. The sky is one of the things that constructs us, one of our constants. But it is not what people believe. I should like to close this circle by turning over in my bed and scrutinizing the stars. — Philippe Starck

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. — Carl Sagan

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. — Charles Darwin

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing. — John Berger

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly. — Robert Crumb

Because all men are but reflections of their upbringing, education, and experiences, we also expend considerable effort scrutinizing both the man and the general who led the Army of Northern Virginia north that summer. Robert E. Lee was trained as an engineer at West Point, studied extensively the campaigns of the Great Captains of military history, and learned the art of command and maneuver at the elbow of General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. The aggregate of these experiences had a profound and demonstrable influence on his generalship. It is against this backdrop of education and experience that Lee's decisions during the Gettysburg Campaign must be examined, understood, and judged. — Scott Bowden

You cannot get all your desires assuming the hidden secret standing somewhere scrutinizing your soul. — Denmwen

If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful - and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding - than any creation or "end of days" story. If you read Hawking on the "event horizon," that theoretical lip of the "black hole" over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough "time"), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive "burning bush. — Christopher Hitchens

It was her, Marie Antoinette, scrutinizing me, satanically silent. Some would say that Marie Antoinette could only express her hate in silence because she was a turtle. To these naive souls I would reply that hate, like laughter, makes less noise the deeper it is.
-pg 100 — Albert Sanchez Pinol

Every man in the western suburbs who resembled the phantom picture was subjected to long, scrutinizing looks. These men went home and looked at themselves in the mirror, saw no resemblance whatsoever. In the evening, in bed, they wondered if they should change something about their appearance in the morning or would that seem suspicious? It would turn out they didn't need to bother. People would soon have something else to think about. Sweden would become a changed nation. A violated nation. That was the word that was continually used: violated. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

Everything was for show. He'd always need a group around him, and act out a role, usually one that made him look great to people who didn't do any serious scrutinizing. — Maura Curley

Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope - and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing - that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that ... ' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.
It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so. — Christopher Hitchens

I mean, I don't like sitting at a table with seven or eight people asking me questions and kind of listening to what I'm doing - scrutinizing my thoughts and things like that. I just don't like it. I can't understand how anyone would. — Joaquin Phoenix

To use words and phrases in an easygoing manner without scrutinizing them too curiously is not in general a mark of ill-breeding. On the contrary, there is something low-bred in being too precise. But sometimes there is no help for it — Socrates

Easing back in her seat, Grace watched the children in the playground opposite, coats off, faces flushed, laughing hysterically with pleasure. They were so vividly alive, completely immersed in the game. She tried to recall a time when she'd been that way and realized she couldn't remember when that had been. She'd lost the knack of forgetting herself. Instead she seemed to look down on herself throughout the day, scrutinizing, judging; finding herself wanting more. — Kathleen Tessaro

Jared felt vaguely unsettled that she'd noticed. He wasn't used to adults scrutinizing his behavior. He hadn't meant to take take so many booksbut they were the kind he liked, about made-up olden days when the world made sense, about death and love and honor. — Sarah Rees Brennan

She who has intentionally destroyed [the fetus] is subject to the penalty corresponding to a homicide. For us, there is no scrutinizing between the formed and unformed [fetus]; here truly justice is made not only for the unborn but also with reference to the person who is attentive only to himself/herself since so many women generally die for this very reason.. — Saint Basil