Sharpest Quotes & Sayings

I'll say that for all the good things, all the great things, the super wow things it can do, the heart is kind of an asshole. The strongest feelings we have are never when things are stable, never when things are solid, never when we can handle things. The sharpest feelings are when things are either super good or super bad, as if the heart only ever wants to add gasoline to a fire. And the heart has all the subtlety of a freight train. It's going to hit you, and it's going to hit you hard. — Dennis Liggio

My agent is the quickest, sharpest man on earth. — Christoph Waltz

I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I'm pretty! — Kristen Taekman

Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors. — John Dryden

There is not unmitigated ill in the sharpest of this world's sorrows; I touch not the sore of thy guilt; but of human griefs I counsel thee, Cast off the weakness of regret, and gird thee to redeem thy loss: Thou has gained, in the furnace of affliction, self-knowledge, patience and humility, And these be as precious ore, that waiteth the skill of the coiner: Despise not the blessings of adversity, nor the gain thou hast earned so hardly, And now thou hast drained the bitter, take heed that thou lose not the sweet. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

The Visalus Founders are the finest and sharpest young leaders that I have ever met. — John C. Maxwell

Knowledge is the sharpest of weapons. — Heather Lyons

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow. — George Eliot

Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. — Ambrose Bierce

The butchering may continue as it will, it shall remain the historical guilt of the Western powers that they did not promptly provide the sharpest preventative measures against the continued attack-politics Germany undertook. Possibilities existed for this, but no measures were seized upon. — Friedrich Kellner

I've never, ever in my life touched a photographer. Some of the cruellest things I've ever said have been to photographers who are chasing me down the street, some of the sharpest, most efficient emotional barbs. And they know that in that moment, in that one-to-one wit competition, they just got smashed. — Russell Crowe

Love cuts deeper than the sharpest blade, cripples more than shattered bones, and leaves scars that can never fade. — Jeaniene Frost

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you're a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn't belong here. So I'm going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay. — Andrew Solomon

It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly. — Olive Schreiner

As morning approaches, body temperature rises, then peaks during the day, dips for a time in early afternoon (when many people take siestas), and begins to drop again in the evening. Thinking is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian arousal. Try pulling an all - nighter or working an occasional night shift. You'll feel groggiest in the middle of the night but may gain new energy when your normal wake - up time arrives. — David G. Myers

It only went to show what he already knew, which was that there were more dangers in life than even the sharpest training could anticipate. — Larry McMurtry

They "cruise" or hold themselves up with furniture in search of the hardest and sharpest surface to bang their head on. — Jim Gaffigan

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed. — Paul Engle

The most beautiful roses sometimes have the sharpest thorns. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain. — Emma Lazarus

Exactly. You might not be the sharpest apple in the barrel, but you do have your wicks lit when it matters. — Katie MacAlister

i aint the sharpest knife in the drawer , but i know enough to know that if your gonna be dumb you have to be tuff... i — Jose Torres

Venus of Eryx, from her mountain throne,
Saw Hades and clasped her swift-winged son, and said:
'Cupid, my child, my warrior, my power,
Take those sure shafts with which you conquer all,
And shoot your speedy arrows to the heart
Of the great god to whom the last lot fell
When the three realms were drawn. Your mastery
Subdues the gods of heaven and even Jove,
Subdues the ocean's deities and him,
Even him, who rules the ocean's deities.
Why should Hell lag behind? Why not there too
Extend your mother's empire and your own ... ?
Then Cupid, guided by his mother, opened
His quiver of all his thousand arrows
Selected one, the sharpest and the surest,
The arrow most obedient to the bow,
And bent the pliant horn against his knee
And shot the barbed shaft deep in Pluto's heart. — Ovid

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens. — Franz Kafka

How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like? — Steven Weinberg

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting. — Anna Brownell Jameson

The problem with thick skin is that it leaves you impervious to the sharpest of pins. Everything becomes dull. But without that sense of pain, there cannot be that sense of relief. Ultimately, the thickened skin leaves you numb, incapable of feeling the highs and lows of life. It leaves you rough like a rock and just as inanimate. — Michael Soll

Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker. — Clive Barker

Your gift is not a burden," she whispered. "But you must be brave, because it has more power than the sharpest claw ... — Erin Hunter

Many of my sharpest critics have decided to take a position of ignoring me - because they feel that by attacking me, they would draw attention to my book and give me more publicity and help me sell more books. So I think that they decided that the best thing for them to do is to say nothing. Also, I think that some of my critics simply can't refute my argument - and so it's easier for them to ignore it as well, so that they're not forced to confront the logical contradiction in their own position. — Bruce Bartlett

This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? ... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past. — C.P. Snow

That even in its sharpest pangs of pain a dog can still caress its master we have learnt from the studies of vivisectors. — Richard Wagner

I am the sharpest pencil because I live outside the box. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

It pained her that a few hundred words in an also-ran newspaper could get her kicked out. That damned article.
And Rook.
Her sharpest agony. She had invested in this guy. Waited for this guy. Felt something for this guy that went beyond the bedroom ... or wherever else they took each other. Nikki did not give herself easily to a man, and this betrayal by Rook was why. Heat reflected on her answer at the oral boards about her greatest flaw and admitted her reply was a mask. Yes, her identification with her job was total. But her greatest flaw wasn't overinvestment in her career. It was her reticence to be vulnerable. Unarmed as she was-literally-she had been emotionally so with Rook.
That was the gut shot that had blown clean through her soul. — Richard Castle

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I do know how to count. — Mickey Gilley

It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the waterhole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, 'Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I'll look after your balls for you. — Neil Gaiman

Craft the finest arrow
Forage jungles for straightest shaft
Forge sharpest head of glass
Pluck feathers of the wisest crow
Without the simplest archer and bow
Without a mark that's true
Useless
Craft the finest vessel
Fell the jungle's strongest mast
Build the world's mightiest hull
A flag the crown of all seas you can sew
Without the simplest oarsmen to row
Without a port that's true
Useless — Dylan Thomas McCall

The sharpest tools in the box are not always the best tools for the job. — Craig Stone

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute. — Mark Twain

For to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy. — Salman Rushdie

But in those whom no necessity forces to turn Author, who merely write for fame, and have full leisure to polish their compositions, faults are impardonable, and merit the sharpest arrows of criticism. — Matthew Gregory Lewis

Laughter dulls the sharpest pain and flattens out the greatest stress. To share it is to give a gift of health. — Barbara Johnson

There's a story ... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree ... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings ... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. — Colleen McCullough

That That a man is beloved of God, should melt him all into esteem and holy veneration. It should make him so courageous as an angel of God. It should make him delight in calamities and distresses for God's sake. By giving me all things else, He hath made even afflictions themselves my treasures. The sharpest trials, are the finest furbishing. the most tempestuous weather is the best seed-time. A Christian is an oak flourishing in winter. God hath so magnified and glorified His servant, and exalted him so highly in His eternal bosom, that no other joy should be able to move us but that alone. — Thomas Traherne

that'd be High." I stared up at my husband, the sharpest man I knew, wondering how, at least with one thing, he could be so dumb. "Uh, I don't think so." His gaze cut back to me. "Come again?" "The woman we just saw was the female adult equivalent of a six-year-old who just learned there's no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and she was adopted." He looked to the heavens and muttered, "Fuck." "Seriously," I snapped. — Kristen Ashley

The soul has eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight and most sensitive hearing. — A.W. Tozer

Homo sapiens didn't become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor - though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself. — Edward McKendree Bounds

Sometimes I feel bad for the girls because they aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. In fact, they're more like a couple of dull butter knives that were left in the grass outside of the shed. — Charlie McDowell

Alas for those girls who've refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth. — Jack D. Zipes

The fascination that lives on the keenest edge, and sparkles on the sharpest point, also gathers in depths of a fall. — Mark Lawrence

We both know how to hide our sharpest parts, I just don't always recognize my own weaponry. — Sarah Kay

Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of
HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though. — Fareed Zakaria

Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost. — Willard Van Orman Quine

His closed-eye appearances had deceived many visitors, I was told, but they might then find, to their cost, that these closed eyes veiled the sharpest attention, the clearest and deepest mind, they were ever likely to encounter. On — Oliver Sacks

It's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that will ever change. — Anne Tyler

My mother and my father both, you know, the term would be, 'suck it up and just get on with it'; 'don't let bad things that happen to you stop you'; 'you're in control of your life,'" recalls Bloomberg. That advice is one of his sharpest childhood memories. — Joyce Purnick

He who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometime during my study of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, I uncovered an odd paradox that exists in our minds about time gone by. It is a difference most people don't discern between history and the past. Simply stated, the past is what is real and true, while history is merely what someone recorded. If you don't think there is a difference, experience an event in person and then read about it in the newspaper the next day, after witnesses have been interviewed. It might be shocking for many of us to realize that what we know as "history" can actually be a total fabrication, created from the imagination of someone with an ax to grind. Or perhaps, and it certainly happened in the Middle Ages, history was simply recorded by the man with the sharpest ax. — Andy Andrews

The grace of God is abundant. It is for all lands, for all ages, for all conditions. It seems to undergird everything. Pardon for the worst sin, comfort for the sharpest suffering, brightest light for the thickest darkness. — Thomas De Witt Talmage

Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove. — Dean Inge

Are you ready ?" she asked, spinning the chamber.
Kell gazed through the gate at the waiting castle. "No."
At that, she offered him the sharpest edge of a grin.
"Good," she said. "The ones who think they're ready always end up dead. — V.E Schwab

Because fate would not slight me so unspeakably. I'd seek a noon-day sun if I were paired with one such as you."
"Such as me," she repeated blandly. She'd been mocked too often over her lifetime to take offense. Her skin was as thick as armor.
"Yes, you. An ignorant, mortal Kmart checkout girl." He took the sharpest knife from his place setting, absently turning it between his left thumb and forefinger.
"Kmart? I should have been so lucky. Those jobs were hard to come by. I worked at my uncle's outfitter shop."
"Then you're even worse. You're an outfitter checkout girl with aspirations for Kmart."
"Still better than a demon. — Kresley Cole

As if you have discovered a beach you have been visiting all your life is made not of sand but of diamonds, and they blind you with their beauty."
Diamonds might be blinding in their beauty, but they were also the hardest and sharpest gems in the world. They could cut you or grind you down, smash and slice you apart. Malcolm, deranged with love, had not thought of that. But Julian could think of nothing else. — Cassandra Clare

Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed. — Lisa Unger

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking. — Bernard Crick

The sharpest minds often ruin their lives by overthinking the next step, while the dull win the race with eyes closed. — Bethany Brookbank

Creativity is a massive and the sharpest voice that reaches every corner of the globe. — Euginia Herlihy

Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing my life had ever known. — Patrick Rothfuss

The Word of God seems to be the only offensive weapon which you have in your spiritual armory. It is quite powerful, and in the words of Hebrews 4:12, "It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword" (NLT). You make use of this weapon when you speak God's Word to the Enemy concerning the situation you face. — Pedro Okoro

Sometimes people walk out of your life never to return, and all you have left are bitter memories and what ifs. And though you try to move on and forget them, they become regrets that cut deeper than the sharpest knife, slashing you over and over again. — Mia Asher

The American Civil War lays out the stark contrast: the greatest generals in war are often abundant failures during peacetime, and vice versa. McClellan and Sherman are the sharpest contrasts; but there is also Grant the peacetime drunkard, and Stonewall Jackson the barely tolerable military professor. Only Lee stands out as effective in both peace and war (and even he had a mentally unstable father, and himself may have been dysthymic in his general personality). This conflict reflects, I think, the different psychological qualities of leadership needed in different phases of human activity, peace and war being the two extremes. — S. Nassir Ghaemi

Prince Bolkonsky was of medium height, a rather handsome young man with well-defined and dry features. Everything in his figure, from his weary, bored gaze to his quiet, measured gait, presented the sharpest contrast with his small, lively wife. Obviously, he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but was also so sick of them that it was very boring for him to look at them and listen to them. Of all the faces he found so boring, the face of his pretty wife seemed to be the one he was most sick of. With a grimace that spoiled his handsome face, he turned away from her. He kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand and, narrowing his eyes, looked around at the whole company. — Leo Tolstoy

The patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. — Louisa May Alcott

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself
the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The moment you try so hard to forget becomes your sharpest memory.

-Tara — Amita Trasi

One of the adversary's sharpest tools is to convince us that we are no longer worthy to pray. No matter who you are or what you may have done, you can always pray. — Boyd K. Packer

Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons. — Criss Jami

The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country. — Robert F. Kennedy

It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We have already examined one of the objections that have been brought against the Quantity Theory; the objection that it only holds good ceteris paribus. No more tenable as an objection against the determinateness of our conclusions is reference to the possibility that an additional quantity of money may be hoarded. This argument has played a prominent role in the history of monetary theory; it was one of the sharpest weapons in the armoury of the opponents of the Quantity Theory. Among the arguments of the opponents of the Currency Theory it immediately follows the proposition relating to the elasticity of cash-economizing methods of payment, to which it also bears a close relation as far as its content is concerned. — Ludwig Von Mises

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country") — Charles Beaumont

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament. — Frances Mayes

Goldie [Hawn] is one of the sharpest ladies I've ever worked with. She doesn't miss a thing. She's my greatest audience. She laughs at all my stories and in the right places, too. — Burt Reynolds

The press must grow day in and day out - it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon. — Joseph Stalin

Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts - as was the case among the Indians and appears to be the case amongst us 'modern men' and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Is there perhaps such a thing as suffering from superabundance itself? Is there a tempting bravery in the sharpest eye which demands the terrifying as its foe, as a worthy foe against which it can test its strength and from which it intends to learn the meaning of fear? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Some of your hurts you have cured, and the sharpest you've even survived. But what torments of grief you've endured from evils which never arrived - Ralph Waldo Emerson — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love sees sharply, hatred sees even more sharp, but Jealousy sees the sharpest for it is love and hate at the same time. — Sarah Brightman

As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinegar, so the deepest love turneth to the deadliest hate. — John Lyly

Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real. — Susan Meissner

He can't hear you." Alex sighs. "You aren't the sharpest sheep in the barn, are you?"
"That's not even the right metaphor," I snap, my attention still focused on Richie. "It's the sharpest pencil in the box."
"Right." Alex nods. "Except you are a sheep. I'm not stupid, I just adjusted the metaphor to fit your persona-"
"Oh, shut up. Richie!" I scream again. Alex shakes his head. — Jessica Warman

I verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly - and that is the sharpest crying of all. — Charles Dickens

Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you've endured
From evils that never arrived. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me a shot to remember
And you can take all the pain away from me
A kiss and I will surrender
The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead
A light to burn all the empires
So bright the sun is ashamed to rise and be
And I'm in love with all of those vampires
So you can leave like the sane abandoned me — Gerard Way

For its health, cricket needs to look outward to the sharpest minds, to people who sustain and nurture brands and often take hard but necessary decisions. Cricket cannot be bound by cricketing minds alone. — Harsha Bhogle

CAIR is still trying to promote its strange claim that criticism of its ideology is racist....The ridiculous claims that criticism of Islam is an act of bigotry fail to take into account the fact that former Muslims like Bosch, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Firoozeh Bazrafkan have been some of the sharpest critics of the ideology. Did they also change races? — Daniel Greenfield