Simple Sentence Quotes & Sayings

Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met ... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone. — Eric Weiner

During these past years, not being able to speak with you, I dedicated myself to reviewing, within myself, the sacred books I know by heart. I had the idea I should summarize them in a single volume. Then, in a single chapter, then in a single page, and finally in a single sentence. This sentence is the greatest thing I can teach you. It seems simple, but if you understand it, you will never have to study again." The Rabbi recited it. And life, from that moment on, changed for Alejandro. "If God is not here, He is nowhere; this instant itself is perfection. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead. — E. E. Cummings

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. — Larry McMurtry

To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a few moments inside. I'll glance at the first couple pages, then flip around to somewhere in the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It's like dating, only with sentences ... It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word (tangerine). We're meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know. — Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. — Ernest Hemingway,

Though I have seldom done anything to my own satisfaction, I am better satisfied with the translation of the New Testament than I ever expected to be. The language is, I believe, simple, plain, intelligible; and I have endeavored, I hope successfully, to make every sentence a faithful representation of the original. — Adoniram Judson

And thus unknowingly, Dor began to serve his sentence
to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions. Time. — Mitch Albom

If the Baron meets with a parcel of negro ships carrying whites into slavery to work upon their plantations in a cold climate, should we therefore imagine that he intends a reflection on the present traffic in human flesh? And that, if the negroes should do so, it would be simple justice, as retaliation is the law of God! If we were to think this a reflection on any present commercial or political matter, we should be tempted to imagine, perhaps, some political ideas conveyed in every page, in every sentence of the whole. Whether such things are or are not the intentions of the Baron the reader must judge. — Rudolf Erich Raspe

Prof. Emi Ito said "Lailah, if you can't explain the scientific observations in a simple sentence, it means you do not know enough. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In what, then, can those engaged in this kind of warfare place their hope? The Nakano Military School answered this question with a simple sentence: "In secret warfare, there is integrity." And this is right, for integrity is the greatest necessity when a man must deceive not only his enemies but his friends. With integrity - and I include in this sincerity, loyalty, devotion to duty and a sense of morality - one can withstand all hardships and ultimately turn hardship itself into victory. This was the lesson that the instructors at Futamata were constantly trying to instill in us. One of them put it this way: "If you are genuinely pure in spirit, people will respond to you and cooperate with you." This meant to me that so long as I remained pure inside, whatever measures I saw fit to take would eventually redound to the good of my country and my countrymen. — Hiroo Onoda

As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave ... an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth. — David Brin

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book. — Terry Brooks

Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: "And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don't forget to love yourself." The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The ide
a of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with
Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message whenyou were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank. — Fynn

Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says. — Sheldon Richman

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It's simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understand that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you're doing, where you're going? Yes. It's impossible. Who can do it? The writer. — Ron Carlson

That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction. — Ayn Rand

his consort didn't recognize the fear that drove her to ask such questions, a fear that could be encapsulated in seven simple words that formed a vicious sentence:
Will this flaw make you reject me?
...
She knew she held Raphael's heart, she
knew, and yet a wary, wounded part of her worried he'd change his mind one day, find her no longer worthy of loving. — Nalini Singh

In one simple sentence: what Christians want for the nation should first be a witnessed reality in their local church. — Scot McKnight

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue. — Adrienne Rich

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time. — Ernest Hemingway,

I think I am really easygoing. Well ... as I was about halfway through that sentence, I thought, 'No, actually you're really picky.' But the things I ask for are really simple to do. — Amanda Harlech

When you say: The simple truth is this, and then you pause, and then you finish the sentence, people stop, and they think specifically about what you're saying. And it's, in essence, trying to boil it down to something that's very understandable and meaningful. — Frank Luntz

The secret of success lies in this simple sentence: Why not? — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice. — Barbara Tuchman

All energy contains consciousness. That one sentence is basically scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world. — Seth

Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review, it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism, does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing. — Jean Kerr

It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal. — Bob Colacello

Use 'breath prayers' throughout the day, as many Christians have done for centuries. You choose a brief sentence or a simple phrase that can be repeated to Jesus in one breath. — Rick Warren

Most things that are true are simple. To lose weight, eat less than you burn. To reduce stress, find a job you love. To resolve conflict, be patient and peaceful. These are very, very simple in that they are complete concepts that take no more than a sentence to say. They are not, however, easy, because they must be applied consistently. — Vironika Tugaleva

NO" is a complete sentence. It does not require an explanation to follow. You can truly answer someone's request with a simple No. — Sharon E. Rainey

Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don't know how - if you don't see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas - it will show. — June Casagrande

The most magical key for success is this simple sentence: I can do it! Repeat this in your mind! I can do it! I can do it! I can do it! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Two women chasing him, ready and waiting for his call and the one that had buts at the end of every sentence was the one who turned him inside him out with a simple kiss. — Carolyn Brown

How can you trust someone who doesn't bother to spell correctly or can't manage to lay out a simple declarative sentence? — Sue Grafton

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity that
constantly threatens to overload short-term memory. — Linda Flower

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile - not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it. — Paulo Freire

Writing is better if it's kept simple. Every sentence doesn't need to have perfect noun/verb agreement. I've said 'ain't' on the air. Because I sometimes use 'ain't' when I'm talking. — Stuart Scott

And thus, unknowingly, did Dor begin to serve his sentence - to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions. Time. It seemed to be running too fast for everyone but him. — Mitch Albom

I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerman went around for days repeating the simple interrogative sentence to himself; like Of Times and the River, it verified something he had known in his bones all along, but in which he could not placed his faith until it had been articulated by someone of indisputable moral prestige and purity : "Why," Caroline Benson asked the seventeen-year-old boy, "should you want to learn a thing like that? — Philip Roth

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied. — Paula McLain

I would have thought even you could understand such a simple sentence, Father. Shall I repeat it in Latin for you? — L.J.Smith

Thus once more I found confirmed on all sides the simple, clear, important, and practical meaning of the words of Jesus. Once more, in place of an obscure sentence, I had found a clear, precise, important, and practical rule: To make no distinction between compatriots and foreigners, and to abstain from all the results of such distinction, - from hostility towards foreigners, from wars, from all participation in war, from all preparations for war; to establish with all men, of whatever nationality, the same relations granted to compatriots. All this was so simple and so clear, that I — Leo Tolstoy

Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Would a just God sentence a morally good individual to hell for never having heard of him? And for that matter, would a just God expel a morally good individual to hell who has heard of Jesus, but simply finds no evidentiary reason to believe? According to any reasonable interpretation of Christianity's key doctrines, the answer is a simple and firm 'Yes.' This is because, according to Christian dogma, it is impossible to be 'moral' without Jesus Christ; I disagree with this on a fundamental level. — David G. McAfee

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living. — Jack White

It can be a simple sentence that makes one single point and you build for that. You zero in on one moment that gets that character, you go for it, that's it, man, and if you fail the whole thing is down the drain, but if you make it you hit the moon. — Jack Lemmon

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration) — John Steinbeck

Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not being able to record it properly. — Don DeLillo

...if you want to know what my ultimate goal is in all this, I can tell you in one simple sentence. I want to take the stick out of opera's ass. — Cindy Irish

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.") — Michio Kaku

It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction. — Sherwood Anderson

By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his depth, and his unfamiliarity with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage. — Charles P. Pierce

Writer's Rhyme

Word by word
line by line,
I'm gonna make
this writing fine.

I'll reread
'til I know
that each sentence
says it so.

Check the grammar
and the meaning;
be the critic;
do the screening.

Dictionary's
not for show;
Helps me get
those words to flow.

Watch the diet;
hem it in.
Do not fear
to make it thin.

Simple is
a goal to praise;
Let's untie
that wordy phrase.

Every word
let's be sure
follows the last
with meaning pure.

"Won't be easy,"
so 'tis said,
but effort will
put me ahead.

Word by word
line by line,
I'm gonnna make
this writing fine,

even though
it takes some time,
I'm gonna make this writing fine;

I'm gonna make
this writing fine. — Peter Siviglia

I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives. — Teju Cole

And if you need to read that sentence again, no shame. It's complicated - as complicated as the sovereignty of God. Yet as simple as if. Gustave Eiffel did not build his tower so Lora and I could kiss on top of it. Nevertheless, his if made it possible. And it's your ifs that open doors of opportunity for others, most of whom you won't meet on this side of eternity. But make no mistake about it, every little if makes an exponential difference across time and eternity. History — Mark Batterson

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence. — Isadora Duncan

No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected- which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal to risk. — Paulo Freire

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis. — Tyler Cowen