Trenchant Quotes & Sayings

Pete Rose is too rich a character to fit on a bronze plaque. He requires a good, trenchant, poignant (ah, Petey) book, and this is it. — Roy Blount Jr.

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant with of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'. — Richard Dawkins

Every ignoramus imagines that all that exists, exists with a view to his individual sake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him. And if something happens to him that is contrary to what he wishes, he makes the trenchant judgement that all that exists is an evil. — Maimonides

Few authors are so interesting as their work - they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books. — Alec-Tweedie

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. Heuristics — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory - childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age - are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results. — Dani Shapiro

Determine what specific goal you want to achieve. Then dedicate yourself to its attainment with unswerving singleness of purpose, the trenchant zeal of a crusader. — Paul J. Meyer

Practicing love often means feeling through fear: intentionally opening yourself when you would rather close down, giving yourself when you would rather hide. Love means recognizing yourself as the open fullness of this moment regardless of its contents
trenchant thoughts, enchanting pleasures, heavy emotions, or gnawing pains
and surrendering all hold on the familiar act you call 'me'. — David Deida

The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Men like Crawford mistrusted Keynes because his views were unconfused. Throughout his life Keynes produced unimpeachable facts and figures, clear analyses, direct solutions and trenchant practical advice all based on the nitty-gritty of his subject, which were discounted by officials, politicians and bankers who dismissed him as academic, theoretical, quixotic, impractical. To them his clarity seemed too good to be true. — Richard Davenport-Hines

When the lie and the truth are two trenchant weapons, they are at the risk of becoming downright uncertainties. — Marieta Maglas

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. — Edith Wharton

The absence of fatherhood implies the impossibility of brotherhood. It is no accident that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre, in addition to Freud, all struggled with the notion of fatherlessness. Its exalted, but unrealistic, implication is godlessness and self-deification. But its more immediate, existential implication, as we have seen, is being orphaned and abandoned. It is curious that Freud, despite his extensive knowledge of classic literature, either ignored or repressed its most trenchant moral, namely, that by equating oneself with the gods, one invokes their anger and punishment. The gods will not be mocked, and they are intolerant of hubris. — Donald DeMarco

By demanding for the worker real riches, which are not the riches of money but of leisure and
creation, he has reclaimed, despite all appearance to the contrary, the dignity of man. In doing so, and this
can be said with conviction, he never wanted the additional degradation that has been imposed on man in
his name. One of his phrases, which for once is clear and trenchant, forever withholds from his
triumphant disciples the greatness and the humanity which once were his: An end that requires unjust
means is not a just end. — Albert Camus

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance. — Ellen Glasgow

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face? — Ben Shahn

trenchant questions she'd asked. 'Pretty? — Stav Sherez

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost. — Joyce Carol Oates

Academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there's no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot - and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background. — Paul Krugman

In college I wrote trenchant, deep, profound epics. Then I grew up. — T.E. Huff

..who would win in a fight.Dumbeldore from harry potter or Magnus Bane.

"Dumbledore would totally win"said the first one."he has the badass killing curse."

The second lycanthorpe made a trenchant point."Dumbeldore isn't real"
"I don't think magnus Bane is real either. — Cassandra Clare

We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water. — Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

A pair of werewolves occupied another booth. They were eating raw shanks of lamb and arguing about who would win in a fight: Dumbledore from Harry Potter books or Magnus Bane.
"Dumbledore would totally win," said the first one. "He has the badass Killing Curse."
The second lycanthrope made a trenchant point. "But Dumbledore isn't real."
"I don't think Magnus Bane is real either," scoffed the first. "Have you ever met him?"
"This is so weird," said Clary, slinking down in her seat. "Are you listening to them?"
"No. It's rude to eavesdrop," said Jace. — Cassandra Clare

[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.
Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires. — Theophile Gautier

the most trenchant commentary was — Edmund Morris

Let not thy sword skip one:
Pity not honour'd age for his white beard;
He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron;
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself's a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps,
That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe,
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy;
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut,
And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects;
Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes;
Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes,
Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding,
Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay soldiers:
Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent,
Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone. — William Shakespeare

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become. — Don DeLillo