Whittled Quotes & Sayings

It is time to remind ourselves that today's thoughts and actions become our legacy. When we forget this or lie to ourselves thinking our actions do not matter, we have permission to act as momentary buffoons. We let ourselves break, just this once, from our values. We cheat, just this once. We lie, just this once. We put off the hard task, just this once. We skip the workout, just this week. We take the drink, just one more. And soon we find that each of these little breaks in our will leads to another, and then to a lifetime of compromise and regret. Without vigilance, what is right and strong about the human spirit can be whittled away and broken forever. — Brendon Burchard

Sometimes she felt as though she was disappearing, that she was being whittled down to just this terrible feeling, like a sudden aching that appeared all over, not in her body but in her soul. — Anna Quindlen

But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost. — James Frey

Since the writing of our Constitution, our religious liberties have been systematically threatened and whittled away by Supreme Court justices who interpret the First Amendment as a prohibition against religious activity on public property. — Tim LaHaye

The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow. I — Lauren Groff

We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and experiences, but to be whittled and sandpapered until what's left is who we truly are. — Arianna Huffington

The free person does not live by an unexamined faith. To do so is to worship an idol whittled out and made into a fetish. — James Luther Adams

However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns. — Wendell Berry

Slightly whittled, sharper, but it is still a question. In time it will be sharp enough to impale the answer. — Jonathan Renshaw

When the NSA's surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world. — Noam Chomsky

Who do you think made this world an' the things 'at's in it? Maybe it's your notion 'at somebody about your size whittled it from a block o' wood, scattered a little sand for earth, stuck a few seeds for trees, an' started the oceans with a waterin' pot! I don't know what paved streets an' stall feedin' do for a man, but any one 'at's lived sixty year on the ground knows 'at this whole old earth is jest teemin' with work 'at's too big for anything but a God, an' a mighty BIG God at that! — Gene Stratton-Porter

There is an Iroquois myth that describes a choice the nation was once forced to make. The myth has various forms. This is the simplest version. A council of the tribes was called to decide where to move on for the next hunting season. What the council had not known, however, was that the place they eventually chose was a place inhabited by wolves. Accordingly, the Iroquois became subject to repeated attacks, during which the wolves gradually whittled down their numbers. They were faced with a choice: to move somewhere else or to kill the wolves. The latter option, they realized, would diminish them. It would make them the sort of people they did not want to be. And so they moved on. To avoid repetition of their earlier mistake, they decided that in all future council meetings someone should be appointed to represent the wolf. Their contribution would be invited with the question, 'Who speaks for wolf? — Mark Rowlands

That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away. — Lauren Oliver

There was a chemical solution to all of America's food needs, which had been whittled away for years and years and honed down with precision to train the public that everything they needed to put on the table for their family came in a box, bottle or can. — Kenneth Eade

Wallpaper. Decoration. Her whole life and person, whittled down to nothing. "I don't accept that ," Etta said. I'm neither of those things. And, for the record, neither are you. — Alexandra Bracken

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. — Kiran Desai

Now Lucy sighed on his behalf. Communication must be difficult when your ass whittled the opposite sex's vocabulary down to one word. — Tessa Bailey

I strongly believe that we are not put on this Earth just to accumulate victories and trophies and avoid failures; but rather to be whittled and sandpapered down until what's left is who we truly are — William G. Nickels

You like Nick a lot, don't you, Nora?" Dorothy asked.
"He's an old Greek fool, but I'm used to him."
"Charles isn't a Greek name."
"It's Charalambides," I explained. "When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long ... too much trouble to write ... and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in. — Dashiell Hammett

Part of seeing what is on an ordinary block is seeing that everything visible has a history. It arrived at the spot where you found it at some time, was crafted or whittled or forged at some time, filled a certain role or existed for a particular function. It was touched by someone (or no one), and touches someone (or no one) now. — Alexandra Horowitz

I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I'll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats. — Chila Woychik

I've whittled my fascination with the cosmos down to this mantra: we can imagine the Universe as a giant void racing away from us at a frightening speed, or it could occur to us that, in fact, it is wrapped around us in all directions. Then, no matter where we are, we are at the centre of something wonderful. And that's how I've always thought about it. — Sean J Halford

All things are transient. Buddha says it is so, and Hock Seng, who didn't believe in or care about karma or the truths of the dharma when he was young, has come in his old age to understand his grandmother's religion and its painful truths. Suffering is his lot. Attachment is the source of his suffering. And yet he cannot stop himself from saving and preparing and striving to preserve himself in this life which has turned out so poorly.
How is it that I sinned to earn this bitter fate? Saw my clan whittled by red machetes? Saw my businesses burned and my clipper ships sunk? He closes his eyes, forcing memories away. Regret is suffering. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Tom's team distilled the thousand ideas down to 293 discussion topics. That was still way too many for a single day's agenda, so a group of senior managers then met and whittled those down to 120 topics, organized into several broad categories such as Training, Environment and Culture; Cross-Show Resource Pooling (we often call our movies "shows"); Tools and Technology; and Workflow. — Ed Catmull

For far too long the American public and business sector have kept their silence as civil liberties have been whittled away by statutory and regulatory measures. — Bob Barr

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen
a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will.
[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966) (dissenting)] — William O. Douglas

There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her. — Thomm Quackenbush

A face that looked like it had been whittled out of driftwood. — Chelsea Cain

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them. — Henry David Thoreau

The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months. — Tim Ferriss

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. — Russell Baker