About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.


Edsgar W. Dijkstra

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A small sharp axe clears a forest quicker than a big blunt one.
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Do. Then talk. In that order.
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Everyone has a gift.
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The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board.
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You cannot control what other people do, only how you react to it.
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Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
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How to get it, I annoy you???
You are not interested???

What's the idea???
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Life is a magical game so play it with love.
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Do the thing and you will have the power.
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Do it and they will follow
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A Ritual to Read to Each Other


If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and...
WILLIAM STAFFORD
The finest edge is made with the blunt whetstone.
JOHN LYLY LYLIE OR LYLLIE
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
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Eventually I came across another passage. This is what it said:
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I will never forget the vision of Jamie walking towards me.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
As these images were going through my head, my breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, the...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
You don't have to learn much out of books, it's like if you want to learn about cows, you go milk on...
HARPER LEE
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
HARPER LEE
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E.M. FORSTER
There was no Jace Wayland more real than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
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To put it nicely, these teachers are blunt.
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Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sha...
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MOHAMMAD SULAIMAN ALJABER
Chemotherapy is just medieval. It's such a blunt instrument. We're going to look back on it ...
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What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
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I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
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Things are the only hidden meaning ...
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To make a point, is to be blunt, which is pointless.
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I love you crookedly because my heart's been unhinged from birth. The doctors gave me strict instru...
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Isn't it amazing that we’ll cause ourselves more pain by thinking about, and avoiding something we...
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They didn't get the blunt end of it.
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Don't Just Let it Happen, Make it Happen!
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People become more ignorant when it comes to religion.
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You know that we've got a few problems we need to talk through before we get married."

"I...
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If you can dream it, you can do it.
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I'm psychologically equipped for this.
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Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly.
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There are so many things we do in life that define the real meaning of our lives. There are so many ...
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Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obsc...
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Let us not bankrupt our todays by paying interest on the regrets of yesterday and by borrowing in ad...
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What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but ...
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A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.
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In Japan, a company worker's position is secure. He is retrained for another job if his present ...
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You should not ask questions without knowledge.
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Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have...
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There are only two real ways to get ahead today - sell liquor or drink it.
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If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn f...
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Never try to impress a woman, because if you do she'll expect you to keep up the standard for th...
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A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
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It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.
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If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
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It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, on...
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We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
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Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
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I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell... their heart's in the right place...
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In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of ligh...
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the ba...
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It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get...
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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the wh...
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In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who w...
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After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.
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I drove across country in my yellow 1970 VW bug (which I drove until 1986) to Los Angeles, having ha...
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Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,&...
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I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.
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Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that n...
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Read, read, read, read and then read some more.
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I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard ...
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Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If y...
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If I have a choice between looking something up and making it up, I'll make it up every time.
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I have no interest in non-fiction. I don't read it and don't watch it and don't write it...
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I don't believe in the afterlife.
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The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like bird...
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Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by...
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The Bureau doesn't have any secret files.
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I haven't leaked anything to anybody. They are wrong!
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I have to do this my way.
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I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat.
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I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or anyone else!
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The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
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It was a proof of Welsh good nature: so long as I had a friend that knew and could introduce me, the...
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I dislike society because conversation exhausts my brain more than silent thought - again, I cannot ...
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However careful a tramp may be to avoid places where there is abundant work, he cannot always succee...
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My impression of Americans from the beginning is of the best, and I have never since had cause to al...
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It has always been a wonder to me where my conversational power has gone: at the present time, I can...
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Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well fr...
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But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near.
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Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.
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How the snow falls in the north! Flake on flake falling incessantly, until the small dingles are alm...
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Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him w...
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What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
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I like to give pennies to children, but unfortunately, a man cannot do these things if he lives in a...
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As long as I love Beauty I am young.
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri...
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. AUDEN
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him ...
W. H. AUDEN
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature...
W. H. AUDEN
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. AUDEN
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. AUDEN
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. AUDEN
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. AUDEN
Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer un...
W. G. SEBALD
I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
W. G. SEBALD
Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed ...
W. G. SEBALD
Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only whe...
W. G. SEBALD
I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war ca...
W. G. SEBALD
A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can enca...
W. G. SEBALD
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fic...
W. G. SEBALD
I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your re...
W. G. SEBALD
To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy ...
W. G. SEBALD
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were s...
W. G. SEBALD
People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes,...
W. G. SEBALD
I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the na...
W. G. SEBALD
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear t...
W. G. SEBALD
It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You...
W. G. SEBALD
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; ther...
W. G. SEBALD
I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.
W. EUGENE SMITH
Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.
W. EUGENE SMITH
The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.
W. EUGENE SMITH
If transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day aft...
W. DANIEL HILLIS
A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they'r...
W. DANIEL HILLIS
Of course, a movie is in constant flux.
W. D. RICHTER
Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?
W. D. RICHTER
I think, of all the holidays we celebrate, my least favorite is Earth Day. For one thing, I never kn...
W. BRUCE CAMERON
With a 3D printer, you could build your own car, one part at a time. When you were finished, you'...
W. BRUCE CAMERON