Quotation Explorer - 'Plain'

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals. - H.L. Mencken
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music. - Jorge Luis Borges
Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. - Judith Guest
Now, a plain word here about the Christian church trying to carry on in its own power: That kind of Christianity makes God sick, for it is trying to run a heavenly institution after an earthly manner. - A.W. Tozer
One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth. - Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A fine dress on a homely maiden is never enough of a distraction. It can convey a sense of wealth and its accompanying attractions, but it can never truly compensate for a plain face. - Laura Moncur
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one. - John Ruskin
It's not foresight or hindsight we need. We need sight, plain and simple. We need to see what is right in front of us. - Gordon Atkinson
[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple. - Chuck Sigars
There’s way too much that’s legal that’s just plain wrong. - Clifford Cohen
One very difficult aspect of sin is that my sin never feels like sin to me. My sin feels like life to me, plain and simple. My heart is an idol factory, and my mind is an excuse-making factory. - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
There are books written to be read.There are books written to be sold.The first ones have the soul and lessons you need.The second ones are just plain, empty, and cold. - Alexandr Iscenco
I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Random thought fills the streambed, cascading with care and spilling over the flood plain until bifurcation forces it to arc and fork into a single, determined stream. - Lorii Myers
Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character. - Gregory Maguire
If you want people to enter your world, you don’t need to invite them; just keep your door open and keep your thoughts plain! - Mehmet Murat ildan
A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it. - Max Frisch
You have to be realistic about terrorism. Certain groups of people, certain groups, Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montana, are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time. - George Carlin
Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong. - Muhammad Ali
I, the ordinary restless child, the plain adolescent, the commoner who had been a nun twice, would prove to be a Daughter of Heaven. - Shan Sa
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Where duty is plain, delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may provide both wisdom and safety. - Tryon Edwards
Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones. - Oscar Wilde
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. - H.L. Mencken
Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping. - Oscar Wilde
No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful. - Eleanor Roosevelt
And they came up on the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, and fire came down from heaven and devoured them.-Revelations 20:9 - A J.J. Graves
I don't give up. That makes me incredibly resilient or maybe stupid or just plain stubborn. Whichever... - Destiny Booze
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. - Jean Kerr
Number of empty Ben & Jerry's containers: 3 -- two mint chocolate cookie, one plain vanilla. (Who buys plain vanilla ice cream from Ben & Jerry's, anyway? Is there a greater waste?) - Ally Carter
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth. - William Hazlitt
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back. - Lois McMaster Bujold
I'd rather look ridiculous when everybody else does than plain and sensible all by myself. - L. M. Montgomery
These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of the slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie. - Stephen Crane
The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo. - William Blake
I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if behind them they didn't have a little bit of plain ordinary everyday kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too. - Sidney Buchman
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. - Evelyn Waugh
I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world. - M.F.K. Fisher
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one. - John Ruskin
People in general would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin. - Sue Monk Kidd
The ghosts that exert the most power in people’s lives-at least, the people I know–tend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody. - Glen Hirshberg
The main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things. - Alistair Begg
The things that are essential to salvation are so exceedingly simple that no child need sit down in despair of understanding the things which make for his peace. Christ crucified is not a riddle for sages, but a plain truth for plain people. True it is meat for men, but it is also milk for babes. - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything has been created twice once on a mental plain and once on a physical plain. - Bob Proctor
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can! - J.R.R. Tolkien
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. - Jerry Garcia
Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness. - Robertson Davies
People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds up a mirror for you? - Isaac Asimov
The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality: that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything. - Benjamin Franklin
Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. - Julie Powell
Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price. - Amelia Earhart
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. - Bible
To bring one's self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.
Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do. - Katharine Hepburn
Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. - Martin Luther
The child's existence turned a plain world to riches. Her life raised up like this, the child giving point and purpose to each day, the care of him transforming her, widening and deepening her. - Mary Costello
My person says I don’t understand cause and effect. That’s not true, I get it: roll in the mud, you get the bath. But what shedoesn’t understand is, sometimes it’s just plain worth it. - Belle, Dog Only Knows - Terry Kaye
I had spent many years living with a plain piece of canvas just right on my face as a headboard for my bed. As the years passed by, I watched it slowly transforming into a work of art which still lives above my head. And that my friend, is truly living art. - Shawn Lukas
So what if you're plain? Anyone can like a beautiful woman or a handsome man. That's easy. But power is the ability to inspire attraction without the obvious. - Donna Lynn Hope
If you cry "Forward!" you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite? - Anton Chekhov
I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking. - Beatrice Wood
Every plain wall deserves a piece of work, so why not cover it with a smile? - Shawn Lukas
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands. - Oscar Wilde
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. - H.L. Mencken
I wonder how appropriate it is to try to 'argue someone into the kingdom.' Many apologists hotly deny any such charge, but I don't believe them. The tenor of almost all apologetics literature makes it plain that this is their intent. - Robert M. Price
nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character. - Winston S. Churchill
But wonder on, till truth makes all things plain. - William Shakespeare
An agreeable manner may set off handsome features, but can never alter plain ones. - Jane Austen
And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. - Jacob Bronowski
There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed. If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude. - Robert Brault
To be conservative at 20 is heartless and to be a liberal at 60 is plain idiocy. - Sir Winston Churchill
It doesn't matter how much money we have or how much we own here on Earth-we have to die and leave it all-that's the plain truth - Charmaine J Forde
I am a plain person. I have merely spoken out my mind. I do not say you should believe what I have said because it alone is certain. Accept such ideas as can be accepted, with the help of your reason, after a sound inquiry. Reject the rest. - Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a desert plain. For us, there is a passion in the midst of that expanse. The knower who reaches there will prostrate, there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any 'where' in that place. - Jalaluddin Rumi
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries. - Ezra Pound
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs. - William Osler
How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words! - Samuel Adams
Sincerity is like traveling on a plain, beaten road, which commonly brings a man sooner to his journey's end than by-ways, in which men often lose themselves.
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