140 One Sentence Quotes

Following is our list of one sentence quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about single sentence.

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Famous One Sentence Quotes

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. — Ernest Hemingway

A good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence. — Dai Vernon

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. - Edgar Allan Poe

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory. - Denis Diderot

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory. — Denis Diderot

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. — William Strunk, Jr.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. - Friedrich Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience. — Miguel de Cervantes

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar. — David Crystal

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much. — Colm Toibin

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences. — Sylvia Plath

'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence? — George Carlin

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs. — Richard Brautigan

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. - Janet Flanner

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. — Janet Flanner

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words. — Robert South

Short One Sentence Quotes

  • A short saying often contains much wisdom. — Sophocles
  • It takes few words to tell the truth. — Chief Joseph
  • There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together. — Josh Billings
  • Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words. — Arthur Bryant
  • To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill. — Charles Caleb Colton

Top 10 One Sentence Quotes

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property. — Karl Marx

When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. — Albert Einstein

If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate!' — David Mermin

If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. — John McPhee

Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot. — Wilfrid Sheed

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Well, one thing, you got to stand in a courtroom and listen to a judge sentencing you to 25 years in prison before you realize that freedom of expression can no longer be taken for granted. — Larry Flynt

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code. — Mary Karr

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him. — Billy Collins

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria --- anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor. — W.P. Kinsella

One Sentence Image Quotes

One sentence quote Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.
Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.

Inspirational One Sentence Quotes

One would think that [persecution] would be an obstacle to church growth when joining the church meant a death sentence. And yet, the age of persecution was the greatest period of church growth in history. — Gene Veith

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine. — Thomas A. Edison

Share your story with someone. You never know how one sentence of your life story could inspire someone to rewrite their own. — Demi Lovato

It is, perhaps, one of the hardest struggles of the Christian life to learn this sentence-- "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name be glory." — Charles Spurgeon

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny. — Freeman Dyson

Single Sentence Quotes

The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not. — Bo Lozoff

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. — Penelope Lively

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret. — Silas House

If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets. — Robert M. Sapolsky

In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation. — John Tukey

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being. Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. — Sam Harris

You might reduce Lombardi's coaching philosophy to a single sentence: In any game, you do the things you do best and you do them over and over and over. — George Halas

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. — Horace Mann

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis. — Eric Schlosser

One Line Quotes

We do not pull in and fill up. And I'll tell you why we don't. It's because I don't buy one goddamn drop of gas in the state of Michigan. We'll coast and push this goddamn car to the Ohio line before I give this state a nickel of my money. — Woody Hayes

You can play hard. You can play aggressive. You can give 120% but if one guy is out of position then someone is running through the line of scrimmage and he is going to gain a bunch of yards. — Bill Belichick

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. — Donna Roberts

A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.... the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction. — Bobby Seale

A Brother may not be a Friend, but a Friend will always be a Brother. — Benjamin Franklin

If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. — Ulysses S. Grant

Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back — Kenny Chesney

Happiness is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel the warmth. — Jon Foreman

Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one. — Charles Bukowski

One of my mom's best lines is... You're not training to be the best in the world, you're training to be the best in the world on your worst day. — Ronda Rousey

One Phrase Quotes

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' — Isaac Asimov

Nelson Mandela was in jail when I was really young, and Winnie Mandela was one of the biggest faces of the movement. In South Africa we have a common phrase - it's like a chant in the street and at rallies: "Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo." Which means, "You strike a woman, you strike a rock." — Trevor Noah

The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is I just tell myself one word: accept. — Naval Ravikant

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. — Charles Austin Beard

To discover the meaning of what is called "social justice" has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever. — Friedrich August von Hayek

What is this much repeated phrase 'active citizen' supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille. — Camille Desmoulins

The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. — Alan Price

I have found the one whom my soul loves. — Solomon

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. — Henri Frederic Amiel

One hand washes the other. — Seneca

One Liner Quotes

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. — Steven Wright

If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you. — Groucho Marx

I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder. — Steven Wright

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness. — Emo Philips

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won't expect it back. — Oscar Wilde

A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory. - Albert Einstein

A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory. — Albert Einstein

I always like to go to Washington D.C. It gives me a chance to visit my money. - Bob Hope

I always like to go to Washington D.C. It gives me a chance to visit my money. — Bob Hope

I can't just say the words, do a lot of one-liners. I love each person I play; I have to be that person. I have to do him true. — Richard Pryor

Knowledge is realizing that the street is one way; wisdom is looking in both directions anyway. — Albert Einstein

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. - Steven Wright

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. — Steven Wright

One Minute Quotes

Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you — Lemmy Kilmister

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution. — Albert Einstein

Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free. — Jacque Fresco

One minute we can be in a small club, the next minute we can be in a coliseum, and the next minute we can be in a small auditorium. It varies, depending on the promoter, the budget, and the travelling distance. — Ben E. King

I can get more out of God by believing Him for one minute than by shouting at Him all night. — Smith Wigglesworth

If you have God's presence, you have favor. One minute of God's presence can accomplish more than 20 years of your striving. — Heidi Baker

If it had been any different, if I had been born just one minute later, or been in the wrong pace at the right time or vice versa, the life that I've lived and come to love would not exist. And that is a situation that I would not want to consider in the slightest. — Slash

Don't waste a minute not being happy. If one window closes, run to the next window- or break down a door. — Brooke Shields

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips. — Michelle Branch

The heavy spacesuits are spectacular to look at but very hot. Putting one on was like going from chilly London winter weather to the Bahamas in just minutes. — Kathleen Quinlan

Sentence Quotes

Every person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint.There are no two people alike. No two people who understand the same sentence the same way... So in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be. — Milton H. Erickson

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once. — John Coltrane

No sentence can end with because because, because is a conjunction — C. N. Annadurai

We've all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor. — Bryan Stevenson

Education today, in this particular social period, is assuming truly unlimited importance. And the increased emphasis on its practical value can be summed up in one sentence: education is the best weapon for peace. — Maria Montessori

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. — Barbara Jordan

Someone ought to do it, but why should I? Someone ought to do it, so why not I? Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution. — Annie Besant

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place. — Albert Ellis

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

People Writing About One Sentence

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri
quotes on love, writing and books

86 543
Read quotes by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway
quotes on love, writing and war

812 11022
Read quotes by Dai Vernon

Dai Vernon
quotes on life, magic and knowledge

12 245
Read quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe
quotes on love, writing and death

374 6054
Read quotes by Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot
quotes on religion

173 1382
Read quotes by William Strunk, Jr.

William Strunk, Jr.
quotes on education, life and slavery

28 159

More One Sentence Quotes

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. — Kurt Vonnegut

I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence. — Asghar Farhadi

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties. — Bonnie Friedman

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing — David Lodge

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

Censorship is saying: "I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine." But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word – even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper. — Ai Weiwei

A woman puts on a new dress eyeliner lip gloss to please others. A woman paints her toes to please herself. And if there was one thing I was familiar with it was pleasing...There's no way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself. — Molly Harper

Then let every one of us, being warned by this sentence of the angel, acknowledge that he as yet cleaves to first principles, or, at least, does not comprehend all those things which are necessary to be known; and that therefore progress is to be made to the very end of life: for this is our wisdom, to be learners to the end. — John Calvin

When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary. — Vivian Gornick

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do — William Zinsser

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters. — Vera Nazarian

The next sentence is one of the most important spiritual truths you will ever learn: God develops the fruit of the Spirit in your life by allowing you to experience circumstances in which you're tempted to express the exact opposite quality. Character development always involves a choice, and temptation provides that opportunity. — Rick Warren

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria - anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor. — W. P. Kinsella

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P. — Jacques Derrida

Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well made sentence and it should only express one idea at a time. — Charles James

Can you describe your product’s USP in one concise sentence? — Cliff Lerner

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work. — Gloria Naylor

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement. — Aldous Huxley

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

Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the Scotch been weaker, had the gods been kinder, had the dice been hotter, this could have been a one-sentence story: Once upon a time I lived happily ever after. — Mickey Rooney

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

It's impossible to be the Mockingjay. Impossible to complete even this one sentence. Because now I know that everything I say will be directly taken out on Peeta. Result in his torture. But not his death, no nothing so merciful as that. Snow will ensure that his life is much worse than death. — Suzanne Collins

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it. — Richard Hugo

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. — Young-ha Kim

Senescent judges show how patriotic they are by passing out hard sentences for tearing up a draft card or following one's conscience according to the principles established by our country at the Nuremburg trials. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me. — Sue Monk Kidd

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author. — Henning Mankell

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything. — Richard Flanagan

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