All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. — Ernest Hemingway
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much. — Colm Toibin
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.
A good magic effect should easily be described in one sentence. — Dai Vernon
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory. — Denis Diderot
'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence? — George Carlin
I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it. — Janet Flanner
...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance. — Ian McEwan
The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs. — Richard Brautigan
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
It takes few words to tell the truth. — Chief Joseph
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
Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences. — Sylvia Plath
Short Single Sentence Quotes
Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.' — Honore de Balzac
A short saying often contains much wisdom. — Sophocles
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience. — Miguel de Cervantes
There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together. — Josh Billings
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. — Jhumpa Lahiri
Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words. — Arthur Bryant
Single Sentence Image Quotes
Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.
When To Use Single Quotes
If you expected one person to fulfill all of your needs, then of course there is a vacuum when they’re gone. Now that you’re single, use this time to build a community of people with shared interests whom you want to be in your life forever. You need to be someone who makes you happy. — Jay Shetty
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single. — H. L. Mencken
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings. — Elizabeth Gilbert
Even if you can't physically see the result in front of you right now, every single effort you do is changing your body from the inside. Never get discouraged.
I saw 'Clueless' probably when I was about 8 or 9 years old. And, I had certain films that I would fall asleep so it was 'Clueless' for quite a long time, and I used to just watch it every single night and knew every single line, every single quote. — Sayings
When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4. — Keith Carter
The flesh is sweeter, where the creature has some chance for its life; for that reason, I always use a single ball, even if it be at a bird or a squirrel; besides, it saves lead, for, when a body knows how to shoot, one piece of lead is enough for all, except hard-lived animals. — James F. Cooper
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me. — Evan Hunter
I went home every night to New Jersey - or most nights - and to help with the six-grade math homework or to make breakfast in the morning, just to make sure that that was there. When I was single and didn't have children, I used to laugh at this notion of quality time. — Kellyanne Conway
I would say that my mother is the single biggest role model in my life, but that term doesn't seem to encompass enough when I use it about her. She was the love of my life. — Mindy Kaling
If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would he this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me. — Ann Landers
I sat with him for three hours and we did not exchange a single word. At the end he handed me, as he had done before, an envelope with money in it. It would have been much nicer if he had enclosed a greeting or a loving word. I would have been so pleased if he had. — Eva Braun
In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work. — Carl Sagan
A single thread of hope is still a very powerful thing.
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. — Meister Eckhart
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
In every single moment, we have the choice to be happy or not. No matter what is going on, we can choose to focus on what is right, what is good and whole in ourselves and our lives, and what options we have in any given situation. In other words, we can choose to be happy no matter what. — M. J. Ryan
Be on a rampage of appreciation every single day!
Please stop using the word "Negro."... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us. — Mary Church Terrell
Seven minutes is all you get to make a positive first impression. In the first seven minutes of contact with your church, your first-time guests will know whether or not they are coming back. That’s before a single worship song is sung and before a single word of the message is uttered. — Nelson Searcy
The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word. — Galileo Galilei
In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction. — I. A. Richards
Single Quotes
All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle. — Francis of Assisi
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. — Oscar Wilde
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. — Buddha
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. — Aristotle
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. — Henry David Thoreau
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle. Happiness never decreases by being shared. — Buddha
Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us — Pablo Neruda
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. — George Bernard Shaw
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
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
When I stand before god at the end of my life I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me.
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
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
A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.
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 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
Single Line Quotes
A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides. — Immanuel Kant
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line — Jorge Luis Borges
Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life. — Nobuyoshi Araki
The way we do small things determines the way we do everything.
Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates. — Stephen Jay Gould
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Every single day you make a choice
In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower? — Warren Hutcherson
The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line. — Louis Sullivan
I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now. I don't care that they're not able to quote any single line that I've written. But just that they can say, "Oh, he was a writer." That's sufficiently an honored position for me. — Rod Serling
There's no finish line. That's a big pill for people to swallow, Every single day for the rest of your life, you are going to have to make better food choices, and move around a bit more. — Bob Harper
Single Word Quotes
Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love. — Therese of Lisieux
I want people to be sincere; a man of honor shouldn't speak a single word that doesn't come straight from his heart. — Moliere
What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan. — Hakuin Ekaku
Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word. — Pat Conroy
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance. — Henry Watson Fowler
Ah, yes, divorce... from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet. — Robin Williams
For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him. — Charles Dickens
Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...I have written because it fulfilled me. ... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever. — Stephen King
Even changing a single word when you present options—like using 'not lose' instead of 'keep'—can unconsciously influence the conscious choices your counterpart makes. — Chris Voss
You don’t have to spend a jillion dollars on advertising to get your word out. What matters is that customers have a good experience with your product at every single point of contact. — David Neeleman
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
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
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
I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together. — John Olsen
If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication. — Stephen Covey
What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote. — Martin Heidegger
What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation. — Nicole Krauss
Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. — Brenda Ueland
All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. — Richard P. Feynman
In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home. — Len Wein
I seem like a big bombastic outgoing dude, when it comes down to it with the ladies, when I was a single, free-wheeling dude, I was always very shy. It was difficult to form sentences with the girl of my dreams. — Jack Black
The single most important lesson of effective communication is this: Focus on clarity. Concentrate on precisions. Don’t worry about constructing beautiful sentences. Beauty comes from meaning, not language. Accuracy is the most effective style of all. — David Gerrold
Words. I'm surrounding by thousands of words. Maybe millions...Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs...I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old. — Sharon M. Draper
If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship. — Terry Pratchett
If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction. — Scott Turow
In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. — Confucius
I could care less about ever having a No. 1 single. I would just like to be able to play and have people who grow old with you, and you stay with them through their life. We've got a few sentences, maybe, to say what life's about. Hopefully, we'll get a chapter later. — Brian Fallon
A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition. — Joseph Joubert
It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death. — Richard K. Morgan
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. — Karl Marx
Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This is a novel [Candid] which has narratives within narratives, such as when Cunégonde recounts her story. — Mark Ravenhill
An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject. — Robert Breault
A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted. — Albert Camus
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had. — Samuel Beckett
I feel very fortunate to have known James Salter, not very well, but I knew him over the years. Always, people would be talking, talking, talking, and after digging themselves into a deep enough hole, they would turn to Jim and wait for him to utter the single clarifying sentence. — David Salle
Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence in Voltaire seems to advance the story, and yet stand alone as a sound-bite. — Mark Ravenhill
I value so many people who have to work full time, definitely single mothers. Their work is the hardest work. I applaud it so much. I absolutely love being a mother. I love his milestones. I love his smile. I love that he's talking and making sentences and telling me he loves me. It's amazing. — Molly Sims
It's also obsessiveness. I'll spend a lot of time working on a single sentence, debating over a dash or a colon, etc. I want things to be perfect. I know nothing will ever be as perfect as I want it, and this is very sad, but sometimes I can get close. — Mary J. Miller
There are many who believe that 'Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence!' Whether you are indeed 'married' or if you are 'single', I am sure that funny quotes on weddings and marriages always tend to put a wicked smile to the face. It is often said that 'People who are married are often desperate to get out of it and people who are single can't wait to get in!' — Georg C. Lichtenberg
The perfect story is one you can retell in three minutes, and every single sentence is interesting. — Malik Bendjelloul
Every single thought I have and every sentence I speak is an affirmation. It is either positive or negative. Positive affirmations create positive experiences, and negative affirmations create negative experiences. My new affirmation habit is to only speak of the good I want in my life. Then, only good will come to me. I use my affirmations wisely. — Louise Hay
It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word. — Alexander Smith
If I have to reduce all of the laws of war into a single sentence, it is this. You divide the world into two, combatants and noncombatants. You can attack deliberately combatants, but not deliberately noncombatants. Israel acts that way. It attacks combatants and accidentally kills noncombatants. But in the case of the terrorists, it's the exact opposite. They deliberately attack combatants - noncombatants, civilians, deliberately. — Benjamin Netanyahu
The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man. — Clarence Manion
I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing. — Keith Gessen
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions. — Michael Cunningham
In Conclusion
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Citation
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