The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination. — Elbert Hubbard
A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away. — Charles M. Schwab
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. — Auguste Rodin
In the house of the blacksmith, a wooden knife — Spanish Proverbs
Little by little, the bird makes its nest. — French Proverbs
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I've got a lot of cutting and pasting to do, gentlemen, so why don't you please return to your porch rockers and resume whittling. — Albert Rosenfeld
Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice. — Henry Ford
The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed. — Auguste Rodin
In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessentials until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction. — Bruce Lee
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify. — Henry David Thoreau
Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential. — George Nakashima
The preaching of the faith has lost nothing of its relevance in our times. The Church has a sacred duty to proclaim it without any whittling-down, just as Christ revealed it, and no consideration of time or circumstance can lessen the strictness of this obligation. — Pope Pius XII
If laws were real they wouldn’t need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn’t be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that’s a law. Laws made by man are rules reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it. — Boyd Rice
A language like Ruby is a toolbox with some really neat little tools that do their job really nicely. JavaScript is a leather sheath with a really really sharp knife inside. That knife can cut anything, and with it you can do anything. You can kill a bear. You can catch fish. You can whittle a piece of wood into a pony. It's even a toothpick. — Nick Morgan
We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art? — Rudyard Kipling
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
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious. — H. L. Mencken
There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order. — Hugh Kingsmill
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
Hillary's trying to appear downhome. Earlier today she was sitting on the front porch of a general store whittling a pantsuit. — David Letterman
Men can't be trusted with pruning shears any more than they can be trusted with the grocery money in a delicatessen . . . They are like boys with new pocket knives who will not stop whittling. — Phyllis Mcginley
Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold. — William Zinsser
There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. — Charlie Kaufman
Whittle was an amazing chap. Tiny, stubborn, unstoppable - jet-propelled! It's amazing the impact his invention has had upon the world. — Adam Hart-Davis
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 privacy and dignity of our citizens are 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 a person's life. — William O. Douglas
There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher's ability to do sums, rather than the village bum's ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes. The reason why the child does not is plain enough -- the bum has put himself on an equality with him and the teacher has not. — Floyd Dell
I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know? — Don Novello
My mom would always say this thing about writing - and I've taken it into account in a lot of things in my life - which is just, "Make it shorter." Figure out what you are truly saying, whittle it down to the essence, then say that. — Jake Gyllenhaal
It's not success that makes a person's life worthy of legend. It's provocative defeat, someone who struggled mightily and lost. And that loss can't just be gratuitous - there has to be something about his or her character that whittles that loss into something provocative. — Lawrence Douglas
Finishing a song is definitely the hardest part. It's, you know, you can polish it forever and then whittle it down into something it wasn't and be like, "I need to build it back up," which is why some tracks have 400 versions. But I guess you know when it's done when...I have a maximalist approach to sound when I can't find any more space to put new sounds. — Dan Deacon
The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way. — John Kiriakou
A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible. — C. S. Lewis
I'm a great whittler. I can whittle a marshmallow stick really quickly. I don't think anyone whittles anymore, they should! — Chris Jericho
I'm one of those guys where you know, I'm 23 years into this and I love the road more than ever and rather than whittling down my schedule to just play the major cities, I've actually expanded the amount of places that I go to because I want to see a bunch of stuff. You know, plan it as I can while I'm still young enough to travel. — Bill Burr
Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential. — Mark Ruffalo
You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a f***ing actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I'm a grown man who puts on makeup. — Brad Pitt
I think that the older you get, the more you become your true, essential self. You find the things that make you happy. You whittle away the parts of yourself that mean less to you. — Tom Ford
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen. — Elizabeth Bowen
The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history. — John Dos Passos
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. — John Dos Passos
The market has a simple way of whittling all excessive pride and overblown egos down to size. After all, the whole idea is to be completely objective and recognize what the marketplace is telling you, rather than try to prove that the thing you said or did yesterday or six weeks ago was right. The fastest way to take a bath in the stock market or go broke is to try to prove that you are right and the market is wrong. — William O'Neil
I didn't want to do eight seasons of How To Build A Fire. The intention was to make something fun and dynamic and about self rescue, not about whittling. — Bear Grylls
The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk. — John Dos Passos
In the old days, a TV sync was perceived as not so cool or whittling away at your indie cred. Now it's seen as much more of an opportunity than a sellout, as a way to find fans who wouldn't have ordinarily come across their genre of music. — Alexandra Patsavas
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
A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to whittle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious. So, it's always a challenge, whether I'm lying in a hospital bed or flying around with a rocket pack on my back, or what have you. On the best of days, it's a challenge for me. — Billy Campbell
In Conclusion
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