Top 1200 Great Short Quotes & Sayings

Great success doesn't come in short periods of time.

You all know Newt Gingrich. Newt is short for Newton. People say if that's the case, what is Mitt short for? It's short for 'Mittens.'

I try to use short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters to keep the reader's interest.

You can do a short film in three to four days, and then you can show it. Look at the careers you seen go either through Tropfest or outside of Tropfest. You can make a short film in a couple of days, and if it's great, it can go in the Internet or go to a film festival like this one or another.

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.

You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.

I'm not a great fan of very short films.

Iraq is short on capital, short on electricity, and short on management expertise, but it does not lack economic enthusiasm.

It will be great to play a short, fat sweaty loser for a change.

Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

Alexander the Great once said that 'I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity!' What a great illusion is this! Wise man is he who always chooses to live longer and he who blesses the obscurity!

'Obvious Child,' the short, had a nice life online and a great festival run, but the short and the feature still stand apart from everything else I've done. I play a woman who you might meet in life. My other work is much more heightened.

They say that generally, rulers - dictators - tend to be short, like me. It gives them an inferiority complex; when they were kids, they wanted to be big and to crush the small, but they were small themselves. Lenin was short, Stalin was short, Putin...

I'm not a great father and there have been many occasions, when I fall short, but I'm genuinely trying.

Contentment, as it is a short road and pleasant, has great delight and little trouble.

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.

I thought The Big Short deserved a nomination because Adam MacKay is one of the best filmmakers. A lot of what he does deals in comedy and he co-produces with Will Farrell, people don't really give it the credit that it deserves. I think that they actually do great screenwriting and they make great films, very entertaining.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.

Life's too short. It's got to be great.

I like to write short stories more because I never met a writer who wasn't lazy. And a short story is, by its very definition, short. It is something that generally you can turn out in a week to two weeks depending on how well it goes for you. But, at the same time, it gives the same satisfaction of creating a complete world.

I foresee great refinements in the field of short-pulse microwave signaling, whereby several simultaneous programs may occupy the same channel, in sequence, with incredibly swift electronic communication... Short waves will be generally used in the kitchen for roasting and baking, almost instantaneously...

Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

We're here for such a short time. When your great-great-grandkids study history, don't you want them to be proud that you were part of the solution?

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Short chaps evolved naturally, but I didn't title and number them till much later. I like short chaps, like short books too, as a rule.

I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Life is too short for any vain regretting... Between the swift sun's rising and its setting, we have no time for useless tears or fretting, life is too short.... Time is the best avenger if we wait, the years speed by, and on their wings bear healing, life is too short for aught but high endeavor-too short for spite, but long enough for love. And love lives on forever and forever.

There is a natural tendency for investors to devote a significant majority of their time to finding new ideas. After all, uncovering great companies selling at great prices is the lifeblood of successful investing. But in the never-ending quest for the next great idea, investors often give short shrift to their existing investments.

You know, episodic TV directing is a very long and arduous job. You have very short schedules, short short shooting days, and you have to get lot of pages done.

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

Life is not a beauty contest, some [ugly people] are great. What I hate is nasty, ugly people... the worst is ugly, short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life... they are mean and they want to kill you.

Don't let your cool stand in the way of being soulful. Life is too short. Too short to hate. Too short to judge. Too short not to live for. Don't let anything or anyone get the best of you or your heart and mind. If you are going down... go down swinging, singing, and loving.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small.

Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.

Making a long stay short is a great aid to popularity.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big - bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.

I'm much better off the tee. I'm not a great putter. I do not have a good short game.

But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.

If you're looking for reps, write letters that are short and professional. Make sure you have a really great reel of yourself. If there are friends you know who are making short films, do them - it's all material for your reel.

There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers, great actors, great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that, because I'm 24, I don't have a family, I don't need to make tons of money, and I'm not dying to get famous.

But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings.

I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

I've worked in many companies, and I think that, number one, if you are going to have a great environment, you produce great work... If people are happy, that's what's important. Life is short.

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

My dad was a man of great wisdom in his short time here.

Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.

Who knows whats going to happen with whole Internet Web series thing. I mean, obviously people are spending a lot more time on their computer.The great thing about it is so many short films have been done over the time and there is not a real, there is not a venue for them because everybody goes to see a feature length film so it really is a great vehicle to do these kind of short creative pieces, so its kind of fun to be a part of that and kind of see what can happen from that. But trailblazer, I don't know. I mean, that's a pretty fancy word.

I love short track. I competed in short track, I was a world champion in 1986 but at that point in time it wasn't in the Olympic Games so I moved into long track. Short track is a blast to skate and it's a blast to watch.

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

I didn't ask to be short. I didn't want to be short. I've tried to pretend that being a short guy didn't matter.

I made some shorts that I'm not in. I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me. But my way into making movies has been through performing. My very first short film, I played a child and her own mother. So in some ways, to me, my great achievement so far is just that I've gotten all these other people to play the other parts. That's what makes it a real movie.

I do not think it is "selling America short" when we ask a great deal of her; on the contrary, it is those who ask nothing, those who see no fault, who are really selling America short!

Anytime you come to a short track you want to see a great race.