Top 66 Scraping Quotes & Sayings

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

You think if you win the Olympics, you'll become a millionaire overnight. But I was still scraping the barrel, looking down the back of the settee for pound coins to buy a pint of milk.

Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselingand scraping and polishing.

My dad went to art school when I was one. They scraped and continued scraping, because artists, as we all know, don't earn a lot of money. It's a precarious existence and my mum didn't work, so dad sold paintings.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.

I liked school and was a bit of an all-rounder academically, I struggled with music. I can't hold a note when singing and abandoned any notion of a career in music after barely scraping a pass in grade 2 piano.

I have scars on the backs of my arms from dressers in Paris scraping me with pins as I was taking a shirt or gown off.

I started out in comedy gigging and scraping a living together, and eventually worked up to doing shows at the Comedy Store in London in 1979. That led on to me presenting a show in the early days of Channel 4 called 'Whatever You Want,' which had live music and sketches.

I have been cooking vegan recipes for a long time, long before the release of my first cookbook, because in the rubbish old days of scraping by on mismanaged, delayed and suspended benefits, meat and dairy products were often just too expensive, in contrast to their kinder counterparts.

I don't see any point in having a public service broadcaster which attempts to compete with the commercial sector. Obviously part of its remit is to entertain, but entertainment doesn't necessarily mean scraping the bottom of the barrel and appealing to the very lowest common denominator.

I haven't been approached to do a 'Doctor Who' movie. I think they would be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they asked me to do it.

My favorite moments are when the bass falls in the pocket with the drums, the guitar is on top just slicing it, and the melody is scraping across like a sidewinder shattering through the monitor. It's just, ahhh, I love it! That's the jones, the hit, the buzz right there. It gets me off.

You look at a horse, and he's such a majestic, beautiful, powerful creature that you can't not be impressed. I love scraping the water off them when I wash them down because you go all round the contours, and its muscle and body, and you just think, 'Ooh, isn't this a magnificent creature.' You're touching it, and it's just solid, carved muscle.

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.

I alone must solve my problem. I have to clear my mind of everything else, think hard, analyze, explore my options, plan a strategy for the immediate situation, and then do whatever it takes. Sometimes it means scraping off what I have done and starting over again and again.

Fear of success is one of the new fears I've heard about lately. And I think its definitely a sign that we're running out of fears. A person suffering from fear of success is scraping the bottom of the fear barrel.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

I don't believe in the scraping of stuff. Take the existing condition, offer up a diagnosis for what's wrong, and a prescription for making it work.

If these were indications of new love, as Sergei expected they were, then he was not surprised. All that scraping and arguing, the teasing and playful antagonism, could only mean on thing. It was a sure sign of attraction.

I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.

I do smaller films, I'm not getting big paydays. I feel like we're just kind of scraping together here.

...when a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel.

Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.

Is the scraping off of a barnacle the destruction of a ship?

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

It's just as easy for me to be building a fence somewhere and scraping by on unemployment in between doing a guest star spot. I've been there.

In the world of globalization, the fossil fuel masters of the universe who are digging up our boreal forest and our muskeg and scraping out the bitumen would rather have Canadians take all the risks - and then the oceans take the risks to ship it to refineries that they've already built in other countries rather than create jobs for Canadians here.

I wanted to do a set of love songs for Valentine's Day so I went through my old material. I found myself scraping around the edges of good taste.

I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles. I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping.

I never had intention of coming to New York or L.A. and actually doing more than scraping by - you know, doing plays. And as my career sort of progressed of its own volition, I did come to New York.

I had a brief experience in the food industry. I was a bus boy in a Mexican restaurant in Arizona, scraping re-fried beans off people's plates. It teaches you a bit of humility and the importance of a good deodorant.

I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honour of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led.

You're killing me because you want me to give a message to God for you?" Jace shook his head, the point of the blade scraping across his throat. "You're crazier than I thought

The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible.

If anything as simple as child care was covered by the league or your organization, that would be life-changing for moms, especially when we're scraping pennies. Maybe we would have more moms in this league if something like that was there for us, but I feel like we're far from that.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that.

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one.

Who cares what a man's style is, so it is intelligible,--as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock's feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts.

Legion hissed like a startled cat, the noise scraping at Reyes’s skin. “Me no boy. You think me a boy?” Everyone stopped, stared. Even Aeron. Reyes was the first to find his voice. “You’re a…girl?” A nod. “Me pretty.” “Yes, you are.” Reyes exchanged a glance with Lucien. “Beautiful.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I don't want to be treated like I came from another planet or something or was somehow born with some weird birthright or super power. I don't view myself that way. I am a normal guy, picking up the crap from the dog and scraping the BBQ and having a beer and fixing the shed out back.

The work that I've gotten in the hiatuses seems to indicate that I will have a little more work after 'Mad Men' than I did when I was scraping by while I was temping in New York, but who knows? People very easily could be like, 'Meh, we're done with that. We've got Jon Hamm. We're good without the weird one with glasses.'

I was able to support myself by acting alone about six years ago. Until then, I was just scraping by.

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

Of myself I must say this, I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding prince, nor yet a master; my heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects' good.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

I was happy, I wasnt beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasnt what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I dont know how my mother did it.

There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old.

A lot of what I do in my work is taking a thing and either washing it off, scraping it, covering it, scraping it and then washing it, turning it upside down. Making it somehow blind.

The intelligent and efficient politician is a species virtually unknown in the galaxy. Perhaps I might secure a scraping [for my] cell library.

Things are very rudimentary as far as women's rights really go here, and it seems fine, but once you start scraping the surface, you start to see the ripple effect of how not having equal rights is so detrimental and how many mothers are single parents trying to raise their families.

Flaky devotionalism, bowing and scraping and sucking up to the teacher is very phony. It is counterproductive to enlightenment and spiritual development. What is necessary is mutual respect.

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.