Top 336 Stiff Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

What is a fine person or a beauteous face, Unless deportment give them decent grace; Blessed with all other requisites to please, To want the striking elegance of ease; Awkward, embarrassed, stiff, without the skill Of moving gracefully, or standing still.

While other state governments stiff their vendors, close parks, delay tax refunds, and ignore unacceptably poor service levels, Indiana state employees are setting national standards for efficiency.

For me, the key to using the stiff-arm is when you feel a defender is closing on you and at the last second he is about to reach you, I just stick my arm out there. I don't know how good it is. I just do it and I gain separation every time.

Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness. In order to achieve happiness, it is imperative to gain mastery of your body. If at the age of 30 you are stiff and out of shape, you are old. If at 60 you are supple and strong then you are young.

It's almost embarrassing, but I do have one trick for taking portraits on commission. I carry one of these little bicycle horns in my pocket, and once in a while, when someone is sour-faced or stiff, I blow my horn. It sort of shatters the barriers. It's silly, but it works.

The competition is very stiff. Brian Williams has proved himself as a credible news anchor (at NBC), and Bob Schieffer has done the same (at CBS). But as Peter and Tom (Brokaw) and Dan have always said about the competition, it makes us all better.

So many times I've wanted to crack up, standing there stiff while seven women are crawling round my toes fixing hems and the designer's having a freak-out because the denim cuffs are crooked. I'm on the verge of hysteria.

Once a year, I take my whole wine team down to see the Giants, and we meet the players. Ive never seen anyone pitch like Lincecum that can throw the ball and get through the front leg. He has that stiff front leg.

As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself, 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff?' This set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how a poor washerwoman was going to better my condition.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

call out if you need a hand. if she looks like she's going to have you, i'll sneak up behind her and whach her on the head with a stiff rabbit

Once a year, I take my whole wine team down to see the Giants, and we meet the players. I've never seen anyone pitch like Lincecum that can throw the ball and get through the front leg. He has that stiff front leg.

I'm actually doing what I want with my life. I do sometime think I could just shut up and rest on my laurels and say: you know what guys, I'll operate out of the pocket you put me in.... but no way! No way I'm gonna do that! I'd just get bored stiff the first minute.

At 35, I'm definitely starting to feel more like a grown-up than I ever have. There's nothing in my life that is childish or whimsical. Having fun is fantastic and I never want to lose a sense of that - and also, I think, you have to have that to put into your work or else it's going to feel stiff.

I pulled out the manuscript [from the envelope] and a great big stiff cardboard finger sprung up. This is someone that was so certain they would be rejected, they would be getting their revenge in advance. I was lucky - it could have been a pipe bomb.

I studied in Britain and spent great moments of my life there as a student living in Belsize Park. I admire the British trait of the stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. My wife studied in Britain, too, and both of us have many friends there.

public work brings a vicarious but assured sense of immortality. We may be poor, weak, timid, in debt to our landlady, bullied by our nieces, stiff in the joints, shortsighted and distressed; we shall perish, but the cause endures; the cause is great.

I think sometimes you can be around somebody and take in certain energy and read certain things and you don't know why your neck is stiff. But if you can recognise the negativity, once you identify it and you know what you are dealing with you can make a point to counteract it with a different energy.

Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.

I start kind of stiff, and then I understand the movement, the distance, and then I can start loosening up. That's how fighting should be. That's how I try to keep my mind.

Get a sales tax, small on necessities and large on luxuries; then a stiff inheritance tax on the fellow that saves and don't spend. That will get him either way. A tax paid on the day you buy is not as tough as asking you for it the next year when you are broke.

My feet look like hooves-like, fake-leather bottoms and funky toenails - and I scrub them with a big stiff-bristled nylon brush you'd use for scrubbing the side of your house.

If a bunch of Republicans are too stiff- necked, too proud, or in some cases too committed to the old order, after the election, I think they're going to be very sobered by their position.

Stiff-necked America, in flagrant rebellion against God, is indulging a caterwauling orgy of sinful maudlin cinementality on the 5th anniversary of God's 9/11 vengeance upon this evil nation for its sodomite sins!

Ah! gracious Heaven gives us eyes to see our own wrong, however dim age may make them; and knees not too stiff to kneel, in spite of years, cramp, and rheumatism.

When one's thoughts are neither frivolous nor flippant, when one's thoughts are neither stiff-necked nor stupid, but rather, are harmonious -- they habitually render physical calm and deep insight.

I never feel I repeat myself. I really go out of my way to amuse myself. I would be bored stiff. If I feel the déjavu when I'm doing something, I stop and rethink and rework it.

I like jeans, but I think in 100 years it's going to be crazy when we look back at the fact that everyone, every day for about 60 years straight, wore stiff blue pants as their default. Why?

It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip.

Bowing, ceremonious, formal compliments, stiff civilities, will never be politeness; that must be easy, natural, unstudied; and what will give this but a mind benevolent and attentive to exert that amiable disposition in trifles to all you converse and live with?

I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.

After 'The Sisters Brothers,' I tried to write a contemporary story dealing with an investment adviser in New York City who moves to Paris. I did all this research, but after about a year and any number of pages written, I was bored stiff.

Paul Newman is simply not an actor and possibly not even alive; seems to be carved from wood, his movements stiff and jerky as a marionette, his one expression an agonized grimace as of wood trying to smile.

Chennai is one of the scariest crowds to face. Everyone looks so conservative, but once you crack the first joke, they are so appreciatively loud that they will hit you with a laugh that will scare you stiff and yet give you energy. Chennaiites give me the loudest laughs; it's the coolest crowd to perform for.

Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence.

When you do a song new live on stage, it's kind of a bit weird until it gets worn in, you know, like oiled up a bit. It's still a little bit stiff until you really thrashed at it for a few weeks.

You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it, we see it as a distortion of space. And space is enormously stiff. You can't squish it; you can't change its dimensions so easily.

I studied in Britain and spent great moments of my life there as a student living in Belsize Park. I admire the British trait of the stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. My wife studied in Britain too and both of us have many friends there.

I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.

Can anything be more grotesque and barbarous than our 'florists' bouquets,' a series of concentric rings of flowers of divers colours, bordered by maidenhair and a piece of stiff lace paper, in which stems, leaves, and even petals are brutally crushed, and the grace and individuality of each flower systematically destroyed?

Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.

During the hard training phase never be afraid to take a day off. If your legs are feeling unduly stiff and sore, rest; if you are at all sluggish, rest; in fact, if in doubt, rest.

Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.

I needed a way to have the platter continuously spinning while I'm moving the record back and forth. I went to a fabric store. When I touched this hairy stuff - felt - I found it. I rubbed spray starch on both sides and ironed it until it became a stiff wafer. After that, I was able to stop time.

Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn't bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.

We are scattered, stunned; the remnant of heart left alive is filled with brotherly hate... Whose fault? Everybody blamed somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

You need to take small steps when you dream big dreams. I am a published author with dyslexia, a professional speaker who was in speech therapy for three years as a child because I had a lisp; and a slow stiff kid from the suburbs who became an All-Pro in the NFL.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Where I went to school, Eton College, we had to wear dark trousers, a tailcoat, and a stiff, starched collar every day, and that was fine with me: Part of the reason I wanted to go there was because I've always loved dressing up.

I'm good in front of the camera in terms of speaking or entertaining or being humorous, but when it comes to dancing, you really got to know your stuff in order to be confident. You can freeze up or get stiff, and it's just not a good situation.

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

I managed to potter along tolerably well in the morning, sitting in the sun and sketching the old buildings... but in the afternoon, sitting in the shade... with stiff fingers and chilled bones... the water froze in little cakes all over the picture.

In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin.