Whiff Quotes

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. (William Butler Yeats)

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

P. J. O'Rourke

A whiff of grapeshot.

Thomas Carlyle

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

Emil Cioran

It may often be noticed, the less virtuous people are, the more they shrink away from the slightest whiff of the odour of un-sanctity. The good are ever the most charitable, the pure are the most brave.

Dinah Craik

I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.

Robert Fisk

Flowers she would pick like guitar strings, for a real good whiff of how how life behind par seems.

Lupe Fiasco

Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore; they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves.

Julian Assange

He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable.

Katherine Dunn

Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language.

William Harcourt

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable. (Mark Forsyth)

'The Voice' has lots of singers who fit the 'Idol' mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.

Rob Sheffield

Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

Joshua Foer

I'd love to play a Bond villain. Yeah, I'd love to play a Bond villain. Everyone always says this to me; they always say, 'You've got to be a Bond villain', 'We're going to make you a Bond villain...' But they've never, ever approached me, I've never had a whiff of it. I think I'd love to play a Bond villain; I'd have great fun.

Eddie Marsan

i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.

Michelle Tea

I trust every single person around me, and if I feel even a whiff of uncertainty I won't have that person around me.

Leona Lewis

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Chapman Cohen

Give them a whiff of grapeshot.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The essence of Vassar is mythic. Today, despite much competition, it still figures in the public mind as the archetypal woman's college. [...] It signifies a certain je ne sais quoi; a whiff of luxury and the ineffable; plain thinking and high living. [...] For different people, in fact, at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner. The inscription on it varies with the era or with the ideas of the beholder and in the final sense does not matter - the flushed cheek and tensed arm are what count.

Mary McCarthy