Tidy Quotes:

For no one loves the bearer of bad tidings.

- Sophocles

source: "The Antigone of Sophocles".

topic: Men, Tidy, Tidings

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

- George Henry Lewes

source: George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

topic: Literature, World, Tidy, Tidings

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

- Mark Twain

topic: Soul, Literature, Dresses, Careless, Neat And Tidy

After every war someone has to tidy up.

- Wislawa Szymborska

topic: War, Tidy

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

- William Morris

source: Hopes and Fears for Art "The Beauty of Life" (1882)

topic: Life, Happiness, Beauty, Life Is Simple, Spring Cleaning

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

- Jean Anouilh

topic: Order, Leaving, Way, Tidy

Tidiness is a virtue, symmetry is often a constituent of beauty.

- Winston Churchill

source: Winston Churchill (1949). “The Sinews of Peace: Post-war Speeches”

topic: Philosophy, Virtue, Symmetry, Neatness, Constituents

I can't focus when there's too many things around. Whenever I used to go to the office, I used to always say, 'Tidy up.'

- Zaha Hadid

topic: Office, Focus, Used, Tidy

I'm a tidy sort of bloke. I don't like chaos. I kept records in the record rack, tea in the tea caddy, and pot in the pot box.

- George Harrison

topic: Tea, Records, Chaos, Tidy

Reputations rise and fall almost as regularly as the tides.

- Peter Benchley

topic: Fall, Tides, Reputation, Rise And Fall, Tidy

It was Tottenham at home. I thought: 'Please don't go on about Tottenham, we all know what Tottenham are about. They are nice and tidy but we'll f****** do them.' Alex came in and said: 'Lads, it's only Tottenham.' And that was it! Brilliant!

- Roy Keane

source: "Roy Keane says he and Alex Ferguson were on same wavelength at United" by James Riach, www.theguardian.com. October 20, 2014.

topic: Football, Nice, Home, Tottenham, Tidy

If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you're going.

- Roland Joffe

topic: Football, Ideas, Popcorn, Watching Football, Tidy

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

- Carl Sagan

topic: Space, Overcoming, Tiny, Pale Blue Dot, Tidy

If ever there were a true "just as I am" church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings quite yet, if ever there was a group where everyone was loved and no one pretended - we could not make enough room inside the building.

- John Ortberg

source: John Ortberg (2009). “The Me I Want to Be”, p.202, Zondervan

topic: Love, Community, Age, Brokenness, Neat And Tidy

You are a terror, aren't you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won't be able to find the things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.'So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed hearts somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. 'Tidying up is what I'm here for!' she shouted at Howl. 'Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,' Howl said.

- Diana Wynne Jones

source: Diana Wynne Jones (2002). “Wizard's Castle”

topic: Heart, Thinking, Soul, Tidy, Tidying Up

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.

- Lee Daniels

source: Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

topic: Two, Style, Three, Neat And Tidy, Tidy

One way to organize your thoughts is to tidy up, even if it's in places where it makes no sense at all.

- Ursus Wehrli

topic: Way, Organize, Tidy

I'm often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.

- Mona Hatoum

topic: People, Identity, Culture, Otherness, Tidy

Here I am, I still go on, you know, like the tides.

- Angela Lansbury

topic: Goes On, Tides, Stills, Tidy

Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.

- Lynn Abbey

topic: Editors, Feet, Tides, Anthology, Tidy

Yes, I do like to be in control. I do like everything to be laid out, to know what I'm doing. I'm very impatient. I like things done yesterday, which is probably a fault of mine. I like things to be neat and tidy and organised. I say what I want and show what I want and I keep things private.

- Alan Shearer

topic: Yesterday, Done, Want, Organised, Neat And Tidy

Life is a tide; float on it. Go down with it and go up with it, but be detached. Then it is not difficult.

- Prem Rawat

source: Speech at Fernbank, London, February, 1972.

topic: Tides, Life Is, Difficult, Detached, Tidy

Experience shows that great enterprises seldom end with a tidy and satisfactory flourish. Together, we are doing our best to re-establish peace and civil order in the Gulf region, and to help those members of civil and ethnic minorities who continue to suffer through no fault of their own. If we succeed, our military success will have achieved its true objective.

- Queen Elizabeth II

topic: Military, Order, Suffering, Tidy

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

- Tom Robbins

source: Tom Robbins (2003). “Skinny Legs and All”, p.356, Bantam

topic: Life, Religious, Horse, Dark Horse, Unpredictability

You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.

- Samuel Alexander

topic: Self, Personality, Desire, Tidy

It's [a miscarriage] all very thief-in-the-night. No one really knows what to say. You go into the emergency room, you think you're going to be a mum and you walk out empty. It's all neat and tidy, there's this potential being in your life and you're empty - all cleaned up and put back together, but completely shattered.

- Tori Amos

topic: Miscarriage, Night, Thinking, Emergency Room, Neat And Tidy

There is nothing so good as a burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.

- Alfred Hitchcock

topic: Funny, Simple, Sea, Burial, Tidy

The growing tide of anti-Semitism shocks the conscious of everyone who values freedom, and the ugly, hateful acts particularly stain the character of democracies where liberty and religious freedom are supposed to be respected.

- Mike Ferguson

topic: Religious, Character, Liberty, Anti Semitism, Tidy

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

- Diablo Cody

topic: Reality, People, Redemption, Tidy

I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.

- Gerald Seymour

source: Source: www.theguardian.com

topic: Writing, Editors, Trying, Repetitive, Clumsy

The very word "change" has changed. When I was young--and not just because I was young--we looked forward with confident impatience to change. Planned, controlled, beneficent change would continue to clear slums, sweep up the remains of empire, raise living and educational standards, tidy away--firmly but kindly--the last aboriginals who still raved about martial glory or the pride of wealth. Now, as it seems to me, change is set almost exclusively in the minor key, change seen overwhelmingly as loss.

- Neal Ascherson

source: Neal Ascherson (1988). “Games with Shadows”, Hudson Annex

topic: Change, Educational, Pride, Tidy

I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

- Kelly Link

topic: Jobs, Cutting, Thinking, Tidy

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure - full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

- Henry Bromell

source: "Northern Exposure". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 1990 - 1995.

topic: Life, Pain, Heart, Business Life, Bad Life

What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even have to earn.

- Madeleine L'Engle

topic: Christian, Believe, Broken, Lashing Out, Tidy

So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

- Diane Ackerman

topic: Book, Order, Ideas, Cascade, Tidy

[On husband Phil Donahue:] The man does not know the meaning of the word tidy. He asked me one day, 'Where are my shoes?' So I asked him, 'Where are my shoes?' I don't know what it is about men. They think that women have radar attached to our uteruses.

- Marlo Thomas

topic: Husband, Men, Thinking, Uterus, Tidy

How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - thats not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.

- Sheldon Whitehouse

source: "Sheldon Whitehouse: God Won’t Save Us From Climate Catastrophe" by Michael McAuliff, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 8, 2013.

topic: Humility, Self, Miracle, Tidy

The Germans are often too bureaucratic, too fixated on rules and not risk-oriented enough. And some of their officials have the feeling that they need to make everything in the cityscape look nice and pretty as quickly as possible. That was particularly apparent in the former East Germany after reunification. Then cities sometimes get a bit too neat and tidy.

- Charles Landry

source: Source: www.spiegel.de

topic: Nice, East Germany, Neat And Tidy, Cityscapes, Reunification

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

- Melvyn Bragg

source: Melvyn Bragg (2013). “The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language”, p.51, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

topic: Dust, Patterns, Neat, Tidy

Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

- V. S. Naipaul

source: V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Half a Life”, p.74, Pan Macmillan

topic: Neat And Tidy, Tidy

I very much regret, in appearing before you at your request, to address you on the present state of the country, and the prospect before us, that I can bring you no good tidings.

- Robert Toombs

source: Robert Augustus Toombs (1860). “Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs: On the Crisis. Delivered Before the Georgia Legislature, December 7, 1860”, p.3

topic: Country, Regret, Addresses, Tidy

In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.

- Andy Rooney

topic: Book, Surroundings, Throwing, Tidy

I can't cook. I don't have the right brain for it, somehow. I can't walk into a room and tidy it up. I get distracted. I pick up one thing and I start looking at it. And my cooking is truly heinous.

- Sophie Kinsella

topic: Cooking, Brain, Rooms, Tidy

Military operations cannot be tidy or free of friction - particularly in a coalition whose contributing nations see the campaign through national prisms.

- Mike Jackson

topic: Military, Campaigns, Operations, Military Operations, Friction

I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing - my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes.

- Gary Kemp

source: "What I see in the mirror" by Gary Kemp, www.theguardian.com. June 15, 2012.

topic: Dad, Thinking, Class, Presenting Yourself, Tidy

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

- Dennis Lehane

topic: Needs, World, Connections, Neat And Tidy, Tidy

Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way. If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why - given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again - that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.

- George Will

topic: Running, President, Way, Offshore, Tidy

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

- Jonathan Lethem

topic: Japan, America, Mazes, Neat And Tidy, Wandering Around

The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don't fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don't need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.

- Francis Chan

source: Francis Chan, Preston Sprinkle (2011). “Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We've Made Up”, p.88, David C Cook

topic: Trying, Clay, Needs, Tidy

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

- Linda Grant

topic: Coffee, Book, Imagination, Pleading, Tidy