Chaff Quotes

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. (Elbert Hubbard)
Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff. View quote
Adlai Stevenson II
We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff. View quote
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you. View quote
Gwendolyn Brooks
Well, well, perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am -- my friends get round me -- we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories -- and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I've been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. View quote
Kenneth Grahame
As soon seek roses in December, ice in June, Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff Believe a woman or an epitaph Or any other thing that's false Before you trust in critics. View quote
Lord Byron
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. View quote
William James
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away. View quote
George Eliot
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away. View quote
George Eliot
We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, - the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do - he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest. (Upton Sinclair)
No tyrant or usurper can ever invade our rights so long as we are united. Let Mr. Lincoln attempt it, and his party will scatter like chaff before the storm of popular indignation which will burst forth from one end of the country to the other. Secession or revolution will not be justified until legal and constitutional means of redress have been tried, and I can not believe that the time will ever come when these will prove inadequate.​. View quote
Sam Houston
Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together. View quote
Dinah Craik
She does not know how little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field. View quote
Paolo Bacigalupi
The vehicle of actions begin to ripen into fruit when the afflictions exist; not when the afflictions have been rooted out. As the rice in the paddy has the power to grow only so long as the chaff remains attached thereto and their seed power is not burnt up, not when the chaff has been removed, so also does the vehicle of actions grow into ripeness, when the afflictions are attached to it, and when is seed-power not has not been burnt up by intellection; not when the afflictions have been removed. View quote
Vyasa
But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say "comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it. View quote
Grace Paley
As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue. View quote
Christian Nestell Bovee
I can tell where my own shoe pinches me; and you must not think, sir, to catch old birds with chaff. View quote
Miguel de Cervantes
But yet that holden this tale a folly, As of a fox, or of a cock and hen, Taketh the morality, good men. For Saint Paul saith that all that written is, To our doctrine it is y-writ, ywis; Taketh the fruit, and let the chaff be still. View quote
Geoffrey Chaucer
As far as dreams were concerned-well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain's rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There's nothing special about that. It's not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems-that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility. View quote
Adam Roberts
The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff. The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore - namely, that really we have no claim on a long life ; that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span - for short it is at best. (Felix Adler)
Solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff. In fact, my definition of success itself is changing. View quote
Richard E. Byrd
Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. View quote
Dinah Craik
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less that God wishes - that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens - that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their course. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebush is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence - the fall of...leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche. View quote
Charles Spurgeon
📖 Chaff Proverbs