These scrap quotes will inspire you. Scrap, to abandon or throw away as worthless or a small piece or amount of something, especially one that is left over after the greater part has been used.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging scrap quotes, scrap sayings, and scrap proverbs.
Best Scrap Quotes
- “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.” ~ E. O. Wilson
- “We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “Scrap doesn’t come for free, we pay someone to make it.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Grab it while you can — grab every scrap of happiness while you can” ~ Noel Coward
- “Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love – you have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
- “This is the true joy of life-the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.” ~ Lauren Oliver
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“Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.” ~ Anzia Yezierska
- “Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
- “History is scraps of evidence joined by the glue of imagination.” ~ Subhash Kak
- “Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.” ~ Philip Larkin
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“If you’re cooking and not making mistakes, you’re not playing outside your safety zone. I don’t expect it all to be good. I have fat dogs because I scrap that stuff out the back door.” ~ Guy Fieri
- “The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” ~ George Orwell
- “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.” ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin
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“Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.” ~ Maggie Kuhn
- “My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.” ~ Alice Munro
- “People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.” ~ Bob Dylan
- “And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that [Christmas] has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!” ~ Charles Dickens
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“I’ve appointed a task force to take a fresh look at the color-code system and whether we should retain it, change it or scrap it.” ~ Janet Napolitano
- “We’re not going to scrap the budget and make up some totally new platform the day after the election. So it’s certainly willingness to compromise but we’re not going back on the fundamental things we’re running on in this campaign.” ~ Stephen Harper
- “The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.” ~ Dean Koontz
- “The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.” ~ Graham Greene
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“There’s a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years.” ~ Eddie Vedder
- “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge…. Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.” ~ Robertson Davies
- “If I don’t see a music video to it while writing it, I just scrap it immediately. It’s very visual.” ~ Melanie Martinez
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“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” ~ Zelda Fitzgerald
- “The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.” ~ Walt Whitman
- “Even more important maybe, or equally more important at least, is they don’t have to scrap for a living.” ~ David Talbot
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“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “Sunday, January 27, 1884. — There was another story in the paper a week or so since. A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left onto the cat’s plate. One day puss did not take his place punctually, but presently appeared with two mice, one of which it placed on its master’s plate, the other on its own.” ~ Beatrix Potter
- “Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made.” ~ Roger Caras
- “There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March” ~ Jane Hirshfield
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“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “The strongest iron, hardened in the fire, most often ends in scraps and shatterings.” ~ Sophocles
- “For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.” ~ Hilary Mantel
- “If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I’d say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way.” ~ Mary Roach
- “While snow the window-panes bedim,
The fire curls up a sunny charm,
Where, creaming o’er the pitcher’s rim,
The flowering ale is set to warm;
Mirth, full of joy as summer bees,
Sits there, its pleasures to impart,
And children, ‘tween their parent’s knees,
Sing scraps of carols o’er by heart.” ~ John Clare - “There has to be some limit to what lawyers can take from their clients. Otherwise, cagey attorneys end up with the lion’s share of the settlement and the victims end up with little more than scraps.” ~ Dennis Hastert
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“There is in every artist’s studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist’s discipline prevailed against his imagination.” ~ Robert Breault
- “Writing doesn’t come real easy to me. I couldn’t write a novel in a year. It wouldn’t be readable. I don’t let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.” ~ Charles Frazier
- “Dinner was meat – not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain – which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.” ~ Clive James
- “A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.” ~ William Faulkner
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“To find oneself living in an age of doubt is not such a curse. There is a kind of reverence in undertaking the quest for truth, even before the first scrap has been found.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.” ~ Cynthia Ozick
- “Sometimes it is really hard to sit in the single and go for a row. I think this is really normal. I, like probably a lot of people, burn out every once in a while. What I have learned from my own experience is that there are two reasons for it to happen. It is that I am either physically tired or mentally tired. If either of these are the case, the wisest decision is to blow off practice. Blowing off practice is healthy. I didn’t understand that until I was so burnt out that I wanted to make scrap material out of my single and my oars.” ~ Xeno Muller
- “This is a government which is proposing to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of households right around Australia. And for what? To make not a scrap of difference to the environment any time in the next 1000 years.” ~ Tony Abbott
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“Sometimes I create a character from a scrap – a mere mention that has been left behind.” ~ Sara Sheridan
- “For taxpayers, however, it’s [pay equity] a rip-off. And it has nothing to do with gender. Both men and women taxpayers will pay additional money to both men and women in the civil service. That’s why the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law.” ~ Stephen Harper
- “My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.” ~ Richard Russo
- “We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.” ~ Lydia Davis
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“I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.” ~ Rich Mullins
- “You need to take risks, you never know if the end results will be beautiful or strange, you need to be instantaneous, listening to every moments, without missing a scrap of the music, even if you play a rest!” ~ Brian Blade
- “I think I have signed some scrap of paper for every man, woman and child in the United States. What do they do with all those scraps of paper with my signature on it?” ~ Vida Blue
- “The writer gleans wind scraps; he listens wherever he can. Each day is full of instances; what counts, as with all stimuli, is the sympathetic response.” ~ Nicholas Delbanco
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“Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote.” ~ George Sanders
- “Trump will have to take up juggling if he goes ahead and scraps the agreement with Iran and at the same time, seeks to avoid alienating Russia, and quite possibly France and Germany. These European countries are already nervous about what the Trump presidency means with respect to the future of the post-World War II international order that has essentially kept the peace on the continent since 1945. This order is far from perfect, of course, and under pressure from other sources, especially due to the rise of chauvinism and European Trumpism.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone’s been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice – somewhat contrived, I admit – to write the man’s name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: “That finishes the incident, and so far as I’m concerned, that fellow.” The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “No, now he didn’t want to let himself get too close because he knew it wasn’t going to last. Good stuff never lasted. Change would come and wipe it away, and what was the point? It hurt too much every time it was ripped away and he was getting tired of losing pieces of himself. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be much left, just scraps of gristle and bone without feeling. He didn’t need that” ~ Steve Perry
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“Through love scraps of copper are turned to gold.” ~ Rumi
- “I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.” ~ David Ebershoff
- “The tories major announcement was to scrap the human rights act, because and I quote ‘people get very frustrated with human rights’.” ~ Tim Farron
- “At some glad moment was it nature’s choice to dower a scrap of sunset with a voice?” ~ Edgar Fawcett
