Delicacy Quotes - Page 2

• Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

  John Adams

  Names, Hypocrisy, Suffering

  "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" by John Adams, teachingamericanhistory.org. 1765.

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• This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

  Edward Thorndike

  Animal, Men, Numbers

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• There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

  Jean Genet

  Flower, Jail, Fragility

  Jean Genet (1973). “The Thief's Journal”

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• The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Art, Practice, Undisputed

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 653-54, Curiosities of Literature, 1922.

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• This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.

  Walter Murch

  Jobs, Editing, People

  Interview with Michael Wohl, www.peachpit.com.

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• The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

  Naomi Klein

  Powerful, Nihilism, Fast Food

  "It's greed, not ideology, that rules the White House" by Naomi Klein, www.theguardian.com. December 22, 2003.

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• I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.

  M. F. K. Fisher

  Pain, War, Believe

  Joan Reardon, M.F.K. Fisher (2014). “The Art of Eating”, p.385, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Pain, Moving, Writing

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “An Unspoken Hunger”, p.55, Vintage

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• Mendelssohn I consider the first musician of the day; I doff my hat to him as my superior. He plays with everything, especially with the grouping of the instruments in the orchestra, but with such ease, delicacy and art, with such mastery throughout.

  Robert Schumann

  Art, Play, Musician

  Robert Schumann (1986). “Schumann: a self-portrait in his own words”

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• The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Play, House

  "Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson".

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• The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Poetry, Achievement, Mind

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• Friendship, love, and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence, to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.

  Novalis

  Perfect, Silence, Rare Moments

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• A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?

  Jonathan Swift

  Funny, Humorous, May

  Jonathan Swift (1861). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Copious Notes and Additions, and a Memoir of the Author”, p.22

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• After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.

  Jerry Saltz

  Years, Land, Gnarly

  New York Volume 43, Issues 14-21, New York Magazine Company, p. 1, 2010.

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• HOG, n. A bird remarkable for the catholicity of its appetite and serving to illustrate that of ours. Among the Mahometans and Jews, the hog is not in favor as an article of diet, but is respected for the delicacy and the melody of its voice. It is chiefly as a songster that the fowl is esteemed; the cage of him in full chorus has been known to draw tears from two persons at once. The scientific name of this dicky-bird is _Porcus Rockefelleri_. Mr. Rockefeller did not discover the hog, but it is considered his by right of resemblance.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Names, Two, Voice

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2419, Delphi Classics

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• The dependant who cultivates delicacy in himself very little consults his own tranquillity.

  Samuel Johnson

  Littles, Tranquillity

  Samuel Johnson (1787). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Together with His Life, and Notes on His Lives of the Poets, by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. In Eleven Volumes ...”, p.55

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• Weak men often from the very principle of their weakness derive a certain susceptibility; delicacy and taste which render them, in those particulars, much superior to men of stronger and more consistent minds, who laugh at them.

  Sir Fulke Greville

  Men, Weak Man, Laughing

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• Mr. Bumpy from Bump in the Night was this funky little guy who lived under the bed and thought eating dust bunnies was a delicacy. He was as cool as he could be, and ate dirty socks.

  Jim Cummings

  Dirty, Night, Dust

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• My love affair with nature is so deep that I am not satisfied with being a mere onlooker, or nature tourist. I crave a more real and meaningful relationship. The spicy teas and tasty delicacies I prepare from wild ingredients are the bread and wine in which I have communion and fellowship with nature, and with the Author of that nature.

  Euell Gibbons

  Meaningful, Real, Wine

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• We reject certain food because it is rotten. Certain food we can see is fresh. But there is this creative space between fresh food and rotten food where most of human culture's most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist.

  Sandor Katz

  Creative Space, Achievement, Culture

  "'Fermentation': When Food Goes Bad But Stays Good". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. June 13, 2012.

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• In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Profound, Ends, Abyss

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2017). “The Essential Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals”, p.46, Chartwell Books

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• Ho, Ho, Sir Surgeon. You are too delicate to tell the man that he is ill. You hope to heal the sick without their knowing it. You therefore flatter them. And what happens? They laugh at you. They dance upon their own graves and at last they die. Your delicacy is cruelty, your flatteries are poisons you are a murderer. Shall we keep men in a fool's paradise? Shall we lull them into soft slumber from which they will awake in hell? Are we to become helpers of their damnation by our smooth speeches? In the name of God we will not.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Names, Knowing

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• Neither refinement nor delicacy is indispensable to produce elegance.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Elegance, Produce, Refinement

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• It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuite or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgement, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing: for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Friendship, Character, Men

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• It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

  Ivan Illich

  Art, Learning, People

  Ivan Illich (1974). “Mission and Midwifery: Essays on Missionary Formation”

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