Elegance Quotes - Page 8

• The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.

  George Polya

  Independent, Ideas, Numbers

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• Elegance of manner is the outgrowth of refined and exalted sense.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Exalted, Refined

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• In order to create an image almost similar to that of a pencil case standing up and walking, I try to eliminate all excess by cutting. I have the feeling that this process (of "cutting off") is linked in some way to "elegance". Elegance and so-called "eliminating excess", or the beauty that remains after excess has beeen eliminated...

  Yohji Yamamoto

  Cutting, Order, Feelings

  "The Past, the Feminine, the Vain in Talking to Myself" by Kiyokazu Washida, Ch. 3, 2002.

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• Money doesn't buy elegance. You can take an inexpensive sheath, add a pretty scarf, gray shoes, and a wonderful bag, and it will always be elegant.

  Carolina Herrera

  Shoes, Add, Bags

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• Intellectual elegance [is] a mind that is continually refining itself with education and knowledge. Intellectual elegance is the opposite of intellectual vulgarity.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Opposites, Intellectual, Mind

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• I think that there is an air of experience and aesthetic sophistication that weaves in with the amateur aspects of the film [Dream of Life]; it gives the film a certain elegance.

  Patti Smith

  Dream, Thinking, Air

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Concision in art is a necessity and an elegance. The verbose painter bores: who will get rid of all these trimmings?

  Edouard Manet

  Art, Trimming, Painter

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• Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Song, Pain, Struggle

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• One argument against open systems is that they become open to everything, good and bad. Like a Richard Meier skyscraper, the anal retentive, Bauhaus elegance of the Mac does prevent the loose ends and confusion of a less sterile environment. But it also prevents fertility. Apple's development must come from within.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Apples, Confusion, Doe

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• Quality means conformance to requirements, not elegance.

  Phil Crosby

  Mean, Quality, Requirements

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• Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.

  William S. Burroughs

  Cute, Cat, Self

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• He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

  Yukio Mishima

  Pain, Darkness, Age

  Yukio Mishima (1990). “Spring Snow”, Vintage

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• Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Ignorant, May, Never Forget

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• Fashion design is so diverse. It does not have clear identities as before with Balenciaga, Chanel, Cardin, Courreges. Design is about being recognised without a label. Elegance alone is not sufficient.

  Pierre Cardin

  Fashion, Design, Identity

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• It is spring time now! While the world looks for a new war to fight, you look for a cherry blossom to watch! Let the stupid seeks the violence; you seek the elegance!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Spring, War, Stupid

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• Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

  Philip Levine

  Simple, Naked, Meter

  Philip Levine (2011). “The Simple Truth: Poems”, p.62, Knopf

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• If a poor house is well kept, or a poor girl well groomed, there is elegance if not beauty. If good people should come upon hard times, why should they immediately give up on themselves?

  Zicheng Hong

  Girl, Giving Up, Hard Times

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• Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures; since the productions of nature are the materials of art. Under the Roman empire, the labour of an industrious and ingenious people was variously, but incessantly employed, in the service of the rich. In their dress, their table, their houses, and their furniture, the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour, whatever could soothe their pride or gratify their sensuality.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Pride, Agriculture

  Edward Gibbon (1841). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1: With Maps”, p.33

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• Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Habit, Refinement, Certain

  Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1851). “De Quincey's Writings: Life and manners; from The autobiography of an English opium-eater. 1851”, p.14

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• While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.

  Francis Crick

  Simplicity, Tools, Use

  "What Mad Pursuit". Book by Francis Crick, 1988.

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• ...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Hard Work, Opportunity, Simple

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• Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Race, Creative, Orbit

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• The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Degrees, Exactness

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• And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,
  Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay
  And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:
  I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

  William Butler Yeats

  Women, Phoenix, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.127, Wordsworth Editions

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