Elegant Quotes - Page 14

• We endeavour to employ only symmetrical figures, such as should not only be an aid to reasoning, through the sense of sight, but should also be to some extent elegant in themselves.

  John Venn

  Science, Sight, Use

  "Symbolic Logic". book by John Venn, 1881.

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• Tall, elegant, vital, scornful. A man like that could rock a woman to her very core.

  Margaret Way

  Men, Rocks, Tall

  Margaret Way (2010). “Strategy for Marriage”, p.46, Harlequin

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• One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

  Martin Gardner

  Education, Math, Numbers

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• No elegant woman follows fashion slavishly.

  Christian Dior

  Fashion, Elegant Woman

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• Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

  Edward Witten

  Nature, Simplicity, Physics

  "Viewpoints on String Theory: Edward Witten". "NOVA" interview, www.pbs.org. July 2003.

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• To the degree it is efficient, a spaceship is elegant and beautiful.

  Vanna Bonta

  Beautiful, Degrees, Spaceships

  "The Cosmos as a Poem". Essay by Vanna Bonta, 2010.

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• Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Life, What Matters

  "Phenomenal: 12 Pearls of Wisdom From Maya Angelou" by Tai Goodwin, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 29, 2014.

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• This is an elegant hotel! Room service has an unlisted number.

  Henny Youngman

  Funny, Humor, Numbers

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• A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

  Francis Collins

  Nice, Dna, Viruses

  "Francis Collins on Making Life". Interview with Robert Krulwich, www.pbs.org. October 1, 2005.

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• An elegant woman should be able to do her marketing without making housewives laugh. Those who laugh are always right.

  Coco Chanel

  Laughing, Marketing, Able

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• But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

  Amor Towles

  Civilization, Names, Ifs And

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• I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Country, Flower, Book

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• Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

  Neil Gaiman

  Morning, Men, Tangled

  Neil Gaiman (2009). “Anansi Boys”, p.26, Harper Collins

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• In Nonviolent Communication you will find an amazingly effective language for saying what's on your mind and in your heart. Like so many essential and elegant systems, it's simple on the surface, challenging to use in the heat of the moment and powerful in its results.

  Vicki Robin

  Powerful, Communication, Heart

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• ...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

  Louise Erdrich

  Beautiful, Humble, Spiders

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• Heather A. Slomski's stories are downright addictive. I kept promising myself to turn off the light after just one more, and then breaking that promise, beguiled by her cool, measured prose and by the surprises, tensions, and uncanny encounters simmering beneath its elegant surface.

  Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Light, Heathers, Promise

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• I think I would love a shot at remaking 'The Philadelphia Story,' as daunting as it is. I still think it's fantastic. I love the '30s comedies because they're allowed to be both comic and elegant, and the women are so complicated in them.

  Michael Patrick King

  Thinking, Philadelphia, Stories

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• It's just an old alley cat that has followed us all the way home. It hasn't a star on its forehead, or a silky satiny coat. No proud tiger stripes, no dainty tread, no elegant velvet throat. It's a splotchy, blotchy city cat, not a pretty cat, a rough little bag of old bones. 'Beauty,' we shall call you. 'Beauty' come in.

  Eve Merriam

  Stars, Home, Cat

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• The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

  Rick Yancey

  Beautiful, Queens, Kings

  Rick Yancey (2014). “The Infinite Sea: The Second Book of the 5th Wave”, p.31, Penguin

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• Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Beautiful, Technology, Demand

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

  Salvador Dali

  Women, Hair, Arms

  Salvador Dali (2013). “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, p.178, Courier Corporation

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• I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Writing, Thinking

  "Bird by Bird". Book by Anne Lamott, 1994.

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• Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Pride, Power, Men

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• How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

  Carl Sagan

  God, Science, Religion

  "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space". Book by Carl Sagan, 1994.

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• My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me, although he had no beard. He had the appearance of a very elegant British-looking man.

  Michael Haneke

  Father, Men, Good Relationship

  "Michael Haneke: 'There is as much evil in us as there is good'". Interview With Elizabeth Day, www.theguardian.com. October 24, 2009.

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