Elegant Quotes - Page 8

• Roy Blount is so funny, and he sounds like he's just talking, and the next thing you know he has tossed off
  an essay as elegant and intricately structured as a birdsong. His ear for American speech is better than anybody's.

  Ian Frazier

  Talking, Sound, Ears

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• Imagine a revised edition of Shakespeare... a big, thick book with an elegant cover... You open it and find that there are no pages, just an empty box of space. On the back wall of the box is a small mirror. You look into it, see yourself, and now you know all you need to know about Shakespeare.

  Carter Ratcliff

  Wall, Book, Mirrors

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• I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

  William Baziotes

  Wall, Painting, Ancient

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• It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Matter, Theorems

  "Adventures of a Mathematician". Book by Stanislaw Ulam, 3rd edition. Chapter 15: "Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science", p. 274, 1991.

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• Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism... It is the Fashion to be a wit... one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.

  James Branch Cabell

  Fashion, Men, Criticism

  "The Comedies of William Congreve". William and Mary College Monthly, Volume V (p. 41), September 1897; later quoted in "James Branch Cabell at William and Mary: the Education of a Novelist" by William L. Godshalk in "The William and Mary Review", No. 5, 1967, and in "Kalki", Volume II, No. 4, whole No. 8, 1968.

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• The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religious, Pluralism Is, Political

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.104, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• As a child, I saw this beautiful film, Dracula's Daughter, and it was with Gloria Holden and was a sequel to the original Dracula. It was all about this beautiful daughter of Dracula who was an artist in London, and she felt drinking blood was a curse. It had beautiful, sensitive scenes in it, and that film mesmerized me. It established to me what vampires were—these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview With the Vampire. I didn't do a lot of research.

  Anne Rice

  Beautiful, Daughter, Children

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• Logic should no longer be considered an elegant and learned accomplishment; it should take its place as an indispensable study for every well-informed person.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Accomplishment, Logic, Study

  William Stanley Jevons (1870). “Elementary Lessons in Logic: Deductive and Inductive : with Copious Questions and Examples and a Vocabulary of Logical Terms”, p.6

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• Elegant in its simplicity and practicality, Lee has distilled many powerful leadership strategies into the lessons many of us learned as children. They are no less relevant to our working lives. At its core, Creating Magic is a collection of stories that reminds us to demonstrate care and respect for every member of the team and to focus our efforts not our ourselves but on the people we lead.

  George Bodenheimer

  Children, Powerful, Team

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• Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.

  Sheldon Richman

  Education, School, Mean

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• The scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. It is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified-the scientific method.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Names, Scientific Method, Foundation

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• Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel.

  John Dalton

  Wise, Loyalty, Fall

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• Take advantage of the gracious condescension of the elegant calf's kidney, multiply its metamorphoses: you can without giving it any offence, call it the chameleon of cuisine.

  Emmanuel des Essarts

  Food, Giving, Cooking

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• My films have sort of amateur elements, a naive quality, yet they have some sophisticated quality, sometimes the rhythm is kinda elegant.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Quality, Elements, Film

  Source: louderthanwar.com

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• Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Men, Ease

  Samuel Johnson (1800). “The Idler: With Additional Essays”, p.122

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• I do enjoy wearing Japanese and Italian clothing. I also enjoy my blue jeans or tennis shorts and running shoes. I like driving a Porsche because it is an elegant machine and it is a very beautiful experience to drive it. It's magnificently made.

  Frederick Lenz

  Beautiful, Running, Italian

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• Only massage therapists seemed to be informed about trigger points and referred pain, and only exceptional individuals among them (in my own experience at least) were treating trigger points effectively. What's more, the burgeoning variety of unproven modalities offered by massage therpaists gave the profession such an aura of flakiness that the elegant science of myofascial pain got unfairly confused with treatments whose results could easily be attributed to the placebo effect.

  Clair Davies

  Pain, Confused, Placebo Effect

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• I feel like I'm back visiting an old grandmother. She's crotchety and eccentric, but also elegant, and anyone who doesn't fall in love with her has no imagination.

  Tony Lema

  Falling In Love, Grandmother, Golf

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• We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Mean, Stories, Earth

  Ursula Goodenough (2000). “The Sacred Depths of Nature”, p.75, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

  Erik Naggum

  Numbers, Might, Elegance

  "Filk, puns, and other time wasting". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. October 25, 1998.

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• A cat is a regency gentleman--elegant of pose, exquisite of manner, with spotless linen and an enthusiasm for bare knuckle fights, rampaging love affairs, duels by moonlight and the singing of glees. He expects immaculate service from his domestic staff, and possesses a range of invective that would make a navy blanch.

  Pam Brown

  Cat, Fighting, Men

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• A feast not profuse but elegant; more of salt [refinement] than of expense.

  Lord Byron

  Salt, Refinement, Expenses

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• Nima Shirazi's is an important progressive voice in the Iran debate in the West, often deconstructing the myths (and sometimes propaganda) we commonly encounter in the mainstream media. With succinct and elegant prose, and with no axe to grind, he exposes the hypocrisy of Western attitudes toward Iran.

  Hooman Majd

  Attitude, Media, Iran

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• There is no quality of the mind, or of the body, that so instantaneously and irresistibly captivates, as wit. An elegant writer has observed that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. He that deserts the latter, and gives himself up entirely to the guidance of the former, will certainly fall into many pitfalls and quagmires, like him who walks by flashes of lightning, rather than the steady beams of the sun.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fall, Giving, Wife

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.49

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• Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

  John Dryden

  May, Poet

  John Dryden (1830). “Virgil: the Eclogues”, p.231

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