Refined Quotes - Page 8

• People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It's all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that's a beautiful thing.

  Nadia Giosia

  Beautiful, Smart, Thinking

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• The thing about playing percussion is that you can create all these emotions that can be sometimes beautiful, sometimes really ugly, or sometimes sweet, sometimes as big as King Kong and so on. And so there can be a real riot out there, or it can be so refined.

  Evelyn Glennie

  Beautiful, Sweet, Kings

  "Beat of a Different Drummer". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. June 14, 1999.

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• Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence.

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton

  Contentment, Indolence

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• Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please, With too much spirit to be e'er at ease, With too much quickness ever to be taught, With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.

  Alexander Pope

  Wise, Pain, Women

  Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The poems of Alexander Pope”, p.91

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• My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

  Oscar Wilde

  Girl, Sweet, Nice

  Oscar Wilde (1994). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.21, Heinemann

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• A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

  Mao Zedong

  Party, Writing, Chinese Revolution

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.13, Lulu.com

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• The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Views, Lasts

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.123, Routledge

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• [A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

  Paul Tillich

  Mean, Reality, Men

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• When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

  Flann O'Brien

  Sleep, Men, Blood

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• One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Profound, Mouths, Littles

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.243, Modern Library

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• How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

  Ian Mcewan

  Self, Guilt, Rosary

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• All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.

  Virginia Woolf

  Distance, Peaceful, Looks

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.128, Virginia Woolf

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• While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

  Horace Greeley

  Historical, Liberty, Bankers

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• You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

  Dorothy Parker

  Jobs, Book, Reading

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

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• Every accomplishment, every refined talent, every useful attainment in mathematics, music, and in all sciences, and art belong to the Saints.

  Brigham Young

  Music, Art, Accomplishment

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• American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

  Fanny Kemble

  Animal, Men, Stupidity

  Fanny Kemble (1890). “Further Records, 1848-1883: A Series of Letters”

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• If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

  Miles Franklin

  Couple, Sadness, Piano

  Miles Franklin (2009). “My Brilliant Career”, p.456, The Floating Press

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• In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Paris, Consistency, Style

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

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• Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

  Henry Martyn

  Beautiful, Art, Pride

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• Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is refined by religion. In its most advanced state it takes the title of judgment. Hume quotes Fontenelle's ingenious distinction between the common watch that tells the hours, and the delicately constructed one that marks the seconds and smallest differences of time.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Differences, Taste, Titles

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• Corporations never actually mention 'money'; that would be vulgar. They prefer such words as 'turnover,' 'profit,' 'salary,' 'revenue,' 'budget,' 'premium,' and 'savings,' all much more refined.

  Corinne Maier

  Business, Salary, Would Be

  Corinne Maier (2007). “Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay”, p.19, Vintage

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• There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former is refined by art and learning, improved by the charms of social intercourse, and corrected by a just regard to economy, to health, and to reputation, it is productive of the greatest part of the happiness of private life.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Two, History

  Edward Gibbon (2015). “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire V1: the History Focus”, p.348, 谷月社

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• In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.

  Marcella Hazan

  Italian, Long, Kitchen

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• All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.

  Michael Pollan

  Worry, Trying, Fiber

  Source: indianapublicmedia.org

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• As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Men, Artist

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.281, Courier Corporation

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