Exquisite Quotes - Page 14

• It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!

  Charles Dickens

  Beautiful, Death, Memories

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• Exquisite beauty resides rather in the female form than face, where it is also more lasting.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Beauty, Female, Faces

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• A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor . . . The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

  Norman Mailer

  Book, Novelists, Genius

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• It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Eye, Imperfect Things, Poetry

  "L'art romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.

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• Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just as mightily in the service of wonder and the two elements are complementary, not independent or opposed. The thought fills me with awe - a mechanical contraption that could fit in the back of a pickup truck, traveling through space for twelve years, dodging around four giant bodies and their associated moons, and finally sending exquisite photos across more than four light-hours of space from the farthest planet in our solar system.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Independent, Moon, Light

  "Bully for Brontosaurus". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "The Horn of Triton", pp. 508 - 509, 1991.

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• The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.

  Vera Kistiakowsky

  Science, Order, Design

  "Evolution through the Back Door". www.freerepublic.com. June 15, 2003.

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• The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.

  Leon Uris

  Prayer, Men, Discipline

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• Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Retirement, Home, Life Is

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• So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing, Growing, Horns

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1992). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.376, University of Missouri Press

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• The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Nature, Experts, Life Is

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• Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.

  George Eliot

  Love, Memories, Blessing

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.693, Oxford Paperbacks

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• I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes at the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel!

  Sally Carrighar

  Real, Flower, Names

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• Mr Palliser was one of those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give to her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and best security for the future.

  Anthony Trollope

  Giving, Progress, Body

  1864 Can You Forgive Her?, ch.24.

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• When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes. Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms. There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

  Alan Lightman

  Heart, People, Brain

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Dance for Two: Essays”, p.42, Pantheon

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• Made up of corallitic accretions and painful increments, lit on rare occasions by bolts of revelation, and then stuffed behind the wainscotting to grope in the mouse-turd dust, art is the equivalent of athlete's foot, at best an exquisite itch, at worst an excuse to stop walking. On the emotional side, it is either masturbation with a hockey glove or a night beneath the sliding moon that shames Eros.

  Harold Town

  Art, Athlete, Hockey

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• Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

  Bernard Malamud

  Writing, Ideas, Reform

  "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life". The New York Times, March 20, 1988.

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• When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Morning, Lovely, Ordinary

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• A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

  Rose Macaulay

  Freedom, Hot, Austerity

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.101, A&C Black

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• It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

  George Santayana

  Stupid, Ideas, Brain

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.392, 谷月社

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• [Adoption] could turn you into an exquisite comedian. Ask Richard Pryor's ghost.

  Keegan-Michael Key

  Adoption, Comedian, Ghost

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. Theyare loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them.

  E. B. White

  Honesty, Thinking, Sorrow

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• A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Reading, Delight, Dull

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• Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name.... You mustallow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Running, Drinking, Loss

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• A gentleman's taste in dress is upon principle, the avoidance of all things extravagant. It consists in the quiet simplicity of exquisite neatness; but, as the neatness must be a neatness in fashion, employ the best tailor; pay him ready money, and, on the whole, you wi11 find him the cheapest.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Fashion, Simplicity, Gentleman

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• There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Kindness, Thoughtful, Manners

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