Style Quotes - Page 11

• A change of style is a change of meaning.

  Wallace Stevens

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• The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.

  William Cowper

  Sports, Reading, Giving

  William Cowper (1855). “The complete poetical works of William Cowper, with life and critical notice of his writings”, p.113

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• Fine declamation does not consist in flowery periods, delicate allusions of musical cadences, but in a plain, open, loose style, where the periods are long and obvious, where the same thought is often exhibited in several points of view.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Views, Long, Musical

  Oliver Goldsmith (1856). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Comprising His Poems, Comedies, Essays, and Vicar of Wakefield”, p.281

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• It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.

  Georges Braque

  Creativity, Mean, Giving

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• I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Sleep, Ideas, Giving

  Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.297, Simon and Schuster

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• We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.

  Bruce Barton

  Failure, Grace, Pay

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• An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Language, Shyness

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.17, University of Chicago Press

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• When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him - these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter - as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint.

  John Berger

  Mean, Opportunity, Challenges

  John Berger (2011). “Sense of Sight”, p.203, Vintage

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• No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Dark, Echoes, Cities

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “Collected Poems 1931-74”, p.169, Faber & Faber

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• I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized 'realistic' story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its 'realist' style.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Reality, Thinking, Order

  "Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist's Maze". Book by Thomas Allen Nelson, p. 14, 2000.

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• You must not think that a satiric style allows of scandalous and brutish words; the better sort abhor scurrility.

  Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

  Thinking, Satire, Scandalous

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• A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

  J. B. Priestley

  School, Men, Speech

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• Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of object, meaning, and style. This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.

  Paul Klee

  Dream, Mind, Bears

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• It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

  Ben Shahn

  Teaching, Voice, Personality

  BEN SHAHN (1957). “THE SHAPE OF CONTENT”

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• Martial music has sudden and strongly marked transitions from one note to another which that style of music requires; while in that which is intended to move the softer passions, the notes imperceptibly melt into one another.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Moving, Passion, Transition

  Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Illustr. by explanatory notes & plates by John Burnet”, p.59

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• The avenues in my neighborhood are Pride, Covetousness and Lust; the cross streets are Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I live over on Sloth, and the style on our street is to avoid the other thoroughfares.

  John Chancellor

  Anger, Pride, Envy

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• The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Beautiful, Fashion, Expression

  Thorstein Veblen (1993). “A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism”, p.93, M.E. Sharpe

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• If you set out to copy after one master today and after one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of either one or the other, and you will inevitably become fantastic, because each style will fatigue your mind.

  Cennino Cennini

  Mind, Today, Tomorrow

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• If thou shouldst paint mountains in a good style and to look natural, take some large stones full of cracks and copy them.

  Cennino Cennini

  Mountain, Cracks, Looks

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• Indistinctness is my forte.

  J. M. W. Turner

  Forte

  "The Life of J.M.W. Turner,: ... Founded on Letters and Papers Furnished by His Friends and Fellow Academicians". Book by Walter Thornbury, volume 2, p. 243, 1862.

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• I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind... as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.

  Maurice de Vlaminck

  Long, Mind, Firsts

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• Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence.

  Martin Seligman

  Hope, Two, Dimensions

  Martin E.P. Seligman (2011). “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”, p.89, Vintage

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• The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It's internal rather than external.

  Martin Seligman

  Optimistic, Opposites, Events

  Martin E.P. Seligman (2011). “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”, p.92, Vintage

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• Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had.

  Tony Bennett

  Romantic, Music, Singing

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• Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

  Susan Cain

  Personality, Extroverts, Standards

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.4, Broadway Books

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