Coarse Quotes - Page 3

• To regard the fundamental as the essence, to regard things as coarse, to regard accumulation as deficiency, and to dwell quietly alone with the spiritual and the intelligent - herein lie the techniques of Tao of the ancients.

  Zhuangzi

  Spiritual, Lying, Intelligent

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• I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.

  W. G. Sebald

  Wall, Iron, Broken

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• America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  America, Delicacy, Refinement

  "Charles Dickens". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1906.

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• The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Home, Differences

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.353

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• but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art-the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few

  Laird Barron

  Art, Mean, Eye

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• It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

  Aristophanes

  Taste, Poet, Bad Taste

  Aristophanes (2015). “The wasps - The birds - The frogs - The Thesmophoriazusae - The Ecclesiazusae”, p.223, Aristophanes

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• Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

  Herbert Spencer

  Feelings, Doe, Culture

  Herbert Spencer (1910). “Works”

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• I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

  George Eliot

  Wall, Pain, Lying

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.259, Penguin

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• Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.

  Graham Greene

  Strong, Food, College

  Graham Greene (1966). “The Comedians”

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• Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Stars, Pain

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• No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

  William Ellery Channing

  Beautiful, Men, Luxury

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• Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Animal, Men, Special

  Letter to James F. Morton (10 February 1923), published in "Selected Letters Vol. I", (p. 208), 1965.

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• It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Distance, Government, Rome

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• For the devil is better pleased with coarse blockheads and with folks who are useful to nobody; because where such characters abound, then things do not go on prosperously here on earth.

  Martin Luther

  Character, Devil, Goes On

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• We are the bullies of the earth: strong, foul, coarse, greedy, careless, indifferent to others, laying waste as we proceed, leaving wounds, welts, lesions, suppurations on the earth body, increasingly engulfed by our own ordure and, finally, abysmally ignorant of the way the world works, crowing our superiority over all life.

  Ian McHarg

  Strong, Bully, Leaving

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• He who needs only coarse food, water and drink, and as pillow his folded arms will find happiness without further search.

  Confucius

  Water, Needs, Finding Happiness

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• The Torah itself becomes coarse in the mouth of a man of pride.

  Nachman of Breslov

  Pride, Men, Mouths

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• Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Civilization, Mind, Progress

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• Many young persons believe themselves natural when they are only impolite and coarse.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Believe, Natural, Manners

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• The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Law, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.381

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• There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits theevidences of large property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls: if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes and coach and horses?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Horse, Apology

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.268, Graphic Arts Books

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• For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indiansand hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so soon exterminated.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Hunting, Race

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Maine Woods: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume III (of 20)”, p.70, Trajectory Inc

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• Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Pain, Eye

  Oscar Wilde (1909). “De profundus”

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• Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

  John Muir

  Real, Imagination, Fantasy

  John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Henry Bugbee Kane (2001). “The Wilderness World of John Muir”, p.321, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The worldly wisdom of the foolish man Is like a sieve, that does alone retain The grosser substance of the worthless bran: But thou, my soul, let thy brave thoughts disdain So coarse a purchase: O be thou a fan To purge the chaff, and keep the winnow'd grain: Make clean thy thoughts, and dress thy mixt desires: Thou art Heav'n's tasker, and thy God requires The purest of thy flow'r, as well as of thy fires.

  Francis Quarles

  Art, Men, Foolish Man

  Richard Crashaw, Francis Quarles, George Gilfillan (1857). “The Poetical Works of Richard Crashaw and Quarles' Emblems”, p.249

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