Elegance Quotes - Page 16

• When putting words together is good to do it with nicety and caution, your elegance and talent will be evident if by putting ordinary words together you create a new voice.

  Horace

  Latin, Voice, Together

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• Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Art, Passion, Rooms

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• What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist's working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists exploratory work seem relatively disorderly.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Nature, Science, Reality

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• He endearing elegance of female friendship.

  Samuel Johnson

  Friendship, Female, Endearing

  Samuel Johnson (1821). “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works”, p.50

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• The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

  Jeff Greenfield

  Phrases, Fancy, Next

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• In temperance there is ever cleanliness and elegance.

  Joseph Joubert

  Cleanliness, Temperance

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• If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
  On being reproached that his formula of gravitation was longer and more cumbersome than Newton's.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Tailors, Newton

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• Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Nature, Science, Simple

  Murray Gell-Mann's speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1969.

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• My background may be common, but I have specialized in elegance.

  Cyril Ritchard

  Class, May, Common

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• Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

  John Tuzo Wilson

  Science, Woods, Theory

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• Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Beautiful, Nature, Science

  Chen Ning Yang (2013). “Selected Papers of Chen Ning Yang II: With Commentaries”, p.260, World Scientific

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• Every writer must reconcile, as best he may, the conflicting claims of consistency and variety, of rigour in detail and elegance in the whole. The present author humbly confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art.

  Julian Coolidge

  Art, Science, Consistency

  Julian Lowell Coolidge (2004). “A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Perfection, Littles, Fabulous

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• My idea of elegance – and this refers to women as well as men – is that someone is elegant when he or she shows a good knowledge of what fits them, where you can find naturalness and self-esteem. Not showing off. Elegance is the idea of showing an optimistic depiction of oneself, and to lose oneself in the frivolity of style and fashion.

  Stefano Pilati

  Fashion, Self Esteem, Optimistic

  "The End of Elegance". Interview with Costantino Della Gherardesca, www.vice.com. February 15, 2012.

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• It seems there's just no room left for elegance in this paper-plate, blue-jean world. And I, for one, think it's a shame.

  Joan Fontaine

  Thinking, Blue, World

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• There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brillance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.

  Carl Sagan

  Religious, Views, Political

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• Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.

  John Fowles

  Beautiful, Football, Baseball

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• Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

  Edward Abbey

  Sports, Butterfly, Example

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• True elegance consists not in having a closet bursting with clothes, but rather in having a few well-chosen numbers in which one feels totally at ease.

  Coco Chanel

  Clothes, Numbers, Ease

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• I think my most favorite subject was Lena Horne, because she embodies soul and grace and elegance and 'street'. She embodies everything. And beauty — great beauty.

  Carol Friedman

  Thinking, Grace, Soul

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 21, 2010.

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• Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline.

  Jakob Nielsen

  Book, Simple, Practice

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• You have no sensitivity that your soul shall leave in the subtle body and that your subtle body is as sophisticated as anything in the universe can be. So unless you produce in yourself elegance, grace, sophisticatedness in your mind, manners and attitude, and unless you come from the infinite altitude, and ascend to that altitude, you cannot descend in love. The higher is your being, the deeper is the love.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Love, Family, Attitude

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• Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Men, Childhood

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.653

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• It's the nasty and the accident that form the foundation for elegance that comes later.

  Nick Bantock

  Foundation, Nasty, Absence

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• How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Luxury, People, Simplicity

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.347, Springer Science & Business Media

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