Elegant Quotes - Page 5

• There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Thinking, Hands, Body

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• Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Fun, Ignorance

  "The Speaker", December 15, 1900.

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• ...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

  Italo Calvino

  Beer, Cells, Smell

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Unbearable, Arms

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• One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

  Martin Gardner

  Education, Math, Numbers

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• I was deeply moved by Richard Blanco's reading of his inaugural poem-a timely and elegant tribute to the great diversity of American experience. And now comes this fine meditation on his experience of coming to poetry, of making the poem and the months surrounding its making-a testament to the strength and significance of poetry in American culture, something not always seen or easily measured. Today Is For All of Us, One Today is a necessary intervention into the ongoing conversation about the role of poetry in public life.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Reading, Diversity, Meditation

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• Glamour is an attitude-it's the expression of a certain kind of confidence. A glamorous woman is always elegant, but she also possesses an air of mystery and excitement. She's dramatic-almost untouchable.

  Ralph Lauren

  Attitude, Air, Expression

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• What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Beautiful, Fundamentals, Physics

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• Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Horse, Oats, Sides

  "Recession Economics". New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 1, February 04, 1982.

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• And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?

  William McDonough

  Nature, Food, Writing

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• A devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth.

  Nick Lowe

  Musician, Depth, Culmination

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• The mathematical question is "Why?" It's always why. And the only way we know how to answer such questions is to come up, from scratch, with these narrative arguments that explain it. So what I want to do with this book is open up this world of mathematical reality, the creatures that we build there, the questions that we ask there, the ways in which we poke and prod (known as problems), and how we can possibly craft these elegant reason-poems.

  Paul Lockhart

  Education, Book, Math

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• To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

  Italo Calvino

  Hate, Writing, What Matters

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985”, p.47, Princeton University Press

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• The farm was a great place to grow up, but I preferred the Hollywood Hills. My aunt looked like Lucille Ball and everything she touched was beautiful and elegant. But I was intelligent enough to understand I would never be like her.

  Sandra Lerner

  Beautiful, Growing Up, Aunt

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• I can think of a lot of women clients of mine who are well into their 50s or 60s who are still quintessentially very elegant.

  Bruce Oldfield

  Thinking, Clients, Wells

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• The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.

  Carl Sagan

  Cosmos, Machinery, Exquisite

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean". TV Series, 1990.

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• Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full.

  Nick Tosches

  Book, Passion, Unique

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• To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

  Alexander Herzen

  Cities, Venice, Genius

  "The lost city of Venice" by Josh McHugh, www.wired.com. August 1, 2003.

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• We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.

  Michael Foot

  Mean, Helping Others, Common Purpose

  Michael Foot (1984). “Another heart and other pulses: the alternative to the Thatcher society”, HarperCollins

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• Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

  John Rawls

  Law, Justice, Unjust

  John Rawls (2009). “A Theory of Justice”, p.3, Harvard University Press

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• Vultures are homely, but they clean up all the garbage and that's good. And they're elegant in the sky.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Sky, Bird, Garbage

  "In The Studio With Roger Tory Peterson; Reluctant Earthling" by Lisa W. Foderaro, www.nytimes.com. August 26, 1993.

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• Ann Sothern's dressing room...was unbelievably lush and beautiful. More elegant than many homes I've been in.

  Hedda Hopper

  Beautiful, Home, Rooms

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• You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.

  Josh Lanyon

  Fear, Puddles, Proud

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• Champagne is simply one of the elegant extras of life.

  Charles Dickens

  Drinking, Wine, Champagne

  "Household Words: A Weekly Journal".

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• We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

  William Styron

  Acceptance, Goal, Becoming

  William Styron (2015). “My Generation: Collected Nonfiction”, p.519, Random House

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