Picturesque Quotes - Page 2

• Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element. It's something about the human condition. It's not the water itself-it's humanity's relationship to water, because that’s almost a human need, that water be a positive force.

  Roni Horn

  Water, Darkness, Humanity

  17 Copy quote

• Ye lover of the picturesque, if ye wish to drown your grief, take my advice and visit the ancient town of Crieff.

  William Topaz McGonagall

  Grief, Scotland, Advice

  William Topaz McGonagall, “Beautiful Crief”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was out for the Christmas Holidays in school, I would go skiing up to the mountains and there they had Santa on a sled. Pulled by horses and other reindeer, it was a very, very picturesque time and that struck me very emphatically then and has remained with me all this time.

  William Shatner

  Horse, School, Holiday

  Source: www.movieweb.com

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dirt is picturesque, so I don't mind.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mind, Dirt

  J. M. Barrie, Charles Dickens, Johanna Spyri, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum (2015). “Greatest Christmas Novels in One Volume: Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Heidi, The Romance of a Christmas Card, The Little City of Hope, The Wonderful Life, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Pan…”, p.998, e-artnow

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have a respect for family pride. If it be a prejudice, it is a prejudice in its most picturesque shape. But I hold it is connected with some of the noblest feelings in our nature.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Family, Pride, Feelings

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1837). “Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides”, p.96

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

  Walt Whitman

  Real, Artist, Humanity

  Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose”, p.516, NYU Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

  Ernest Hemingway

  Dog, Writing, Differences

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.712, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Fall, Sleep, Views

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2011). “The Marriage Plot: A Novel”, p.136, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Oracles, Literature, Calm

  Henry David Thoreau (1862). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau”, p.133

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

  Susan Sontag

  Cities, Empathy, Joy

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.50, Macmillan

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

  Anthony Trollope

  Literature, Poverty, Misery

  Anthony Trollope (2016). “The Macdermots of Ballycloran: Trollope's Works”, p.81, 谷月社

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure.

  Alice Morse Earle

  Men, Cheerful, May

  Alice Morse Earle (2016). “Stage-coach and Tavern Days”, p.46, Library of Alexandria

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

  Donna Tartt

  Running, Dark, Thinking

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.7, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “Oscar Wilde The Dover Reader”, p.48, Courier Dover Publications

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Lying, Men, Insulted Him

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “The Brothers Karamazov”, p.67, First Avenue Editions

  58 Copy quote

  Show source

• I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.

  Primo Levi

  Beautiful, Home, House

  22 Copy quote

• She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Clever, People

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.

  George Perkins Marsh

  Truth, Science, Errors

  George Perkins Marsh, Stephen C. Trombulak (2001). “So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh”, p.80, UPNE

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Country, Writing, Simple

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1983). “Novels”, p.854, Library of America

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Romantic, Views, People

  James Weldon Johnson, Sondra K. Wilson (1995). “The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson: Social, political, and literary essays”, p.352, Oxford University Press on Demand

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

  4 Copy quote

• Something quite special has played out in the picturesque valleys and mountains, towns and villages of France over the past three weeks. For all who appreciate sport, it was a privilege and an inspiration to watch.

  Paul Ramadge

  Sports, Inspiration, Past

  4 Copy quote

• Neither realism nor romance furnishes a more striking and picturesque figure than that of Christopher Columbus. The mystery about his origin heightens the charm of his story.

  Chauncey Depew

  Romance, Stories, Columbus

  Chauncey Depew “The columbian oration delivered at the dedication ceremonies of the World's fair at Chicago, Oct. 21, 1892”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• the lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional. ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.

  Emily James Smith Putnam

  War, Fall, Men

  4 Copy quote

• In eighteenth-century England, there was a practice of hiring a picturesque hermit who would inhabit the beautiful ruin on your estate. To me it rhymes with certain kinds of pop-music entertainers and eccentrics - both touted and tolerated.

  David Grubbs

  Beautiful, Practice, Ruins

  Interview with Nick Hallett, logger.believermag.com. May 16, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source