Polished Quotes - Page 9

• I am like a huge rough stone...and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force...thus I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almightly.

  Joseph Smith, Jr.

  Stones, Smooth, Quiver

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• He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

  Yukio Mishima

  Pain, Darkness, Age

  Yukio Mishima (1990). “Spring Snow”, Vintage

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• Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more unseen forms become manifest to him.

  Rumi

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Heart

  "The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi". Book by William C. Chittick, p. 162, 1983.

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• I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

  Tana French

  Book, Thinking, Years

  "In the Woods". Book by Tana French, January 30, 2007.

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• Let me get this straight. Your table ran away because you polished it with Windex?

  Rick Riordan

  Tables, Let Me, Ran

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• The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

  James Salter

  Book, Rivers, Illumination

  "Light Years". Book by James Salter, 2011.

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• Why should I be polished and improved like goods for sale? I might not even want to marry! And besides, I have many skills. I can read and write and play the flute and harp. Why should I change to please some man? If he doesn’t like me the way I am, then he can get some other girl for his wife.

  Juliet Marillier

  Girl, Writing, Men

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• I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

  Pablo Neruda

  Past, Vegetables, Ivory

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• Evie picked up the smallest of the rings and tried it on the fourth finger of her left hand. It fit perfectly. Raising it closer to her face, she examined the design. It was the simplest of all the rings, a polished gold band engraved with the words Tha Gad Agam Ort. “What does this mean?” she asked MacPhee. “It says, ‘My love is upon ye.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Mean, Love Is, Hands

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• You guys are so caught up in your polished images and your passive-aggressive comments that no one ever comes right out and says anything. Well, I'm going to.

  Richelle Mead

  Guy, Say Anything, Passive Aggressive

  Richelle Mead (2013). “Gameboard of the Gods: Age of X”, p.347, Penguin

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• Every physical fact, every expression of nature, every feature of the earth, the work of any and all of those agents which make the face of the world what it is, and as we see it, is interesting and instructive. Until we get hold of a group of physical facts, we do not know what practical bearings they may have, though right-minded men know that they contain many precious jewels, which science, or the expert hand of philosophy will not fail top bring out, polished, and bright, and beautifully adapted to man's purposes.

  Matthew Fontaine Maury

  Nature, Philosophy, Hard Work

  16 Copy quote

• When people hurt you over and over, think of them like sand paper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit, but in the end, you end up polished and they end up useless.

  Chris Colfer

  Inspirational, Bullying, Hurt

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• I would not enter on my list of friends
  (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
  Yet wanting sensibility) the man
  Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.

  William Cowper

  Real, Men, Feet

  'The Task' (1785) bk. 6 'The Winter Walk at Noon' l. 560

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• Let Go of Your Worries Let go of your worries and be completely clear-hearted, like the face of a mirror that contains no images. If you want a clear mirror, behold yourself and see the shameless truth, which the mirror reflects. If metal can be polished to a mirror-like finish, what polishing might the mirror of the heart require? Between the mirror and the heart is this single difference: the heart conceals secrets, while the mirror does not.

  Rumi

  Letting Go, Wisdom, Truth

  Rumi (2014). “'Another city'. a selectionf of poems from the Persian”, p.88, Lulu.com

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• Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Giving Up, Mistake, Don't Give Up

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• Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value: but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their luster: and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Inspirational Life, People, Gold

  Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield (1855). “The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc : to which is Prefixed, an Original Life of the Author”, p.150

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• The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.

  Edward Weston

  Photography, Steel, Substance

  Sarah M. Lowe, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Barbican Art Gallery (2004). “Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: the Mexico years”, Merrell Publishers

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• The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Art, World, Taste

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 605-09, Literary Character of Men of Genius, Vers de Société, 1922.

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• Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials. He thinks he has enough to raise a large and stately edifice; but after he has arranged, compacted and polished, his work turns out to be a very small performance. The authour however like the builder, knows how much labour his work has cost him; and therefore estimates it at a higher rate than other people think it deserves

  James Boswell

  Book, Writing, Men

  James Boswell (2002). “The Journal of a Tour to Corsica and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli”

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• [Corneille] was inspired by Roman authors and Roman spirit, Racine with delicacy by the polished court of Louis XIV.

  Horace Walpole

  Delicacy, Spirit, Inspired

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• Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Sunshine, Sunday, Air

  "Old Home Town". Book by Rose Wilder Lane, 1935.

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• The Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window-washer's paradise.

  Gay Talese

  Country, Poodles, Paradise

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• Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less.

  Maria Popova

  Real, Writing, Compassion

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• A man polished to the nail.
  [Lat., Ad unguem factus home.]

  Horace

  Home, Men, Nails

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• In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

  George Eliot

  Country, Book, Men

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.1303, Wordsworth Editions

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