Style Quotes - Page 8

• If you are at Rome live in the Roman style; if you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

  Ambrose

  Rome, Elsewhere, Ifs

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 677, 1922.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.

  William Cowper

  Sports, Reading, Giving

  William Cowper (1855). “The complete poetical works of William Cowper, with life and critical notice of his writings”, p.113

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.

  Aristotle

  Metaphor, Command

  10 Copy quote

• A change of style is a change of meaning.

  Wallace Stevens

  6 Copy quote

• It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.

  Georges Braque

  Creativity, Mean, Giving

  9 Copy quote

• I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized 'realistic' story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its 'realist' style.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Reality, Thinking, Order

  "Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist's Maze". Book by Thomas Allen Nelson, p. 14, 2000.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Martial music has sudden and strongly marked transitions from one note to another which that style of music requires; while in that which is intended to move the softer passions, the notes imperceptibly melt into one another.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Moving, Passion, Transition

  Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Illustr. by explanatory notes & plates by John Burnet”, p.59

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Sleep, Ideas, Giving

  Vincent van Gogh, Mark Roskill (1997). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh”, p.297, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him - these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter - as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint.

  John Berger

  Mean, Opportunity, Challenges

  John Berger (2011). “Sense of Sight”, p.203, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You must not think that a satiric style allows of scandalous and brutish words; the better sort abhor scurrility.

  Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

  Thinking, Satire, Scandalous

  8 Copy quote

• Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of object, meaning, and style. This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.

  Paul Klee

  Dream, Mind, Bears

  12 Copy quote

• I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

  Willa Cather

  Book, Reading, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet.

  Ryan Adams

  Song, Writing, Records

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. June 28, 2007.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• He who blushes at riding in a rattletrap, will boast when he rides in style.

  Seneca the Younger

  Riding, Boast

  4 Copy quote

• Do not imitate one another's style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Art, Son, Imitation

  da Vinci Leonardo, Leonardo (da Vinci) (1990). “Leonardo da Vinci's advice to artists”, Running Press Book Publishers

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic. The editor of an English magazine having received a letter pointing out the erroneous nature of his views and style, and signed "Perfection," promptly wrote at the foot of the letter: "I don't agree with you," and mailed it to Matthew Arnold.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Views, Editors, Feet

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.180, University of Georgia Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Art, Children, Nephew

  9 Copy quote

• No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Dark, Echoes, Cities

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “Collected Poems 1931-74”, p.169, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fine declamation does not consist in flowery periods, delicate allusions of musical cadences, but in a plain, open, loose style, where the periods are long and obvious, where the same thought is often exhibited in several points of view.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Views, Long, Musical

  Oliver Goldsmith (1856). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Comprising His Poems, Comedies, Essays, and Vicar of Wakefield”, p.281

  81 Copy quote

  Show source

• We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.

  Bruce Barton

  Failure, Grace, Pay

  10 Copy quote

• An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Language, Shyness

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.17, University of Chicago Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

  J. B. Priestley

  School, Men, Speech

  18 Copy quote

• It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

  Ben Shahn

  Teaching, Voice, Personality

  BEN SHAHN (1957). “THE SHAPE OF CONTENT”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The avenues in my neighborhood are Pride, Covetousness and Lust; the cross streets are Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. I live over on Sloth, and the style on our street is to avoid the other thoroughfares.

  John Chancellor

  Anger, Pride, Envy

  17 Copy quote

• The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Beautiful, Fashion, Expression

  Thorstein Veblen (1993). “A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism”, p.93, M.E. Sharpe

  7 Copy quote

  Show source