Quotes About Subtlety

Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?

Ooh, we're going to think subtly. We won't get suckered into simplistic answers, not like those chicken-crossing-the-road neurochemists and chicken evolutionary biologists and chicken psychoanalysts, all living in their own limited categorical buckets.

Tact is a faculty for meandering around to a given point instead of making a bee-line.

It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.

Subtlety, that was what was needed. Subtle had never been my natural bent, but I had learned. Eventually.

Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn't say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie's mother's brows were better than sign language, complicated concepts conveyed with the minimum of movement.

God's real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?

Science of yoga and ayurveda is subtler than the science of medicine, because science of medicine is often victim of statistical manipulation.

MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women.

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and Brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.

Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected.

There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful of things.

There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful things.

Robert Black: ...looking forward to it. Sounds like his writings have taught you a lot... Randall Carver: ...Yes. Dunsany's work teaches subtlety, concealing momentous events in otherwise quiet passages.

Sances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.

Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.

You don't smack the water with your paddle if you wish to catch fish.

Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.

Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.