Quotes About Subtlety

Most people don't feel conscious hostility to God. The hostility is manifest more subtly with a quiet insubordination and indifference.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

They that govern most make the least noise.

The best way to manipulate a man is to make him think he is manipulating you.

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.

Because they cannot be direct, they must attract the other person toward them without becoming vulnerable themselves. Imagine what it would be like it you had to use magnetism instead of asking or reaching out directly to get emotional contact.

It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.

Men's minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb. The moments of refinement conceal a death-principle: nothing is more fragile than subtlety.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.

Discretion is the best form of calculation.

You have the nicest window, you know? None of the others can even compete. It´s not flashy like the others, or bleary – your window gives of this nice, quiet light.

Las palabras son siempre demasiado explicítas y apagan del todo el valor de una luz tenue como aquélla.

It sounded like I was coming on to him, feigning helplessness and acting like a child.

You were attacking the enemy skillfully and subtly," Ileana went on, "but at the same time you could not have known that the bats would play a leading part in you offensive." "If it had not been the bats, it would have been something else," Vladilas said. "But I knew eventually you would be mine, as I wanted you to be.

What made a crush "obvious" to other people? Was it when someone noticed your drawing, and remembered it for months afterward? Or kept talking to you, but always with a bunch of awkward silences? Or wouldn't stop blushing? Or invited you to Comic Con?

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

I will refine somebody in a minor way, but I don't want to totally change them. I don't want them to look like plastic dolls.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation or trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Never attach where it is obvious