Quotes About Austere

I don't take much from my own father, because he was a very austere, quiet, private man who would come home from work, go to his parlour and play Beethoven on his piano.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap. . . . The businesswoman is austerely tailored and coiffured; her eye-glasses are severe. . . . her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

I skip down the driveway, hurry up the road, linger on the bridge for a moment, looking down at the reflection of the sky like mercury on the dark water, the foaming white suds near the rocks. Ice glistens on tree branches, frost webs over dried grasses in a sparkling net. The evergreens, dusted with the light snow that fell last night, are like a forest of Christmas trees. For the first time, I am struck by the austere beauty of this place.

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

One was our own Mother Fallopia, tall, elegant, austere, and with a habit so black she looked like a nun-shaped hole in the air.

Anny hasn't changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer's in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blonde locks she didn't want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn't vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant features.

Walls, windows, roof, verandah–entirely commonplace, mean even–moved her with the austere poetry of their function. Here a man sheltered from and diminished the horror and vulgarity of the world by the simplicity of his arrangements for living in it.

sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.

Love wasn't just a soft, easy thing of the senses. It was hard, deep, austere.

Pero, dejando aparte los incongruentes colores primarios, de guardería, de la zona de visitas, la estética de Claverack es austera, y pone en evidencia lo aterradoramente poco que queda de la vida cuando le quitas los perifollos que la adornan.

He's always been known to be entrepenurious.

He had hard, steady eyes, and all the comforting, reassuring charm of a dental drill. - Harry Dresden describing Morgan

I am an austere president.

My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn't impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.

My face lends itself to austere characters, and unless they're two-dimensional, I will do them. Any actor will tell you that an interesting villain is much more interesting to play.

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.

Churches were either great cavernous tributes not so much to God as the wealth and privilege of the community, or they were austere, cold tributes to the ecstasy of refusal.

He sailed through the crowd, through the front of the small church, and found himself in the gloom inside. It always struck Gamache as paradoxical that churches were gloomy. Coming in from the sunshine it took a minute or so to adjust. And even then, to Gamache, it never came close to feeling like home. Churches were either great cavernous tributes not so much to God as the wealth and privilege of the community, or they were austere, cold tributes to the ecstasy of refusal.

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.

The sparse choir murdered a few hymns

That's all right. I'll eat it cold. No need to warm it up." Ojii-san shrinks guiltily into himself as he sits down. He's dying to tell his wife about all the marvelous things that happened last night, but in the stern and austere atmosphere of her presence he finds the words sticking in his throat. He eats with head bowed, feeling perfectly wretched