Quotes About Refinement

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

When you leave the familiar and enter the unknown, your fear becomes refined by experience and hammered into tools of survival on the anvil of anxiety.

Nobody's so great that they can't get better.

the most powerful and forgotten aspect of music is its role as a change agent; its potential as a transformative force for individuals and groups; its quasi-magical efficacy in ameliorating conditions, softening attitudes, recharging or redirecting energies, fueling or channeling emotions, its capability of purifying or refining or augmenting, and making our day-to-day existence better than it would be otherwise.

Rawness and refinement are not opposite ends of a luxurious spectrum... they are two complementary features with which to populate a luxe environment.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.

The well dressed man never stands out in a crowd; his elegance sets him apart.

A man should dress in a way that you don't notice. He looks good and you don't know why. But it's the tailoring, the materials, and the clothes.

The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety.

It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined," d'Avaux corrected her. "If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.

and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss

Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man's one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language. Bharthari, ii.17–20

I used to be more refined but at my age, you start to realize all that politeness doesn't get you very far. Better to be honest and direct, even if it does piss off a few people along the way.

And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion.

Personal growth isn't about beating yourself up, it's about celebrating your ability to refine and enhance yourself, and increase your personal development through awareness.

False modesty is the last refinement of vanity.

Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.

Maturity is betterment of the existing state.

are culture-vultures; but not in the way this phrase is usually used," as Stephen Hugh-Jones, a British anthropologist, explains. "For anthropologists 'culture' is not a matter of refinement of tastes or the intellectual side of civilization; it is the commonly-held ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.

I love things that age well - things that don't date, that stand the test of time and that become living examples of the absolute best.

A cat is an example of sophistication minus civilization.

Hey yogurt, if you're so cultured, how come I never see you at the opera?

Her hair was the gold of gold paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much.