Quotes About Refinement

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

It's either not good enough and dies altogether, or it develops.

If someone comes and tells me I've done great work, that's not what I want to hear. But if someone comes and tells me that this could have been a notch better, I'd spend an hour with the person and hear him or her out.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

A good novel editor is invisible.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.

If you do these things (read good books), what will be your reward? Gradually, unconsciously but inevitably, your diction will begin to take on added beauty and refinement. Gradually, you will begin to reflect someone the glory and beauty and majesty of your companions.

but in the beginning, she was—well, susceptible to improvement.

I was originally supposed to become an engineer," he later wrote a friend, "but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!"72

La sencillez es la máxima sofisticación».

The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, "Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

things, by removing the superfluous." The G4 Cube was almost ostentatious

He would aim for simplicity and beauty, and beauty for him was, after all, essentially simplicity.

all of life is a movement toward perfection

somebody gets better the more you do it. You might think an old

To try to be better is to be better.

The source of stillness is in emptiness. All things and the changes they go through are but temporary conditions, which finally return to nothingness, then revert to emptiness. As long as the human mind is not still and quiet, there will be thoughts of desire remaining, which create tremendous obstacles to the cultivation of refinement.

Wine is how classy people get wasted.

Your lean process should be a lean process.

Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well — that's work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that's what continuous improvement is all about.