Refinement Quotes

1. "Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles—that is, by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, "Today I want to become this or that person," and then proceeding to be that person.One day she decided she would like to be an elegant representative of a well-known Parisian modiste and go to Peru. All she had to do was to act the role. So she dressed with care, presented herself with extraordinary assurance at the house of the modiste, was engaged to be her representative and given a boat ticket to Lima.Aboard ship, she behaved like a French missionary of elegance. Her innate talent for recognizing good wines, good perfumes, good dressmaking, marked her as a lady of refinement."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "The zenith of elegance in any woman's wardrobe is the little black dress, the power of which suggests dash and refinement."
Author: Andre Leon Talley

3. "The spirit of the tea beverage is one of peace, comfort and refinement.""
Author: Arthur Gray

4. "But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties."
Author: Donald G. Mitchell

5. "He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself - was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

6. "They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were."
Author: Émile Zola

7. "The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect."
Author: Felix Adler

8. "Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts—higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash—what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same—sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages—that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o'-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping bag all over the street, and another wiping a child's nose, and up the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too close for refinement."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

9. "It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

10. "Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

11. "It is to be hoped, indeed, that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

12. "To love mankind for the sake of God-that has been the most nobel and far-fetched feeling yet achieved by human beings. The idea that without some sanctifying ulterior motive, a love of mankind is just one more brutish stupidity, that the predisposition to such a love must first find its weight, its refinement, its grain of salt and pinch of ambergris in another even higher predisposition-whoever first felt and 'witnessed' this, and however much his tongue may have stuttered in attempting to express such a delicate idea: may he remain forever venerable and holy in our sight as the man who as yet has flown the highest and erred the most beautifully!"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

13. "Chestnuts are my favorite ingredient to use in the fall, especially for the holidays. I always find that they are meaty, hearty and have a mysterious refinement when cooked or roasted over sea salt."
Author: Geoffrey Zakarian

14. "Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

15. "I didn't go to high school, and I didn't go to grade school either. Education, I think, is for refinement and is probably a liability."
Author: H. L. Hunt

16. "...an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant."
Author: Hilary Mantel

17. "We were astonished by the beauty and refinement of the art displayed by the objects surpassing all we could have imagined - the impression was overwhelming."
Author: Howard Carter

18. "With a woman of sophistication, class and modesty and refinement, I become a totally tongue-tied buffoon. I can't even look her straight in the face."
Author: Iain Glen

19. "Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity--a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices."
Author: Jack London

20. "For really it was the refinement of civilized cruelty, this spick, span, and ingenious affair of shining leather and gleaming steel, which hoisted you and tilted you and fitted reassuringly into the small of your back and cupped your head tenderly between padded cushions. It ensured for you a more complete muscular relaxation than any armchair that you could buy for your own home: but it left your tormented nerves without even the solace of a counter-irritant. In the old days the victim's attention had at least been distracted by an ache in the back, a crick in the neck, pins and needles in the legs, and the uneasy tickling of plush under the palm. But now, too efficiently suspended between heaven and earth, you were at liberty to concentrate on hell."
Author: Jan Struther

21. "I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?""Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word."
Author: Jane Austen

22. "I'm becoming more and more myself with time. I guess that's what grace is. The refinement of your soul through time."
Author: Jewel

23. "Adam was refined dirt; Eve was a glorious refinement of humanity itself. -John MacArthur, Twelve Extraordinary Women"
Author: John F. MacArthur Jr.

24. "Boston has carried the practice of hypocrisy to the n-th degree of refinement, grace, and failure."
Author: Lincoln Steffens

25. "I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird. I make this stuff up."
Author: Lorrie Moore

26. "The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike."
Author: Lorrie Moore

27. "I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt."
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

28. "She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement."
Author: Mervyn Peake

29. "Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant."
Author: Muriel Barbery

30. "Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps."
Author: Niklaus Wirth

31. "...this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave her lover—although she was unaware of this, it is only fair to record. And so as Cale waited for her to save him while he worked out a way of saving her, she had already chosen the bitter but reasonable path of the good, of the many over the one..."
Author: Paul Hoffman

32. "He was smooth water—effortless in refinement but just like still water, dangerous if you couldn't swim."
Author: Pepper Winters

33. "We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all."
Author: Pericles

34. "Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star."
Author: Philip Roth

35. "She sighed heavily before whispering, "I'm still a bit confused as to what we are waiting for." "We are waiting for one of the constants in our world, Miss Braun," Wellington assured her. "At the end of every opera, there is the grand finale, where the music continues its gradual crescendo, the tenor and tempo rising ever so gradually for that pinnacle of dramatic tension, that moment of anticipation—" "Welly, are you talking about opera or about sex?" His next words caught in his throat. For a woman of higher tastes and seeming refinement, this woman could be utterly crass."
Author: Philippa Ballantine

36. "Culture has little to do with how refined a man's intellect is; it rather depends on the refinement of his emotions."
Author: Raheel Farooq

37. "To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement."
Author: Raymond Queneau

38. "I think the time is ripe for a return to the refinement of lifestyle that the pocket watch embodies. A personal pleasure that you know you have in your pocket, which requires an elegant gesture to use and show to others."
Author: Richard Mille

39. "There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You'll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."Where?"In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically."
Author: Roald Dahl

40. "Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."
Author: Robert Andrews Millikan

41. "But all this was nothing compared to the face which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue."
Author: Samuel Beckett

42. "On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally."
Author: Saul Bellow

43. "The hyperconnectivity made possible by the Internet has acted as a massive accelerator for the "small sparks" that fuel the refinement of ideas."
Author: Scott Belsky

44. "You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do."
Author: Stephen Daldry

45. "The quest of discovering your empowered self is a process of refinement, not accumulation. Cut away the nonsense, the drama, the regret, the scars of the past, and make a decision to no longer let them govern your happiness and freedom."
Author: Steve Maraboli

46. "I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me."
Author: Sunni Brown

47. "So we're getting close to suggesting that camp is both the opposite of cool and a refinement of it. Camp and cool both have an element of not-caring, of disdain for the ordinary. The difference is that cool implies a lack of conscious effort, whereas camp is about putting everything you've got into it. Either you love something too much (much more than it's "worth", so the stereotypical anorak-wearing Doctor Who fan and the Barry Manilow cultist are both manifestations of this, at least to the outside world), or you're given to going over the top. Or you do both at once, in many cases. Both phenomena are examples of people fashioning an identity for themselves, and if you're reading this book then you must know people like that. Cool is not caring, camp is actively defiant."
Author: Tat Wood

48. "(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect."
Author: Thomas Carlyle

49. "Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures."
Author: Thomas Mann

50. "We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Refinement Quotes Pictures