Refinement Quotes

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. (Albert Einstein)
It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness. View quote
Lawrence Durrell
It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning. View quote
Vitruvius
During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible. View quote
Niklaus Wirth
Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings. View quote
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public. View quote
William Hazlitt
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. View quote
Felix Adler
Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" - whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing. View quote
Arnold Schoenberg
Each human being has the eternal duty of transforming what is hard and brutal into a subtle and tender offering, what is crude into refinement, what is ugly into beauty, ignorance into knowledge, confrontation into collaboration, thereby rediscovering the child's dream of a creative reality incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love. View quote
Yehudi Menuhin
America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea. (Wallace Stegner)
A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence and refinement so they think they will impress others with their command of obscure words. View quote
Barbara Walters
In life we only try to produce, to win, and enjoy the more we can; in science, to discoverand invent the more we can; in religion, to dominate (or rule over) on the greatest number of people we can; whereas the forming of the character, the further development (or in-dept analysis, "appronfondissement", Fr.) of the faculties of the intelligence ("les facultés de l'intelligence", Fr.), the refinement of the consciousness and of the heart, are considered incidental (or subordinate) things. View quote
African Spir
From these early beginnings, and from the fact that nature had... equipped their minds with the powers of thought and understanding, thus putting all other animals under their sway, they next gradually advanced from the construction of buildings to the other arts and sciences, and so passed from a rude and barbarous mode of life to civilization and refinement. View quote
Vitruvius
A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes,Sweet bath, suavely Scented with ointments,has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Evil will come to nought and will be completely destroyed. The divine, pure goodness will contain in itself every nature endowed with reason; nothing made by God is excluded from his kingdom once everything mixed with some elements of base material has been consumed by refinement in fire. View quote
Gregory of Nyssa
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. View quote
Bryant H. McGill
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. View quote
Geoffrey Zakarian
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. View quote
H. L. Hunt
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. View quote
Iain Glen
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. (Stephen Daldry)
The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes. View quote
David Rockefeller
The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming in every part will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or there will be no blessings. View quote
John Adams
Of the two classes of people, I hardly know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. ... True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it. ... Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. View quote
William Hazlitt
Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants. View quote
Robert Andrews Millikan