Refinement Quotes - page 4

It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young. (Frederick William Faber)
Refinement. While the possession of this quality is due, in the first instance, to education, it is also largely a matter of temperament.
Ernest Flagg
How few people, even among the supposedly well educated, can give an intelligent explanation of the qualities of a design! ...the essential ones ...are necessary in order that the design may be worthy to be classed at all as a work of art. Among the essential qualities are reason, unity, harmony, clarity, and variety. Among the desirable qualities are imagination, interest, refinement, simplicity, dignity, and style.
Ernest Flagg
Islamism immediately revived the lost cause of Urdu behind the smoke-screen of this Communist campaign against Hindi. It lauded loudly when progressive Urdu poets like Firaq Gorakhpuri lampooned Hindi in a language which was largely unprintable. Simultaneously, Islamism started parading Urdu as the great language of culture and refinement which will be lost to India for good if Urdu was allowed to go under. No Communist came forward to examine this "culture and refinement as a legacy of decadent Muslim courts and a frivolous Muslim aristocracy. No Communist questioned the heavy Persianisation and Arabicisation of Urdu which made it incomprehensible even to educated people, leave alone the man in Chandni Chowk. The recognition of Urdu as a second language has today become a sine qua non of Secularism.
Sita Ram Goel
Modesty in dress and language and deportment is a true mark of refinement and a hallmark of a virtuous Latter-day Saint woman.
Ezra Taft Benson
Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.
Ezra Taft Benson
A life of peace, purity and refinement leads to a calm and untroubled old age.
Cicero
The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Edmund Burke
All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Edmund Burke
These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Jane Addams
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society. (Jean Baudrillard)
Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.
Samuel Johnson
It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage.
Samuel Johnson
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.
Raymond Queneau
Too great refinement is false delicacy, And true delicacy is solid refinement.
François de La Rochefoucauld
The ministers of Christ should possess refinement. All uncouth manners, attitudes and gestures should be discarded, and they should encourage in themselves humble dignity of bearing.
Ellen G. White
False modesty is the refinement of vanity. It is a lie.
Jean de La Bruyère
The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
I've always been battling against my sense of dignity and refinement. I was embarrassed by any bodily functions when I was younger. I could never even blow my nose.
Helen Mirren
I believe that civilization is not only the natural destiny of man, but the enfranchisement, elevation, and refinement of all his powers, and think that it is only in such moods as may lead him to envy the cud - chewing cattle, that a man who is free to the advantages of civilization could look with regret upon the savage state.
Henry George
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. (Henry George)
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane... It refers to the attainment of both material well-being and the elevation of the human spirit, [but] since what produces man's well-being and refinement is knowledge and virtue, civilization ultimately means the progress of man's knowledge and virtue.
Fukuzawa Yukichi
Let them not imagine that they know aught of the delights which intercourse with the other sex can give, until they have felt the sympathy of mind with mind, and heart with heart; until they bring into that intercourse every affection, every talent, every confidence, every refinement, every respect. Until power is annihilated on one side, fear and obedience on the other, and both restored to the birthright - equality. Let none think that affection can reign without it; or friendship or esteem. Jealousies, envyings, suspicions, reserves, deceptions - these are the fruits of inequality.
Frances Wright
Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy.
Robert G. Ingersoll
As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman - it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man - much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes.
Kenneth Rexroth