Plainness Quotes

Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant. (Elizabeth Gaskell)
One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." View quote
Diogenes of Sinope
One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome. View quote
Murasaki Shikibu
Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires. View quote
Laozi
There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched. View quote
Theodore Roethke
No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress. View quote
William Law
The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas-the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, "That was a good stroke.”. View quote
Randall Jarrell
I will talk to my sister, my daughter and my mother, the women, in July 24, when I asked you to gave me the mandate and the order to combat possible terrorism, The Egyptian woman with all her plainness, took her husband, her children, her food during Ramadan and took the streets. and the world watched her. take them again and let the world see you again. View quote
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty. View quote
George Eliot
The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian. View quote
Richard Weaver
He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the 'Iliad' itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness and that book is the Bible. (Matthew Arnold)
She must be that which she to the world would seem, For all true love is grounded on esteem: Plainness and truth gain more a generous heart Than all the crooked subtleties of art. View quote
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham