Top 79 Austere Quotes
#1. This is the whole secret of the practice of Elementalism: it obtains happiness by the most rigid and austere simplification of the means to happiness.
John Cowper Powys
#2. We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.
Matthew Arnold
#3. If we would succeed in works of the imagination, we must offer a mild morality in the midst of rigid manners; but where the manners are corrupt, we must consistently hold up to view an austere morality.
Madame De Stael
#4. I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.
Geraldine Brooks
#5. I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds - the words oil on canvas - has everything and nothing to do with what I'm looking at.
Durga Chew-Bose
#6. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn't impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.
Bernard Tschumi
#8. Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a constant submission to it.
Alexander Herzen
#9. Bad impulse buys make you feel grim, don't they? It's like having consumer Tourette's. I gravitate towards austere foreign-language film DVDs when insecure.
Sally Phillips
#10. In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.
Havelock Ellis
#11. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand. I
Sebastian Barry
#12. The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork sat back on his austere chair with the sudden bright smile of a very busy person at the end of a crowded day who's suddenly found in his schedule a reminder saying: 7.00-7.05, Be Cheerful and Relaxed and a People Person.
Terry Pratchett
#13. My face lends itself to austere characters, and unless they're two-dimensional, I will do them. Any actor will tell you that an interesting villain is much more interesting to play.
Charles Dance
#15. In masks outrageous and austere, The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.
Elinor Wylie
#16. For ... austere and gracious allegory, as for so much of its mysticism and its chivalry, its ardours and its endurances, the world is in debt to Spain.
Helen Waddell
#17. Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.
Ansel Adams
#18. As I made my way through 'On Line,' the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition 'about line' at MoMA, I found myself thinking, 'Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!' In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade.
Jerry Saltz
#19. Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
Elinor Wylie
#20. What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.
Jonathan Miller
#21. I wanted to preserve the feeling of remembering her just months after her death - the raw immediacy of it, so the drafts were really about getting the language right, getting the pitch right, keeping the voice austere and plainspoken.
Paul Lisicky
#22. the more brutal or austere the diet, the harder it is to keep.
Padma Lakshmi
#23. Tantric Zen is not being kinky; nor is it being conservative and austere. It is eclectic. It is a real mixture of all things.
Frederick Lenz
#24. Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.
Thornton Willis
#25. The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.
C. Northcote Parkinson
#27. Do what thou wilt, the most sublimely austere ethical precept ever uttered, despite its apparent license.
Aleister Crowley
#28. He hastily pulled off his dressing gown - revealing austere black boxer shorts and a threadbare T-shirt for something called Mogworld - and began twirling it frantically around his head.
Yahtzee Croshaw
#29. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
Raymond Chandler
#30. Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions.
Nancy Stahl
#31. Well, you know ... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating rabbit. That's what there was in the butcher shop.
Tim Curry
#32. I don't take much from my own father, because he was a very austere, quiet, private man who would come home from work, go to his parlour and play Beethoven on his piano.
John Mahoney
#33. Austere perseverance, hash and continuous ... rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistible greater with time.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#34. It shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere.
O. Henry
#35. And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.
George Martin
#36. Strong advocacy for education, health care and worker safety will be indispensable if they are to get their fair share of President Bush's austere budget for the next fiscal year.
Arlen Specter
#37. Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.
Annie Besant
#38. Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.
Sebastian Horsley
#39. We might respect a serious person with an austere and rigid personality, but we adore merry, kindhearted, and artistic people.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#40. An endless scream pierced the frigid night air and shook the world with its rage and sorrow. The aged stone and brick that had withstood the great quake over a hundred years ago now trembled before its pain, and even the austere grimace of the lonely grotesque, its only witness, softened in pity.
Ava Zavora
#41. Ned never argued with their father, he was unfailingly polite and then nonchalantly went his own way; whereas, he, Edmund, deferred dutifully to his father's authority and then found himself resenting both his parent's austere discipline and his own reluctance to rebel.
Sharon Kay Penman
#42. I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.
Coleman Barks
#43. The Empire was not known for its roomy architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term, austere pragmatism, or sometimes pragmatic austerity, found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow.
Chuck Wendig
#44. The '40s were quite austere and super glamorous.
Paul Weller
#45. When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.
Evan Osnos
#46. There is a gravity which is not austere nor captious, which belongs not to melancholy nor dwells in contraction of heart: but arises from tenderness and hangs upon reflection.
Walter Savage Landor
#47. Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.
Pankaj Mishra
#48. Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
Charles Baudelaire
#50. Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
Eugene Delacroix
#51. I'm not shy in the spotlight. I might seem austere and even arrogant, but far from it, I'm actually shy.
Riccardo Muti
#52. In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before. The austere 'prayer book' paper that permitted the space for Shepard's illustrations to Pepys' diaries is now being recreated in the digital era.
Chris Riddell
#53. I am not partial to folk who are grim and austere. I prefer fanciful folk who make me laugh.
Jack Vance
#54. What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
#55. Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful.
Frederick Soddy
#56. It was the earring. Laurent was always so austere. The earring reframed him. It gave the appearance of a sensual side, sophisticated and subtle.
C.S. Pacat
#57. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity.
Ayn Rand
#58. He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.
E. M. Forster
#59. Father love is ancient and austere, like mountains. It is difficult to accept the collapsing of a mountain.
Glenn Haybittle
#60. If I did not have for him the warm affection a son feels toward a less austere and preoccupied father, I at least had an immense respect for him, and a great admiration.
Lincoln Ellsworth
#61. Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemised words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.
China Mieville
#63. People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin ... Today's youth are moved by other slogans ... Order, Hierarchy, Discipline.
Benito Mussolini
#64. I have to say, though, it's a little strange doing both because Durant is very straight and stern and austere.
Corbin Bernsen
#66. PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction - prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.
Ambrose Bierce
#67. The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.
E. T. Bell
#68. A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forgo all things for that,and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. Persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science ...
Coining "Dismal Science" as a nickname for Political Economy
Thomas Carlyle
#70. An old house that had lived its life long ago and so was very quiet and wise and a little mysterious. Also a little austere, but very kind.
L.M. Montgomery
#71. Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#72. When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#73. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.
Nikos Kazantzakis
#74. She would have pondered over the meaninglessness of silent, austere beauty renewing itself with every sunrise and going ungazed at by half the world.
Harper Lee
#75. Hell is wherever Love is not, and Heaven
Is Love's location. No dogmatic creed,
No austere faith based on ignoble fear
Can lead thee into realms of joy and peace.
Unless the humblest creatures on the earth
Are bettered by thy loving sympathy
Think not to find a Paradise beyond.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#76. Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.
Jeanette Winterson
#77. His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.
Carol Shields
#78. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.
Lemony Snicket
