Top 87 Decorative Quotes
#1. Initially, it was the unpractical in fashion that brought me to design my own line. I felt that it was much more attractive to cut clothes with respect for the living, three-dimensional body rather than to cover the body with decorative ideas.
Jil Sander
#2. All this seemed a decorative newly painted picture behind clear new glass.
Hermann Hesse
#3. The Veretian palace, afroth with ornament, paid only lip service to defence. The parapets were purposeless curving decorative spires. The slippery domes that he skirted would be a nightmare in an attack, hiding one part of the roof from the other.
C.S. Pacat
#5. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and ... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
Henri Matisse
#6. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
Oscar Wilde
#7. I like decorative, functional things that I feel comfortable in.
Joey Lauren Adams
#8. The amazing activity of the cat is delicately balanced by his capacity for relaxation. Every household should contain a cat, not only for decorative and domestic values, but because the cat in quiescence is medicinal to irritable, tense, tortured men and women.
William Lyon Phelps
#9. Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss.
Ian Stewart
#10. A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail ... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Charles Horton Cooley
#12. For I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life - on its social not its purely artistic effect.
Oscar Wilde
#13. No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."
Edmund Snow Carpenter
#14. You know, we don't have any decorative sprigs of rosemary; we're not placing little matchstick radishes onto an hors d'oeuvre ... The food's gotta taste good. The concept's gotta taste good.
Nadia Giosia
#15. Those men think I'm purely decorative, and they're fools for not knowing better.
Zelda Fitzgerald
#16. A driver who thinks stop signs are suggestions and red lights are decorative accents.
Hailey Edwards
#17. Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
Rebecca West
#18. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art.
Georges Braque
#19. The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.
Wendell Phillips
#20. And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
Josef Albers
#21. She investigated further: moving along with little kisses down his throat and over his collarbone until she came to the same location on his neck that on hers was currently a decorative black and blue color. She bit him. Hard. Alexia never did anything by halves.
Gail Carriger
#22. The sight of a tree at night full of glowing Clabbert lifestyles, while decorative, attracted too many Muggles wishing to ask why their neighbours still had their Christmas lights up in June.
J.K. Rowling
#23. A lot of really big trees had died to make that desk. His mother had probably gnawed them down, used her nails to saw the boards, and finished the decorative cutwork with her tongue.
Jennifer Crusie
#24. Decorative gestures add romance to a life.
Don DeLillo
#25. One night, I drink too many toasts with vodka, and once in my blameless, virtuous life, I wind up getting sick in a decorative urn. The price? My sister's eternal condemnation." "Not condemnation. But eternal teasing? Definitely.
Claudia Gray
#26. We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?
Italo Calvino
#27. Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.
Peter York
#29. Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives, but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly.
Jan Zwicky
#31. My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Oscar Wilde
#32. There is a saying in the Islands. Beware the women of the warrior class, for all they touch is both decorative and deadly.-Yuki
Tamora Pierce
#33. For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am.
Cornel West
#34. When meter is honored over thythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative.
Ellen Bryant Voigt
#35. If you can't be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don't whine about it.
K.J. Charles
#36. In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.
Gertrude Jekyll
#37. If you're not honest with your work - if you're being merely decorative - then the world will know. People intuit honest work. They know when they are being tricked by clever metaphors . . . by dishonesty in the artist.
Michele Zackheim
#38. I love the journeys of research and discovery their development takes me on. I see prints as less 'decorative' than many might, and more fundamental to a garment's core.
Dries Van Noten
#39. That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding.
Patrick DeWitt
#40. Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap ... The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.
Mary Roach
#41. If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt
George Bernard Shaw
#42. Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality.
Bhikkhu Bodhi
#43. Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Max Ernst
#44. I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
Richard Brautigan
#45. There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.
Hugh Hardy
#46. I still cannot tap on your walls and discover by the hollow or firm sounds which of your walls are merely decorative, and which ones hold everything up.
Philip J. Hilts
#47. One of the reasons I love to come to Paris is because the decorative arts are so refined that I am always walking through one proscenium into another frame.
Ralph Gibson
#48. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
Edward Hopper
#49. [Magnus] stumbled over a few people to the phone, only to find that he had actually reached for a large decorative cigarette dispenser. It was possible he was not quite at his best either.
Cassandra Clare
#50. I love Prada shirts because they're so decorative and figure-hugging, but I also like Reiss shirts because they're clean, simple and look as if they've come off the peg from a design house.
Jamie Bamber
#52. I didn't originally intend to be an artist; I was much more interested in decorative arts--daily life, beautiful objects.
Helaine Posner
#53. I meant to learn something," Sophie said, impatient. "Something else than embroidery or dancing, or playing pretty tunes on the pianoforte. I am not a decorative object, Father. I have an intellect, also, and I wish to make good use of it.
Sylvia Izzo Hunter
#54. Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.
W. H. Auden
#55. One of the first principles of decorative art is that in all manufactures ornament must hold a place subordinate to that of utility; and when, by its exuberance, ornament interferes with utility, it is misplaced and vulgar.
George Mason
#56. The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative.
Susan Sontag
#57. The finger-biter's feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree - they may have started in something real, but she'd tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.
Elizabeth McCracken
#58. A chair is not just a product of decorative art in a space, it is a form and a space in itself
Finn Juhl
#59. Every woman is harmed by the cultural expectation that women are decorative possessions, sexual objects to be acted upon; and every man benefits from having been socialized to be the actor.
Anonymous
#60. Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, if you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own ... their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis ...
Ada Louise Huxtable
#61. Take up something that you know will never bring you any returns except pleasure-in other words, allow yourself to live the way brilliant eighteenth century courtesans lived. Don't be afraid of having a decorative life, even if all the decorations come from you.
Perry Brass
#62. Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.
Piet Mondrian
#63. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.
Muriel Barbery
#64. The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.
Edward Albee
#65. My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
Gyorgy Ligeti
#66. Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras.
Joseph Alsop
#67. I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.
Anish Kapoor
#68. I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.
Oscar Wilde
#69. People think of me as a stereotype: muse, privileged, decorative. Classically, the muses were the inspiration. They'd come and go - they wouldn't actually make things, get their hands dirty. I don't think I'm a muse, although I think I can help pull a trigger. I really like getting my hands dirty.
Amanda Harlech
#70. Beauty had just squatted under one of the chairs lining the hallway. A small trickle was creeping across the marble floor.
'She's too intelligent to pay mind to me,' Lady Sylvia said blandly. 'All three dogs are French, and they behave just like Frenchmen. Decorative but peevish.
Eloisa James
#71. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
Mark Rothko
#72. I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things.
Cindy Sherman
#73. We are all overdressed in our little flashy frocks, our slasher heels, and we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are.
Gillian Flynn
#74. The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.
Martin Filler
#75. From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.
Martin Filler
#76. When art calls, you have to follow it. It doesn't happen often, so take the opportunity when it strikes. In all reality, what I do is art. I do create fabulous pieces of decorative baked goods.
A.M. Willard
#77. For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art.
Sonia Delaunay
#78. I love the idea of the 'vignette,' which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right?
Kate Bernheimer
#79. Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.
Ken Follett
#80. Every decorative piece in this house is my feeling, my choice.
Connie Stevens
#81. I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves. It is futile to argue as to which leaf, which design of branches, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming.
Bruce Lee
#82. Mirrors have come to mean much more than the original 'looking glass.' They are now a part of the decorative scheme of a modern home. By using them, there are no dark, gloomy corners, no drab caverns for halls. There can be a feeling of freedom, light, air, space.
Dorothy Draper
#83. Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.
Alison Weir
#84. The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.
Russell Lynes
#85. I'm quite lucky, because I've got a small, decorative concrete pig.
Bill Bailey
#86. She reached into a pocket of her tunic and brought out a small decorative box. She placed it on the table and slid it toward him. He squelched the urge to push it back. "I came to bring you this. It's yours."
Grace Draven
#87. Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.
Patrick Modiano
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