Elaborate Quotes

#1. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

P. J. O'Rourke

#2. I hope that if you are employed full-time, you are doing it to ensure that basic needs are met and not simply to indulge a taste for an elaborate home, fancy cars, and other luxuries.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#3. Most of what you encounter when you meet a man is a facade, an elaborate fig leaf, a brilliant disguise.

John Eldredge

#4. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#5. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.

Sylvia Plath

#6. The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the downside is some of the things ... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the information isn't true or to see pictures that aren't really me.

Denise Richards

#7. So. Are we concocting some elaborate scheme where we pretend to be twins to get your parents back together?

Melissa Keil

#8. He arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life

Edith Wharton

#9. Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

Michael Lewis

#10. Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail.

Joe Pitkin

#11. Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

Tim Birkhead

#12. The benefits and $174,000 per year salary that we get, we earn. It's not elaborate, it's just a bunch of poppycock that a lot of people have spread around trying to get us to hate our own government and our government representatives.

Hank Johnson

#13. My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#14. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

Eckhart Tolle

#15. Television in America is so elaborate. There are so many remote cranes, and they have all the toys to play with. The directors are really good. They really work with you. So, I'm not really on set thinking, "Oh, my God, this is television. It's very different."

Franka Potente

#16. Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

Mel Gibson

#17. If we avail ourselves for a moment longer of the right to elaborate from the dream interpretation such far-reaching psychological speculations, we are in duty bound to demonstrate that we are thereby bringing the dream into a relationship which may also comprise other psychic structures.

Sigmund Freud

#18. There are greater depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities, in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity.

Joseph Addison

#19. The bar was manned, or should I say womanned by a skeletal heroin chic concentration camp survivor with an elaborate set of tattoos and an incredibly bizarre set of piercings. I swear, if women continue to insist on making their selves this unattractive I'm going to swear off sex permanently.

Randall Moore

#20. I want to clear my mind a little bit and give my mind a little bit of time to breathe so I can pinpoint or at least nail down feelings I'm having and that I've had for the last however long. I need to nail them down long enough to actually write about and elaborate on them.

Fred Durst

#21. Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.

Isaac Asimov

#22. Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

Marisha Pessl

#23. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.

Norman Mailer

#24. Remind the people you care about how much you love them today. It will only take a moment, and it doesn't have to be an elaborate speech. It's a simple gesture but I promise, those words, can heal. Don't wait until tomorrow, it may never get here.

Carlos Wallace

#25. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's

Aldous Huxley

#26. I suspect that LaGuardia is an elaborate prank, and New York has a real airport nearby that only locals know about.

Dave Barry

#27. Among those who study painting, some strive for an elaborate effect and others prefer the simple. Neither complexity in itself nor simplicity is enough.

Chai Lu

#28. Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

Sergio Aragones

#29. It is hard to write, not, as might be expected, for reasons of metre or scholarship or elaborate symbolism, but because the actual writing depends almost entirely on the chance, the mood, the energy, of the moment.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#30. The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#31. When I first arrived in Houston, I was fascinated with the elaborate styles of cowboy boots and thought they were incredibly exotic. They also seemed to be a central part of a specifically 'Texan' identity, one distinct from being 'American.'

Shahzia Sikander

#32. Hey, Carlos," the Professor says when he walks in. "How was REACH?"
"It sucked."
"Can you be more specific?" my guardian asks.
"It really sucked," I elaborate, sarcasm dripping from every word.

Simone Elkeles

#33. I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.

Veronica Roth

#34. Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

Roger Scruton

#35. I care not what your education is, elaborate or nothing, what your mental calibre is, great or small, that man who concentrates all his energies of body, mind and soul in one direction is a tremendous man.

Thomas De Witt Talmage

#36. It was colorful and elaborate - Kayla's website, not the puke

Robin Brande

#37. The things that are indispensable require no elaborate pains for their acquisition; it is only the luxuries that call for labour. Follow nature, and you will need no skilled craftsmen.

Seneca.

#38. There was no pretention here, no hidden meanings in the phrases they spoke, no elaborate plans designed to impress the other. Though it had always been easy to spend time with Mike, she suddenly realized that in the whirlwind of the past couple of weeks, she'd almost forgot how much she enjoyed it.

Nicholas Sparks

#39. For all civilisations are like elaborate campings-out, a complicated picnic in the face of nature's discomforts.

Elizabeth Taylor

#40. When I was young I had this blonde haircut that was shaved on one side with a rat tail and tram lines in it, but I don't really regret that. It was really elaborate but I was 12 and it looked cool. It was like what people in Iceland do.

Kemp Muhl

#41. The intricate engraving, fine lines, beading and milgrain accents echo an era defined by elaborate embellishments.

Vera Wang

#42. The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

Albert Camus

#43. You had an elaborate system that you thought would keep us out of bed: you sat on the other side of the room, you didn't let me crack your knuckles, you never stayed more than fifteen minutes. It never really worked, did it?

Junot Diaz

#44. Left to themselves, people will elaborate, not simplify solutions.

Chester Barnard

#45. But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that.

Rick Bragg

#46. Then why this elaborate abduction? (Lorelei)
Why not? I was there, you were there, Lord Pasty Face was there. It seemed like a perfect opportunity. (Jack)

Kinley MacGregor

#47. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.

Jacques Barzun

#48. It looked like a cutoff valve. Assuming I had any idea what I was looking at. Assuming it would work. Assuming the whole rig wasn't an elaborate fail-safe, a trap that would start the killing rain as soon as I turned the wheel. That was a hell of a lot of maybes.

Craig Schaefer

#49. Masks are elaborate and everyone has one. It takes a while to get to know people. This doesn't make them mysterious, it makes them like everyone else.

Donna Lynn Hope

#50. For a long time I wanted to be a comic strip artist but when I started doing them in my teens they were getting really elaborate with tons of poses and a lot of information.

Craig McCracken

#51. Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#52. Based upon quantum mechanics, our physical reality should not be solid. Most likely our physical reality is an elaborate illusion within our own consciousness and the collective consciousness of the Universe/God.

Russell Anthony Gibbs

#53. The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.

Carl Sagan

#54. It was just so elaborate and so luxurious. We had every gadget imaginable. You know, I had the little gun that came out, and I had the little gun in the heel of the shoe.

Robert Conrad

#55. It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.

Upton Sinclair

#56. The simple gift of giving becomes an elaborate rich aftertaste of a natural blissful feeling, lingering endlessly in my lifetime.

Wes Adamson

#57. A lot of the interesting issues and dynamics within a city occur over things such as socio-economic issues or ethnic issues. But they require a much more elaborate model of human behavior.

Will Wright

#58. Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back.

John Updike

#59. All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

Nick Lane

#60. I love you, he said flatly. I
love
you. Shall I elaborate? I have loved you. I do love you. I will love you. I didn't want to love you. I tried not to love you. I will undoubtably regret loving you, but
God help me
I love you
so much.

Elizabeth Peters

#61. In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature.

Aristotle.

#62. The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.

Marion Woodman

#63. The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

Miriam Toews

#64. The human brain is the last, and greatest, scientific frontier. It is truly an internal cosmos that lies contained within our skulls. The more than 100 billion nerve cells and trillion supporting cells that make up your brain and mine constitute the most elaborate structure in the known universe.

Joel Davis

#65. I learned that the hardest party to pull off successfully is Saturday night dinner. This meal is expected to be elaborate: appetizers, first course, dinner, dessert, and coffee. People arrive at 7:30 or 8 p.m. and stay for hours - definitely past my bedtime - and they all go home exhausted.

Ina Garten

#66. I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.

Maria Semple

#67. In times of prosperity we are apt to forget God; we imagine it does not matter whether we recognise Him or not. As long as we are comfortably clothed and fed and looked after, our civilisation becomes an elaborate means of ignoring God.

Oswald Chambers

#68. I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.

Joyce Carol Oates

#69. It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

Bill Condon

#70. Getting inside the mind of a terrorist wasn't difficult at all. Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies. We're not a particular species. Check out popular video games.

Alan Dean Foster

#71. Imagine the people you fear and dislike as pivotal characters in a fascinating and ultimately redemptive plot that will take years or even lifetimes for the Divine to elaborate.

Rob Brezsny

#72. There is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

Gish Jen

#73. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

Abraham Verghese

#74. Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

Michel Foucault

#75. The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

Bruno Dumont

#76. I wonder, when women who buy beautiful ivory jewelry fasten those elaborate pendants around their throats, if they are choked by sadness.

Jodi Picoult

#77. Two elements enter into successful and happy gatherings at table. The food, whether simple or elaborate, must be carefully prepared; willingly prepared; imaginatively prepared. And the guests - friends, family or strangers - must be conscious of their welcome.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

#78. Socially prominent people are very fond of disease, because it gives them a chance to have these really elaborate charity functions, and the newspaper headlines say 'EVENING IN PARIS BALL RAISES MONEY TO FIGHT GOUT' instead of 'RICH PEOPLE AMUSE THEMSELVES'.

Dave Barry

#79. My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.

Patti Smith

#80. While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.

Meg Rosoff

#81. So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#82. It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

Peter York

#83. Love scenes, if genuine, are indescribable; for to those who have enacted them the most elaborate description seems tame, and to those who have not, the simplest picture seems overdone.

Louisa May Alcott

#84. I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.

Henry James

#85. The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.

Joel Coen

#86. The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

#87. What's fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it's crap-looking - apart from the White House, which is beautiful.

Tony Hale

#88. My dog has the intellectual capacity of a lime wedge, yet even he possesses an elaborate set of assumptions, based on his ability to control my behavior through a combination of slavish devotion and incessant howling.

Martha Beck

#89. I'd come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn't exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.

Ernest Cline

#90. When you're working on a huge, elaborate set that took months to create, and you're surrounded by hundreds of extras, you better remember your lines and know what you're doing in a scene!

Kenneth Choi

#91. The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.

Andrei Codrescu

#92. I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess.

Edgar Allan Poe

#93. The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war.

Wernher Von Braun

#94. I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

Fidel Castro

#95. Elaborate apparatus plays an important part in the science of to-day, but I sometimes wonder if we are not inclined to forget that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of man.

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

#96. Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, edu- cate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art.

James Felici

#97. I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.

Alan Bradley

#98. Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#99. Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

William Greider

#100. It's an awful lot to take in, this elaborate plan in which I was a piece, just as I was meant to be a piece in the Hunger Games. Used without consent, without knowledge. At least in the Hunger Games, I knew I was being played with.

Suzanne Collins