Top 100 Elegant Quotes
#1. Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
Malcolm Gladwell
#2. Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.
Ernest Bramah
#3. He found himself looking down at Laurent, his eyes passing slowly over the delicate skin, the lamp-darkened blue eyes, the elegant curve of cheekbone, interrupted by a stray strand of blond hair.
C.S. Pacat
#4. We want desparately to believe that even if we judge ourselves harshly throughout life, at least at the end, we can pull off a victorious and elegant exit.
Linda Robinson
#5. Mayonnaise, like hollandaise, was invented by the French to cover up the flavor of spoiled flesh, stale vegetables, rotten fish. Beware the sauce! Where food comes beslobbered with an elegant slime you may well suspect the integrity of the basic ingredients.
Edward Abbey
#6. I begin to see my life as a small part of something grander, more elegant: the intertwined nature of the souls of man.
Raoul Wientzen
#7. Master Griffin, I would marry my own mother for the excuse to stab my eyes out with her brooches than to see anything under your kilt," the man's voice said with an elegant aplomb. "Where would you like your guest's things, sir?
Tiffany Reisz
#8. We took the brains out of the set-top box and put it in the cloud. Having our software in the cloud gives consumers the ability to click their remote control and navigate through thousands of choices in a simple and elegant way. That's magic.
Brian L. Roberts
#9. Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.
Honore De Balzac
#10. Did the gods once mingle with humankind, or is Homer a visionary madman, or, what is worse, a mere poet, a maker-up of beautiful falsities, an elegant liar? I shall grapple with that perplexity, only to emerge as I went in, in a cloud of unknowing, if perhaps a little the wiser.
Eva Brann
#11. The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.
Noam Chomsky
#12. Hadrian drew two swords from his sides in a single elegant motion. He flipped one around
letting it spin against his palm once. "Need to get a new grip on this one. It's starting to fray again." He looked at Will. "Shall we get on with this? I believe you were about to rob us.
Michael J. Sullivan
#13. Amazement could go no further. If Phryne had ridden in on a unicorn he would merely have remarked on its elegant hocks and golden horn and suggested that she enter it weight for age at Felmington. Well, no, not a unicorn. Not Phryne. A dragon, perhaps. He was sure that she could tame a dragon.
Kerry Greenwood
#14. We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.
Ursula Goodenough
#15. When I'm going to events, I like Armani because I think they do a cross between my relaxed rocky feel and a really smart elegant look really well.
Ruta Gedmintas
#16. Vultures are homely, but they clean up all the garbage and that's good. And they're elegant in the sky.
Roger Tory Peterson
#17. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
'It's been fun,' she said.
'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves.
T.C. Boyle
#18. Evolution is a tinkerer, an ad-hocker, and a jury-rigger. It works with what it has on hand, not with what it has in mind. Some of its inventions prove elegant, while in others you can see the seams and dried glue.
Natalie Angier
#19. My dad had a personal style which was very attractive. It was quite reserved and quite elegant, and it was infectious.
Bill Nighy
#20. To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being ... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.
Italo Calvino
#21. Farewell, beautiful
lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, good-bye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for
existing, good-bye you bastards!
Jean-Paul Sartre
#22. Both Rick and Amelia were impressed with their graceful movements. The Balinese dance was artistic with great expression. The dancers seemed to be telling a story through their fingers, hands and body gestures, including head and eye movements. It was amazing. Every gesture was elegant.
Linda Weaver Clarke
#23. Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park; an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
John Green
#24. Usually all I care about is how elegant or over-the-top the pieces are, it's nice to really get to understand what the customer wants and needs as opposed to just focusing on the aesthetic.
Christian Cota
#25. And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us.
Carl Sagan
#26. Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads.
Lorrie Moore
#27. Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
Victor Hugo
#28. The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.
Jennifer Lynch
#29. It's funny to have become an elegant skier now. But my drive is still the same.
Hermann Maier
#30. Oyin Da's mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.
Tade Thompson
#31. Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Bill Bryson
#32. To the degree it is efficient, a spaceship is elegant and beautiful.
Vanna Bonta
#34. A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#35. Writing can be thankless. People treat writing like it's some elegant act but it's usually lonely and isolating. You will struggle over a piece of writing and then get to set and some dumb actor will say it wrong or immediately want to change it.
Amy Poehler
#36. The word WANTED slithered across the top of each image in elegant calligraphy. The drawing of Criminy was spot-on, but the one of me was more than a little imaginative. I looked like an evil seductress, some sort of vampy witch-queen.
I liked it.
I wanted a copy for my wagon.
Delilah S. Dawson
#37. My aunt looked like Lucille Ball, and everything she touched was beautiful and elegant. But I was intelligent enough to understand I would never be like her.
Sandra Lerner
#38. I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.
H.P. Lovecraft
#39. If women would make themselves appear as elegant to an Husband, as they were desirous to appear to him while a Lover, the Rake, which all women love, would last longer in the Husband than it generally does.
Samuel Richardson
#40. Study the teachings of the pine tree, the bamboo, and the plum blossom. The pine is evergreen, firmly rooted, and venerable. The bamboo is strong, resilient, unbreakable. The plum blossom is hardy, fragrant, and elegant.
Morihei Ueshiba
#41. When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.
Paul Auster
#42. A lot of people say, 'I always knew Lucky Luciano as a very smooth, very elegant, very powerful man.' All the accounts of him as an older man were that he was very genteel but he still had the look of smothered violence behind his eyes.
Vincent Piazza
#43. To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write.
Philip Kitcher
#44. An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.
Salvador Dali
#45. Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was but a part of their servitude.
Tacitus
#46. I never thought of Kim Basinger in terms of age. For me she embodies woman with her subtleties and intricacies. She's sensual and intellectually engaging, elegant with a very strong personal style.
Camilla Belle
#48. The same goes for pajamas. If you are a woman, try wearing something elegant as nightwear. The worst thing you can do is to wear a sloppy sweat suit. I occasionally meet people who dress like this all the time, whether waking or sleeping.
Marie Kondo
#49. That mama-bear, elegant-and-modest-on-the-outside, hot-as-allfuck-on-the-inside thing was ringing his doorbell. And God help him, he knew it was beyond inappropriate to be making up fuck fantasies about this woman right then but he couldn't help it.
Lauren Dane
#50. Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Charles Krauthammer
#51. Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.
Barbara Kingsolver
#53. Anna returned her gaze to the bankers' wives, who huddled into the company of one another. The women were young. Their husbands wore the jewellery of their beauty like elegant wristwatches.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#54. God's love is marvelous and mysterious, and no effort of man - no matter how elegant or purposeful - can explain that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#55. Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis.
Isaac Newton
#56. The transformation of disease, as exemplified by the case of diabetes, is a valuable and elegant concept that serves to remind us that the tally sheet for medical science must carry a column for debit as well as credit.
Deborah Butterfield
#57. I have no way to ask about that. I have no elegant way of stepping into your heart to ask about that without tracking in filth. So I will wait, someday, when you want to tell me.. tell me then. I'll wait until then.
Josef Kucera
#58. We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones.
Hod Lipson
#59. The charming grass, elegant water, fascinating winds, admirable rocks and delicate sands are never alone.
Delano Johnson
#60. No, I thank you; I have had an elegant sufficiency of the numerous delicacies. Any more would be an unsophisticated superfluity, for gastronomic satiety admonishes me that I have reached the ultimate stage of deglutition consistent with dietetic integrity.
Fred Chappell
#61. No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyberspace.
Ai Weiwei
#62. The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.
Amy Bloom
#64. Then will the poor worldling exclaim: "Alas! my house, my gardens, that elegant furniture, those garments, will soon be no longer mine: the grave alone remaineth for me.
Alfonso Maria De Liguori
#65. No one has ever played these endgames with such elegant ease as Capablanca.
Richard Reti
#66. When times are bad, people like to lose themselves in the sheer glamour of another period: beautiful wardrobes, magnificent meals served in elegant settings.
Shirley Maclaine
#67. Remember that the divine order is intelligent and fundamentally good. Life is not a series of random, meaningless episodes, but an ordered, elegant whole that follows ultimately comprehensible laws.
Epictetus
#68. Heather A. Slomski's stories are downright addictive. I kept promising myself to turn off the light after just one more, and then breaking that promise, beguiled by her cool, measured prose and by the surprises, tensions, and uncanny encounters simmering beneath its elegant surface.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
#69. I've only ever looked at Marissa and seen an elegant, statuesque, gorgeous woman. But this morning, I find myself wishing she was a cute, rumpled, fiery brunette instead.
Shit! That's not good!
M. Leighton
#70. Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort-expanding the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals.
Dan Millman
#71. Naked need is the occasion for God's giving, not a need adorned with the clean, elegant robes of respectability and good works.
Miroslav Volf
#72. He was a thin, elegant-looking man with precise symmetrical features and the hushed, disapproving manner of a senior librarian.
Alastair Reynolds
#73. For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life.
Plato
#74. I kept ... returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
William Baziotes
#75. Coming from Haiti and growing up in Brooklyn, there's a lot of European influence when I get dressed up. I wear a lot of fitted suits, elegant cuts; I think it's cool to mash up a lot of different looks.
Wyclef Jean
#76. Grace can never properly be said to exist without beauty; for it is only in the elegant proportions of beautiful forms that can be found that harmonious variety of line and motion which is the essence and charm of grace.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
#77. Spanish-language, and audio, and in deluxe hardcover editions featuring elegant silver-embossed jackets
E.L. James
#78. I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.
Anne Rice
#79. The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
#80. I love Felicity Jones. It was funny because I went to go see the 'Rogue One' set, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I love you.' And she's so tiny, and elegant, and she's just so small. Everyone's so much smaller than they seem.
Daisy Ridley
#81. He repeated the words dutifully, and then put together his very first sentence in elegant King's English. "Cut...fuck...Bil-lee.
Mark Wildyr
#82. You always knew where you stood with Quezovercoatl. It was generally with a lot of people on top of a great stepped pyramid with someone in an elegant feathered headdress chipping an exquisite obsidian knife for your very own personal use.
Terry Pratchett
#83. Those people who are scared of science or are a bit dismissive of science tend to not really understand what science really is, which is the most beautiful, most elegant and most creative way of looking at the world.
Dallas Campbell
#84. The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.
Jeff Greenfield
#85. In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.
Douglas Crockford
#86. So now he was throwing a party. The most swellegant, elegant party evah.
Melanie Benjamin
#87. His legs have a mind of their own, his foot shoots by itself ... Roberto Baggio is a big horsetail that flicks away opponents as he flows forward in an elegant wave.
Eduardo Galeano
#88. What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.
James Sanborn
#89. Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an "elegant" or "robust" theory. But it isn't science.
Halton Arp
#90. You always want to keep your look clean and elegant, but you don't have to do the safe black-dress route. Have some fun! Wear something colorful with a hint of sparkle.
Mindy Kaling
#91. An elegant woman should be able to do her marketing without making housewives laugh. Those who laugh are always right.
Coco Chanel
#92. Simon Fraser University would make an elegant ruin
Bruno Freschi
#93. A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work.
Steve McConnell
#94. I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.
Sierra Simone
#95. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.
Denis Johnson
#96. Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.
Guy De Maupassant
#97. The very sight of a teapot puts a smile on the face of most people. One cannot help but think of more serene and genteel times. From a whimsical child's teapot to an elegant English Teapot, to collectible teapots that adorn some homes, they are a subtle reminder of all that is good in this world.
Barbara Roberts
#98. Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.
Andre Simon
#99. When we first meet what we love, we could become poets for our longing. When we are removed from what we love, we become singers of grief and weavers of elegant description.
Martin Prechtel
#100. Ranel had said that the murderer wore a ring with a red gemstone. Looking at Akkarin's hands, she was almost disappointed to see they were bare. Not even a mark to hint that a ring might have been worn regularly. His fingers were long and elegant, yet masculine ...
Trudi Canavan
