Top 49 Ornamental Quotes
#1. Cap'n," said he, at length, with that same uncomfortable smile, "here's my old shipmate, O'Brien; s'pose you was to heave him overboard. I ain't partic'lar as a rule, and I don't take no blame for settling his hash; but I don't reckon him ornamental, now do you?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#2. Besdies, to turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental.
Richard Peck
#3. That is suitable to a man, in point of ornamental expense, not which he can afford to have, but which he can afford to lose.
Richard Whately
#4. I once painted a concert singer and on the chestnut frame I carved the opening bars of Mendelssohn's Rest in the Lord. It was ornamental unobtrusive and to musicians I think it emphasized the expression of the face and pose of the figure.
Thomas Eakins
#5. A bull in a china shop is not a useful animal, nor is he ornamental, but there can be no doubt of his energy. The hare was full of energy, but he didn't win the race. The man who stands still is the man who keeps his ground.
Anthony Trollope
#6. The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.
Mark Twain
#7. I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot and vein that runs through the body of it.
Joseph Addison
#8. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
Edith Wharton
#9. Ornamental pattern work, to be raised above the contempt of reasonable men, must possess three qualities: beauty, imagination and order.
William Morris
#10. Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
Edward Abbey
#11. I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
Fernando Pessoa
#12. You cannot reduce the situation to worm jokes, Will. This is Gabriel and Gideon's father we're discussing."
"We're not just discussing him; we're chasing him through an ornamental sculpture garden because he's turned into a worm.
Cassandra Clare
#13. Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral.
Mark Forsyth
#14. Art is not just ornamental, an enhancement of life. It is a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional ... a map to self discovery.
Gabrielle Roth
#15. Maggie in her crude form, with her hair down her back, and altogether in a state of dubious promise, was a most undesirable niece; but now she was capable of being at once ornamental and useful.
George Eliot
#16. A portrait is like an ornamental headstone. It is not for the subject, but for those who look upon it. For those you want to remember.
Julie Klassen
#17. For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am.
Cornel West
#18. I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.
Simon Schama
#19. I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the State to pay for them.
Charles Clarke
#20. Straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental.
William Hogarth
#21. Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;
Edith Wharton
#22. The true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second, what is useful, and third, what is ornamental. To reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice.
Lydia Sigourney
#23. The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. It is not enough to wear an ornamental cross as a pretty decoration.
A.B. Simpson
#25. Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
H.P. Lovecraft
#26. When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.
Mark Twain
#27. The Stones were always exemplary of one of the best of all rock qualities: tightness. They have always been economical, the opposite of ornamental. Having a very clear idea of what they wanted to say they could go into a studio and make it all up on a three minute cut.
Jon Landau
#29. Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.
Charles Dickens
#30. The passenger train is like the male teat - neither useful nor ornamental.
James J. Hill
#31. Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular Centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it's just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges.
Tim Moore
#32. To grow up under really simple circumstances, and to understand that certain things were ornamental ... that made an impression on me as a child and is something I use.
Helmut Lang
#33. That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.
Kate Atkinson
#34. It was darn nigh impossible for women in rock in the '70s. There wasn't a mold if you were a woman and you were in the entertainment in the '70s. You were probably a disco diva or a folk singer, or simply ornamental. Radio would play only one woman per hour.
Ann Wilson
#35. The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men - senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds - performing meaningless duties.
Thomas Cahill
#36. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.
Haruki Murakami
#37. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
Erich Maria Remarque
#38. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
#39. I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.
David Grubbs
#40. I always get what I want in the end. And I think I want ... ornamental ironwork. For the windows of my bedchamber.
Robert Jordan
#41. In fact with his low forehead, ornamental quiffs of hair on the temples, lurching walk and perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife, it was obvious at once that Vincenzino was "a man of honour," one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#42. The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies.
Lemony Snicket
#43. There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.
Charles Dickens
#44. A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.
David Mamet
#45. Go and make yourself useful, since you are too big to be ornamental.
Louisa May Alcott
#46. She had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.
Charles Dickens
#47. The sanserif only seems to be the simpler script. It is a form that was violently reduced for little children. For adults it is more difficult to read than serifed roman type, whose serifs were never meant to be ornamental.
Jan Tschichold
#48. The box didn't appear to be hampered in any way by the ornamental rug draped roguishly over it, nor by the thief hanging by one arm from the lid. It was, in a very real sense, a dead weight. Further along the lid were the remains of two fingers, owner unknown.
Terry Pratchett
#49. Fact was, little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful.
Robert A. Heinlein
