Quotes About Plainness

#1. What could two men, so different from each other, see in this "brown patch", as Mary called hereself? It was certainly not her plainness that attracted them (and let all plain young ladies be warned against the dangerous encouragement given them by Society to confinde in their want of beauty)

George Eliot

#2. Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.

John Wilkins

#3. If Beauty is excuse enough for Being, it sure takes Plainness then to feel the real necessity for - Doing.

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

#4. 56. Manifest plainness and embrace the genuine; lessen self-interest and make few your desires.

Lao-Tzu

#5. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness ...

Virginia Woolf

#6. Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.

Lao-Tzu

#7. Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity; Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.

William Shakespeare

#8. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested - ominously - a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

Donna Tartt

#9. To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence; for to be what some people call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking.

Joseph Addison

#10. It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness; and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.

Herbert Spencer

#11. True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.

Alexander Pope

#12. 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

#13. It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.

David Hume

#14. But any idea of plainness is simply contrary to the fancy color that is red.

Marion Roach

#15. She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.

Truman Capote

#16. People tolerate a lot for looks. They tolerate much less for plainness.

Donna Lynn Hope

#17. The truth is, the Science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things.

Robert Hooke

#18. One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, A child has beaten me in plainness of living.

Diogenes

#19. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.

William Strunk Jr.

#20. Modest plainness sets off sprightly wit,
For works may have more with than does 'em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.

Alexander Pope

#21. In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.

Robert Galbraith

#22. My plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a
proof that I am speaking the truth.

Socrates

#23. Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#24. Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live.

James Shirley

#25. She that would raise a noble love must find Ways to beget a passion for her mind; She must be that which she to the world would seem, For all true love is grounded on esteem: Plainness and truth gain more a generous heart Than all the crooked subtleties of art.

Theresa Villiers

#26. It's right that you should do so, Fire. It's right and it's your right, because you're my beautiful child, and beauty has rights that plainness never will.

Kristin Cashore

#27. It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.

John B. S. Haldane

#28. No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.

William Law

#29. Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#30. Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent.

George Eliot

#31. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Matthew Arnold

#32. I am, sir. It is my way - it always was my way, by instinct - ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.

Charlotte Bronte

#33. It is God himself, the Lord and Creator of all things, who is so small here, who is hidden here in the corner, who enters into the plainness of the world, who meets us in the helplessness and defenselessness of a child, and wants to be with us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#34. One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome

Murasaki Shikibu

#35. I can't relate to your razzle-dazzle, your wish
for voluptuous when my symphony is spanx.

Kelli Russell Agodon

#36. The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

Oscar Wilde

#37. When a woman is plain, people say, 'What beautiful eyes you have, beautiful hair.

Anton Chekhov