Top 100 Quotes About Refinement
#1. Women lose their delicacy and refinement, when they are compelled night and day to haggle with their destiny over things pitifully small, and for this they are blamed by those whom their toil supports.
Rabindranath Tagore
#2. The fires of refinement will shine the light of Christ into the dark places of our hearts, burn off the chaff, and restore us to a state of greater purity.
Robin Bertram
#3. Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant H. McGill
#4. To speak truth, reader, there is no excellent beauty, no accomplished grace, no refinement, without strength as excellent, as complete, as trustworthy.
Charlotte Bronte
#5. Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.
Niklaus Wirth
#6. There is nothing so catching as refinement.
Emily Eden
#7. Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
Aaron Copland
#8. The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.
Eric Sevareid
#9. I've played a lot of elegance and refinement, so to do something really down and dirty is a great attraction.
Natalie Dormer
#10. Can it be out of discretion, and a reluctance to hurt, that they affect to be unaware of my existence? But this is a refinement of feeling which can hardly be attributed to the dogs that come pissing against my abode, apparently never doubting that it contains some flesh and bones.
Samuel Beckett
#12. Who has reached the extreme limits of scale with the same infallible precision, equally guarded against the false refinement of artificial elegance and the roughness of spurious force? Who has better known how to breathe anguish and dread into the purest and most exquisite forms?
Charles Gounod
#13. Sometime in the eternities to come, we will see that our trials were calculated to cause us to turn to our Heavenly Father for strength and support. Any affliction or suffering we are called upon to bear may be directed to give us experience, refinement, and perfection.
Delbert L. Stapley
#14. The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#15. Be not unwilling in what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody.
Marcus Aurelius
#16. We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#17. But all this was nothing compared to the face which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue.
Samuel Beckett
#18. If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#20. Civilization is refinement of spirit, respect of one's neighbor, tolerance of foreign opinion, courtesy of manner.
Vicente Blasco Ibanez
#21. Life is about refinement, not perfection. And you still have refining to do.
Dan Millman
#22. I didn't go to high school, and I didn't go to grade school either. Education, I think, is for refinement and is probably a liability.
H. L. Hunt
#23. Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" - whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing.
Arnold Schoenberg
#24. I sit up talking till daybreak with the young people and we have almost Athenian evenings, Athenian, I mean, only in their intellectual subtlety and refinement.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#25. Taste is an evolution and refinement of one's personal likes and dislikes. This evolution takes place with a constant curiosity and interest in everything. The editing consequently refines the choices and defines taste.
Norma Kamali
#26. Women bring with them into the world a certain virtue, a divine gift that makes them adept at instilling such qualities as faith, courage, empathy and refinement in relationships and in cultures,
D. Todd Christofferson
#27. The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.
John Adams
#28. Refinement is just as much a Christian grace in a man as in a woman; but he is not such a hateful, unsexed creature without it as a woman is.
Charlotte Mary Yonge
#29. The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.
Isaac D'Israeli
#30. I want to bring softness and refinement to an urban, feminine wardrobe and to help the woman show her character and individuality through her unique clothes.
Catherine Malandrino
#31. Force, not persuasion, not discussion, is the legitimate instrument for influencing and policing the hockey mind. Fighting in hockey is one of the most magnificent and eloquent displays of refinement in all of sports.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#32. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#33. During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible.
Niklaus Wirth
#34. Good enough is good enough. There is time for refinement later. It's not how great you start - it's how great you end up.
Guy Kawasaki
#35. Only you are responsible for the development of your gift and for its brilliant after the process of its refinement
Sunday Adelaja
#36. A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.
Theodore Dalrymple
#37. Encourage good music and art and literature in your homes. Homes that have a spirit of refinement and beauty will bless the lives of your children forever.
Ezra Taft Benson
#38. The process of discovering your greatest self is of refinement, not adding. The best way to reconnect with your freedom is to look at the rules you have that govern and hinder it.
Steve Maraboli
#39. I've always been battling against my sense of dignity and refinement. I was embarrassed by any bodily functions when I was younger. I could never even blow my nose.
Helen Mirren
#40. Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice.
James Ellis
#41. I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.
Robert Pinsky
#42. You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.
Stephen Daldry
#43. You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.
Sam Altman
#44. Wealth brings with it refinement, the spirit of conservation, while poverty inspires adventurous ideas, the desire to change things, and has little care for life.
Jose Rizal
#45. We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#46. What is the highest of all goods achievable by action? ... both the general run of man and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness ... but with regard to what happiness is they differ.
Aristotle.
#47. He was smooth water - effortless in refinement but just like still water, dangerous if you couldn't swim.
Pepper Winters
#48. They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don't know how there can be any blood left in my veins. I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them; I was just as dead-and-alive as they were.
Emile Zola
#49. God's arrows of affliction are sharp and painful so He can get our attention. He won't let His beloved children get away with sin because He knows it robs us of blessings, opportunities, and even character refinement.
Charles Stanley
#50. Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.
Edouard Manet
#51. No improvement that takes place in either sex can possibly be confined to itself. Each is a universal mirror to each, and the respective refinement of the one will always be in reciprocal proportion to the polish of the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
#52. A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.
Herbert Spencer Jennings
#54. A feast not profuse but elegant; more of salt [refinement] than of expense.
Lord Byron
#55. Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?
Jocelyn Gibb
#56. Experimental work of great refinement is necessary in order to determine atomic weights. No relationships between them have yet been certainly found which make it possible for us to compute by any sort of calculation exactly the value of any one atomic weight from any other.
Theodore William Richards
#57. Why was it, she asked herself, that 'animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.
Diane Ackerman
#58. Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary
and terrible elegant.
Muriel Barbery
#59. The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein
#60. An elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.
Hilary Mantel
#61. Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.
Niklaus Wirth
#62. Out of the fires of refinement, come the praise of His magnificence, the brilliance of His glory, and the honor of His precious Son, Jesus Christ.
Robin Bertram
#63. No one would say, 'Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.' We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? 'Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there.'
Sendhil Mullainathan
#64. Gynaecologists are very smooth indeed. Because they have to listen to woeful and sordid symptoms they develop an expression of refinement and sympathy.
Richard Asher
#65. If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
H.P. Lovecraft
#66. She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
Mervyn Peake
#67. They learned to live contently with small things, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy not respectable, and to be rich not wealthy. They let the sacred and unconscious bloom amidst the common, rendering it all extraordinary.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
#68. (Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
#69. The misfortune is that many people, men and women, think that the perfect face has no flaws, no pores in the skin; and that gives unrealistic levels of esteem. Somebody feels they're not right because they haven't got that type of refinement.
Douglas Kirkland
#70. I think 'Chef' is about somebody who's in the middle of his life, and he's kind of lost his passion and his voice, so he seeks out some refinement and redemption.
Jon Favreau
#71. To become balanced, meditate on the heart center in the center of the chest. There you will experience happiness, refinement, sensitivity, beauty, laughter.
Frederick Lenz
#73. Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.
Ray Kurzweil
#74. Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
William Hazlitt
#75. Tyranny has no need of arts or sciences, for its policy, which is very shallow and without any refinement, only consists in shedding blood.
Jean De La Bruyere
#76. Fetish is the exploration of sex as art, and the refinement of one's personal desires. Anything can be fetishised ... There'll be new fetishes forever. I feel that the 21st century is all about fetish.
Rick Castro
#77. Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
Jean Baudrillard
#78. Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
#79. Gaining insight into our own negativity is a lifelong task, and one which is capable of almost infinite refinement. But unless we undertake it, we will be unable to see where to make the necessary changes in our lives. Were
Dalai Lama XIV
#80. Finesse and refinement are admirable qualities, but they are not the artist's ultimate goals; and, indeed, they can stand in the way of those goals.
Sam Inglis
#81. Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
William Hazlitt
#82. There are many true ladies, and they differ somewhat from society generally. So does a true gentleman, on the same principle of refinement and nobility of character.
Maria Jane McIntosh
#83. We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.
George Meredith
#84. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all living things whatsoever.
Ashley Montagu
#85. God's discipline has nothing to do with rejection but more to do with refinement.
Gary Rohrmayer
#86. Yoga is meant for the purification of body and its exploration as well as for the refinement of the mind.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#87. I think the time is ripe for a return to the refinement of lifestyle that the pocket watch embodies. A personal pleasure that you know you have in your pocket, which requires an elegant gesture to use and show to others.
Richard Mille
#88. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#89. The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#91. Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
Nate Silver
#92. The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Edmund Burke
#93. Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#94. The ministers of Christ should possess refinement. All uncouth manners, attitudes and gestures should be discarded, and they should encourage in themselves humble dignity of bearing.
Ellen G. White
#95. Yale's greatness carries an urgent need to guard against the fall of excellence into exclusivity, of refinement into preciousness, of elegance into class and convention.
Benno C. Schmidt Jr.
#96. That alone can be called true refinement which elevates the soul of man, purifying the manners by improving the intellect.
Hosea Ballou
#97. Dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.
Twyla Tharp
#98. Christ was either the grandest, guiltiest of impostors, by a marvelous and most subtle refinement of wickedness, or He was God manifest in the flesh.
Herrick Johnson
#99. Trials come. Tribulation comes. Fires of refinement come. The purpose of refinement is to bring to light the things hidden in darkness and then remove them
Robin Bertram
#100. Does power bring happiness? Does it bring refinement? Does it bring humor? Does it bring a good-heartedness, or is it just cold? Power is never cold. Cold people may use power in cold ways.
Frederick Lenz
