dress quotes

  • Thegloryof God isman, and thegloryof manishisdress.

    -Anonymous
    c.450  Babylonian Talmud. Quoted in Barton Stevenson (ed)  The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1948).

  • For Mercy has a human heart Pity a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.

    -William Blake
      Songs of Innocence,'The Divine Image'.

  • You must understand that this is not a woman's dress I'm wearing. It's a man's dress.

    - David real name David Robert Jones Bowie
    Quoted in Maxim  Jakubowski The Wit and Wisdom of Rock and Roll (1983).

  • The difference inthis case between a manof senseand a fop, is, thatthefopvalueshimself uponhis dress; theman of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows he must not neglect it.

    - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
      Letter to his son,19 Nov.

  • There isno suchthing as a moral dress† It's people who are moral or immoral.

    -Jeanette ne  e Jeanette Jerome Churchill
      'That Moral Dress', in the Daily Chronicle,16 Feb.

  • Ce n'est gue'  re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente"  tement une foi entie'  re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re  clament des te  moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.

    - Simone de Beauvoir
      Le Deuxie' m e Sexe (The Second Sex), bk.2, pt.5, ch.18 (translated by H M Parshley,1952).

  • Wasthere ever sucha sunnystreet asthis Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with thetread of feet until they shine again† Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
      American Notes.

  • Youmust dressaccording toyourage, yourpursuits, your object in life.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      Endymion, ch.23.

  • 'I know of no joy,'she airily began,'greater than a cool white dress after the sweetness of confession.'

    - (ArthurAnnesley) Ronald Firbank
      Valmouth, ch.4.

  • Fond Pride of Dress is sure an Empty Curse; E'er Fancy you consult, consult your Purse.

    - Benjamin Franklin
    Poor Richard Improved, May.

  • Their dress is very independent of fashion; as they observe,'What does it signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?'And if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent,'What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?'

    - Mrs Elizabeth Cleghorn ne  e Stevenson Gaskell
    ^3  Of the Cranford ladies. Cranford, ch.1.

  • Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.

    -William Hazlitt
      Political Essays,'On the Clerical Character'.

  • A sweet disorder in the dress 400 Kindles in clothes a wantonness: A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction† A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility: Do more bewitch me, than when Art Is too precise in every part.

    - Robert Herrick
      'Delight in Disorder'.

  • Dress is a form of visual art, a creation of images with the visible self as its medium.

    - Anne Hollander
      Seeing Through Clothes, ch.5.

  • Her crocus dress she wore, lowcut, belongings on show.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
      Ulysses.

  • Are simple women only fit To dress, to darn, to flower or knit, To mind the distaff, or the spit? Why are the needle and the pen Thought incompatible by men? 507

    - Esther married name  Clark Lewis
      'A Mirror for Detractors', l.146^50.

  • The car has becomeanarticle ofdresswithout whichwe feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

    - (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan
      Understanding Media, ch.22.

  • The root of Evil, Avarice That damn'd ill-natur'd, baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employed a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more; Envy itself, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made That very Wheel that turned theTrade.

    - Bernard Mandeville
      The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (2nd edn.).

  • It's better to be dead, or even perfectly well, than to suffer from the wrong affliction. The man who owns up to arthritis in a beri-beri year is as lonely as a woman in a last month's dress.

    - (Frederic) Ogden Nash
      'How'sYour Sacro-iliac?', in the Saturday Evening Post, 14 Oct.

  • Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the bowers of paradise.

    -Thomas Paine
      Common Sense, ch.1.

  • Expression is the dress of thought.

    - Alexander Pope
    An Essay on Criticism, l.318.

  • When did we begin to dress ourselves?

    - Adrienne Cecile Rich
      Diving into theWreck,'Blood-Sister'.

  • We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because, as a nation, we don't dress well and we've no manners.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Valentine to Dolly and Philip Clandon. You Never CanTell, act1.

  • A mancannot dress,but hisideasgetcloath'datthesame time.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.9, ch.13.

  •   In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up people's feet Still going past me in the street.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
      A Child's Garden ofVerses, no.1,'Bed in Summer', stanzas1^2.

  • The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.

    - Dylan Marlais Thomas
      Under MilkWood.

  •    Ihold that gentlemanto be thebest dressedwhose dress no one observes.

    - Anthony Trollope
      Thackeray, ch.9.

  • Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

    - Henry Vaughan
      Silex Scintillans,'The Retreat'.

  • An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'Sailing to Byzantium', stanza 8. Collected in TheTower (1928).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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