Elaborate Quotes
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A banquet : a sumptuous feast ; especially: an elaborate and often ceremonious meal for numerous people often in honor of a person...a meal held in recognition of some occasion or achievement
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More Elaborate Quotes
Everywhere revolutions are painful yet fruitful gestations of a people: they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.
— Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Horas de lucha, 1908.
'He knows'says Hebraism,'his Bible!'whenever we hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defence of culture, content ourselves with answering simply: 'No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.'
Matthew Arnold— 1869 Culture and Anarchy, ch.5.
As elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
Raymond Chandler— Of chess. Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).
Finnegans Wake took him seventeen years to write, a length of time that suggests an elaborate hobby rather than a passionate desire to create something.
— 1960 Of James Joyce. Literature andWestern Man.
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
Nathaniel Hawthorne— Chapter II: The Market-Place
She was devastatingly cruel about our home town and told an elaborate, embossed tale about how she made good her escape. She referred to it as 'The Planet Brisbane' and ridiculed its unpleasant combination of smug self-satisfaction and provincial defensiveness.
susan johnson— Page 46. (Hungry Ghosts (1996))
Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
norman mailer— Ch. 10 (The Deer Park (1955))
Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
vilayanur s. ramachandran— p. 249 (The Tell-Tale Brain (2010))
Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact.
saki— "Reginald's Drama"
In the modern industrial communities... the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous... that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help.
thorstein veblen— p.65-66 (The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899))
When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.
jacques barzun— "The Masterpiece," in A Stroll with William James (1983)
Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy.
anthony daniels— British Medical Journal Views and Reviews: Desperate house calls (BMJ 2009;338:b212)
Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity: rather it is an elaborate balancing-act, a feat of intellectual skill demanding constant vigilance. Its aim is a reconciliation of opposites.
Robertson Davies— "Aristonmetron" is an unusual formation of the Greek ? (ariston metron or metron ariston: "Moderation is best").
Dreams , as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire , not by the head but by the heart , and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
fyodor dostoevsky— II (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877))
The elaborate argument against the constitutionality of the Act if interpreted as we read it, in accordance with its obvious meaning does not need an elaborate answer.
Holmes, Jr., Oliver Wendell— United States v. Wurzbach, 280 U.S. 396, 399 (1930).
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Ivan Illich— Ritualization of Progress
Individualism, isolation, alienation. The poet is not only different from society, he is as different as possible from other poets; all this differentness is exploited to the limit is used as subject matter, even. Each poet develops an elaborate, “personalized”, bureaucratized machinery of effect; refine your singularities is everybody’s maxim.
Randall Jarrell— of modernism; “The End of the Line”, p. 81
In the sixth century B.C., Gautama, an Aryan princeling on the northern frontier of India, formulated a bleakly pessimistic philosophy that markedly resembles Schopenhauer's. This high doctrine of negation, for reasons that would require an extensive historical explanation, became extremely popular, but was variously interpreted by at least eighteen rival schools, each of which claimed alone to preserve the true teaching of Gautama the Buddha, and Gautama's austere atheism was gradually contaminated and obscured by the usual theological techniques, so that a philosophy that was intended to supplant religion was converted into just another elaborate and learned superstition.
revilo p. oliver— "On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
His reluctance to pay for elaborate or expensive equipment, perhaps the result of an impoverished childhood, had established the legendary "sealing wax-and-string" tradition of the Cavendish , where everyday materials were ingeniously used to make and patch up experimental equipment, with sealing wax proving particularly useful for vacuum seals.
j. j. thomson— Dianna Preston, Before the Fallout from Marie Curie to Hiroshima (2005)
Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.
— The First Men in the Moon (1901), Ch. 24
To [Henry] James's intimates, however, these elaborate hesitancies, far from being an obstacle, were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.
edith wharton— Ch. 8 (A Backward Glance (1934))
We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.
Alfred North Whitehead— Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927)
Everywhere revolutions are painful yet fruitful gestations of a people: they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.
— Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Horas de lucha, 1908.
The bhakti poets use an elaborate, multi-vocal rhetoric, which requires the taking on, not only of personal voices to suit different emotions and genres, but also the voices of some of the dramatis personae of classical Tamil (Cankam) poetry, such as the lovelorn heroine or her solicitous girlfriend.
— Norman Cutler, in “According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India”, p.199
From the invocation to the conclusion, the poet Tulsidas seeks the grace of Rama and announces over and over again that the final object of his poetic performance is the attainment of bhakti – complete dedication to Rama. The narrative ends with an elaborate discourse on the supremacy of the devotional sentiment .
— Tulsidas, in Ramacharitamanas, quoted in "Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern", by K. R. Sundararajan in p.xx.
The more elaborate our means of our common sense is, the less the common sense it becomes.
— Joseph Priestly, in “Thoughts for Meaningful Life” p.96
