Exquisite Quotes
More Exquisite Quotes
Joys too exquisite to last,And yet more exquisite when past.
james montgomery— The Little Cloud.
I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.
— Letter to Stanley Hart White (January 1929)
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
Alain de Botton— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009, pg. 127)
I am floated along, as if I should die Of Liberty's exquisite pain.
— 1849 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point', stanza 36.
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have beenwornshoddy by hisinferiors.It should be a rulethat bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
— Note Books, L, in Edmund Wilson (ed) The Crack-Up (1945).
Affliction's sons are brothers in distress;A brother to relieve,—how exquisite the bliss!
Robert Burns— A Winter Night.
In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.
richard cecil— p. 422. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.
colette— Chambre d’Hôtel, "The Rainy Moon" (1940)
Santiago is the today and tomorrow of Latin American Art. His exquisite line and masterful talent are a great asset for his native Colombia.
santiago martínez delgado— Edgar Kaufmann conversation, letter to Edgar Kaufmann Jr, 1932, Wis.
Alas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma.
witi ihimaera— Fulbright New Zealand Keynote speech, November 2005
The Vicomtesse alias Moira Lister - even though she is on the wrong side of 60, is looking like an exquisite, flawless Gainsborough cameo.
moira lister— Jani Allan, "The Vicomtesse from Ostrichland", Sunday Times (1983), republished in Face Value by Jani Allan.
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
arthur machen— The Hill of Dreams (London: Martin Secker, [1907] 1923) p. 154
The wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring. These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles. The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
— Walt Whitman, Miracles (1856) in Leaves of Grass
I envy your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?
charlotte brontë— Mr. Rochester to Jane (Ch. 14)
The clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair and skin, the charming young arrogance of the eyes this was beauty, he reflected, a miracle, a revelation. Her virginal fineness and her dress, which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice and flame.
john buchan— Prologue (Huntingtower (1922))
In my present insistence on high standards you will see that there is less self-indulgence than resolve and application. I do not let the Christian monopolize the ideal of perfection. I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.
andré gide— Maurice in “Characters,” p. 298
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James— Roderick Hudson
[On Monckton Milne's Life of Keats ] An attempt to make us eat dead dog by exquisite currying and cooking [...] The kind of man that Keats was gets ever more horrible to me. Forces of hunger for every pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force -- that is a combination! Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen 'Vessel of Hell' [...]
john keats— Thomas Carlyle, in J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834 - 1881 (1884)
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— Part I, section 1
One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love to serve the loved one without his knowing it is only possible, as regards the love of God , through atheism .
Simone Weil— Last Notebook (1942) p. 84
I write in a hurry, because the little one, who has been sleeping a long time, begins to call for me. Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment.
mary wollstonecraft— Letter to Gilbert Imlay (19 August 1794)
Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!
Robert Burns— Robert Burns, A Winter Night.
Europe was darkened at sunset, Cordova shone with public lamps; Europe was dirty, Cordova built a thousand baths; Europe was covered with vermine, Cordova changed its undergarments daily; Europe lay in mud, Cordovas streets were paved; Europes palaces had smoke-holes in the ceiling, Cordovas arabesques were exquisite; Europes nobility could not sign its name, Cordovas children went to school; Europes monks could not read the baptismal service, Cordovas teachers created a library of Alexandrian dimensions.
— Victor Robinson, The Story of Medicine (1932), Kessinger Publishing, 2005, p.164
[Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes , Erasmus , Voltaire (& Co., if you will), whose exquisite mixed praises of human and literary folly create a polyphony unlike any other prose music you've ever heard.
— The Washington Times, as quoted in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (2002), edited by Richard Zenith, p. 344
Santiago is the today and tomorrow of Latin American Art. His exquisite line and masterful talent are a great asset for his native Colombia.
— Edgar Kaufmann conversation, letter to Edgar Kaufmann Jr, 1932, Wis.
It does at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.
— Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character of Men of Genius, On Habituating Ourselves to an Individual Pursuit; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 46.
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part I. 1.
The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to every house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay Edinburgh Review January 1830, review of Southey's Colloquies on Society.
