Adornments Quotes & Sayings

Beyond domestic animals and our response to their fealty and affection, we have a peculiar charge concerning the wild animals which supply our clothes, food and adornments. — S. Parkes Cadman

Can it be, thought I, that my sole mission on earth is to destroy the hopes of others? Ever since I began to live and act, fate has somehow associated me with the last act of other people's tragedies, as if without me no one could either die or give way to despair! I have been the inevitable character who comes in at the final act, involuntarily playing the detestable role of the hangman or the traitor. What has been fate's object in all this? Has it destined me to be the author of middle-class tragedies and family romances
or a purveyor of tales for, say, the Reader's Library? Who knows? Are there not many who begin life by aspiring to end it like Alexander the Great, or Lord Byron, and yet remain petty civil servants all their lives? — Mikhail Lermontov

exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul. — Victor Hugo

All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe. — William Winwood Reade

Parents and leaders should give early help to the blase girl who is often overpainted and underdressed. She is the picture of an unhappy girl whose physical adornments, to her thinking, don't invite adequate attention. Heaven help the girl who gets the kind of attention she is seeking by being overpainted and underdressed! She will rue the day, of course, when she gets the kind of attention her flagrant invitation is giving. — Mark E. Petersen

I carry my adornments on my soul.
I do not dress up like a popinjay;
But inwardly, I keep my daintiness.
I do not bear with me, by any chance,
An insult not yet washed away- a conscience
Yellow with unpurged bile- an honor frayed
To rags, a set of scruples badly worn.
I go caparisoned in gems unseen,
Trailing white plumes of freedom, garlanded
With my good name- no figure of a man,
But a soul clothed in shining armor, hung
With deeds for decorations, twirling- thus-
A bristling wit, and swinging at my side
Courage, and on the stones of this old town
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs! — Edmond Rostand

There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of his soul - if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with its own - with self-control, and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth - has fitted himself to await his journey in the next world. — Socrates

The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Authenticity is about returning and magnifying who you are, instead of trying to become someone who you think you should be. It's about peeling off the false adornments and standing wholly, holy, and true. — Akosua Dardaine Edwards

As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused. — Anthony Burgess

And Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences, whether we consider its subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower-borders, shade and perfume of our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies. — Thomas Jefferson

The law of our being is Love of Life, and its interests and adornments; love of the world in which our lot is cast, engrossment with the interests and affections of earth. Not a low or sensual love; not love of wealth, of fame, of ease, of power, of splendor. Not low worldliness; but the love of Earth as the garden on which the Creator has lavished such miracles of beauty; as the habitation of humanity, the arena of its conflicts, the scene of its illimitable progress, the dwelling-place of the wise, the good, the active, the loving, and the dear; the place of opportunity for the development by means of sin and suffering and sorrow, of the noblest passions, the loftiest virtues, and the tenderest sympathies. — Albert Pike

Hirty's the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself. — Stephen King

Not blemishes. Adornments. — Ian McEwan

What worlds are there herein? I'll tell you. In these seas of fragrant waters, numerous as atoms in unspeakably many buddha-fields, rest an equal number of world systems. Each world system also contains an equal number of worlds. Those world systems in the ocean of worlds have various resting places, various shapes and forms, various substances and essences, various locations, various entryways, various adornments, various boundaries, various alignments, various similarities, and various powers of maintenance. — Thomas Cleary

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. — Rabindranath Tagore

Being exaltingly thin was, of course, the foundation for the visibility, the man, the adornments of this life-to-be; it was the prerequisite that made the rest of the dream possible. And since no matter how thin I got, I was frightened that I could wake up tomorrow and be fat again, the rest of the dream was forever ten or twenty pounds away. — Geneen Roth

She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste. — Robert Galbraith

I saw that every flower He has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily's whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy's charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers. — Therese De Lisieux

He was content to wait, his bare limbs on the sheets heavy, the gold slave cuffs and collar his only adornments. He felt the warm, wonderful, impossible fact of his situation. Bed slave. — C.S. Pacat

Body adornments show that we're aware of our bodies and expect others to be aware as well. — Nora Roberts

Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf
a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments. — Ian McEwan

Somehow, though, neither her clothes nor her features seemed to matter - they were the adornments of a painting or a picture, not the real thing. What made her so captivating was something else, not so easily named: the way she moved, the glance of her eyes, the manner and sound and form. All I wanted to do was sit and gape. If I'd let myself fall into her eyes, I think an army of constructs could have battered down the door and I wouldn't have noticed. — Benedict Jacka

I do not find myself beguiled, let alone enchanted by mortal man or woman with their pretense, show or adornments, yet when I'm alone in the pine-scented cloak of forested mountains, I'm both.

It was nearing sunset in the treasure state with not another soul in sight and despite my own plainness and insignificance, I never felt more grounded or at peace; it's a tranquility only the curvaceous, imposing landscape of the frontier can provide and I was free of the trepidation within my thoughts as I gratefully and prayerfully walked with God. All was well within me and around me for that blissful yet brief moment in time. — Donna Lynn Hope

Positions and titles mean absolutely nothing. They're just adornments; they don't represent the substance of anybody. Every person and every job is worth as much as any other person and any other job. — Herb Kelleher

I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year. — John Le Carre

Collective achievement, of course, is less appealing both to the participants and to those later reading about it as the human impulse is to look for the heroes and villains. — Matthew Restall

Femininity in general is seen as frivolous. People often say feminine people are doing "the most", meaning that to don a dress, heels, lipstick, and big hair is artifice, fake, and a distraction. But I knew even as a teenager that my femininity was more than just adornments; they were extensions of me, enabling me to express myself and my identity. My body, my clothes, and my makeup are on purpose, just as I am on purpose. — Janet Mock

The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown ... — Charles Dickens

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? — Theodor W. Adorno

But the adornments and cosmetics could not hide her character: the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips. I thought: A tender young fighting bull. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. "Love and company," said Bear, "are the adornments that change everything. I know they'll be nice to me, but I'll be sad, sad, sad." And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip. — Mary Oliver

A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld