Quotes & Sayings About Decoration

Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day. — Oscar Wilde

It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen ... — Michelangelo

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. — Ernest Hemingway,

A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction ... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration. — Wayne Thiebaud

The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential that only the drains function adequately. Beauty, that feline beauty that has us by the balls in America, is finished. — Henry Miller

The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos — Jonathan Franzen

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty. — Bruce Lee

We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness. — A.S. Byatt

[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Clothes should never be decoration ... whe n someone feels at peace with the clothes, they feel more seductive, more desirable, more sensual, more everything. — Haider Ackermann

For outdoors, he wears a mantle fastened at the shoulder with a clasp or chain; although buttons are sometimes used for decoration, the buttonhole has not been invented. — Joseph Gies

Practice design, Not Decoration: Don't just make pretty talking points. Instead, display information in a way that makes complex information clear. — Nancy Duarte

Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful. — Albert Hadley

Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May (May 31 in 2010). Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. soldiers who died while — Anonymous

Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament. — Igor Stravinsky

The bed is just a decoration in a busy man's bedroom. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Let the pleasure of doodling led us to writing as decoration rather than to the peculiarly abstract sort of representation it inclines towards: the making of signs to look through rather than at. — Robert M. Kaplan

Books aren't for decoration, they are to improve the design of one's interior. — Karen A. Chase

I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day. I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak, because those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it. We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did. — Benjamin Harrison

Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader. — William Zinsser

The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence. — James Ensor

Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy. — Pablo Picasso

You might be a redneck if an expired license plate means another decoration for your living room wall. — Jeff Foxworthy

It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. — Baruch Spinoza

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. — Frank Zappa

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 — Anatole Broyard

There she sits in the corner of the carriage - that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out - there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very power- fully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window ; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage ; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. — Virginia Woolf

I didn't take care of the kids. I took care of the interior decoration of the house. I wanted to be an architect, so I curated that aspect of things. In the middle of the chaos, I moved things around and rearranged everything to find my order. — Giovanna Cau

The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men. — Jeff Shaara

I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes - I'll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes. — Matthea Harvey

Casual sex. Nothing more. Nothing Less. That line wasn't there for decoration, and it was in bold print for a reason. — Whitney Gracia Williams

A physicist who is able to see the interpenetration
and interbeing of elementary particles without
going beyond his or her intellect has, from the
viewpoint of Buddhist liberation, attained just a
decorative facade.
-Someone who studies Buddhism
without practicing meditation has also accumulated
knowledge only as decoration. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric - it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation. — Emile Galle

So I'm just here for decoration?"
"Be grateful I consider you a worthy accessory. — Sarah J. Maas

Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron. — Kelley Armstrong

The modern scene in decoration is not a unified or controlled one. The unified control of the arts during the reign of Louis XIV no longer exists; today the designer is free to achieve a wider variety and more personal approach to the interior. — Van Day Truex

How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? — Olaf Stapledon

It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such ... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter. — Ronald Hutton

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration. — Jeffrey Zeldman

I've never used ethnic music as decoration for profit. — Bill Laswell

[General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary. — Russell S. Bonds

Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it. — Bill Ayers

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is to be avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination. — Immanuel Kant

A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and chiseled squint of the veteran. Even his submissions to terror, the very shit with which he paints his thighs under fire is trophy to him; he points it out to his comrades, laughing in the aftercourse of action as if it were a decoration for valour, for it makes him a salt, a veteran, an old hand. — Steven Pressfield

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. — H.G.Wells

A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead. — Alain De Botton

You couldn't define the '80s when the '80s were happening. We kept changing. We had shoulder pads, then we didn't. It was revealing, and then it was decoration. It was a lot of things at once. It was defined when it was over. — Donatella Versace

The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. — W. Somerset Maugham

Coco Chanel really wanted to have freedom of a man, and at first the only way she could find that freedom was through the clothes. They freed her movement; she got rid of the corset. This imposed her not as a decoration but as a real personality. She invented a new way of seductions through these clothes. — Audrey Tautou

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays ... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The combination of an individual[i.e., a client] with a positive idea of living and a good designer is the great force in contemporary decoration. I don't care how good the designer is, I am sure that he [or she] would rahter have a person with definite ideas rahter than have to work with a negative figure as a client. — Van Day Truex

It is not enough to wear an ornamental cross as a pretty decoration. — A.B. Simpson

Up to 700 A.D., it was assumed that the Christian family cared for their own dead. The clergy played little role in burial and none whatsoever in the arrangement and decoration of tombs. — Peter R.L. Brown

Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That — Elizabeth Gilbert

Honor without power was a useless decoration and power without honor was the simple flexing of muscle — H.J. Brues

the illusion is encouraged that philosophy is an irrelevant, abstract subject - part of the decoration of a cultured life perhaps, but unnecessary in and even distracting from the activities of the practical world. The truth is, however, that all nontrivial activity presupposed some philosophical point of view and that not to recognize this is to make oneself the ready victim of bad or at the very least inadequate philosophy. — Michael Macintyre

There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice. — Katherine Anne Porter

For people like me, books are something solid and real, whereas digital stuff is a bit more ethereal. I like the trophy on my shelf, the presence in my home. A nice book is just as valuable as a decoration as a beautiful porcelain urn - and, let's face it, a hell of a lot more useful. — John Romaniello

Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature. — Wade Davis

Laws change so often it seems pointless to keep track of the fiddly ones. 'Don't kill' is the big one. Everything else is moral decoration. — T.W. Brown

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. "Mister Jem," he said, "we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways - we're mighty glad to have you all." With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church's only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt's The Light of the World. — Harper Lee

Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration. But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away. — Ismail Haniyeh

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music. — Neville Weston

For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year. — Victor LaValle

She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration. — Anthony Trollope

Meanwhile, the kale market grew by 40% in 2013 alone. The biggest purchaser of kale the year before had been Pizza Hut, which put it in their salad bars - as decoration. Some — Brian Christian

The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle, the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea-caddy of black lacquer. In placing a vase of an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in the exact centre, lest it divide the space into equal halves. The pillar of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room. — Okakura Kakuzo

Just like she intended to be with him for Christmas and make him buy a potted tree because, while she didn't like artificial pines, she also couldn't stand the thought of chopping a live one down for decoration. So, every year, she bought a live pine tree, and once Christmas was done, she kept it watered and healthy until spring when she could plant it. — Eve Langlais

John Gielgud thought 'he was never the same after leaving England, though he wouldn't have admitted it. I think that tax business, and the way people reacted to it, shocked him . . . He wasn't much good as a tax exile. He didn't do a lot with his money. His houses were commonplace, the food dreadful, the decoration pretty amateurish. — Philip Hoare

She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration. — Nora Roberts

The greatest satisfaction is not the decoration. It is knowing that I am able to help someone who needs help. — Jimmy Page

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

How many times did you have to take a guy's hand and tell him, "Dude, it's right here." If he had that kind of learning disability in sports, he'd be a bench decoration. She — Suanne Laqueur

[Richard] remembered asking Tommy once why he didn't want to transition into a woman.
"And lose my cock, balls and prostate? Are you kidding me? Honey, I'm still all man. I'm just a man with decoration."
Tommy Wilkins, A Very Tate Christmas (Tate Pack #3) — Vicktor Alexander

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. — Ada Limon

Le Tub is a Miami oceanside restaurant that uses old bath tubs and toilets as decoration. If you're really lucky, you get a table by the water where you can see the manatees as they swim by. Someone once told me that it was one of Oprah's favorite restaurants, but seriously, Oprah has a lot of favorite things--it all sounds like lies at this point. — Tarryn Fisher

Where utility ends and decoration begins is perfection. — Jack Gardner

As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume. — A.F. Stewart

In Britain, chinoiserie was eclipsed by the medievalism of Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Revival, while in Europe japonisme would be chinoiserie's successor. Japonisme never compelled the general middle-class British taste as did the indigenous medieval style. Nonetheless, through extensive importations to Britain of Japanese art and artifacts, notably by the shop Liberty's of London, as well as through the artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect E.W. Godwin, and the writer Oscar Wilde, the Japanese style of decoration was known in Britain well before 1894. — Linda Gertner Zatlin

Details, when they are successful, are not mere decoration. They do not distract or entertain. They lead to an understanding of the whole of which they are an inherent part. — Peter Zumthor

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colors. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur
the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the Eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain, they are all curtains
a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. — Edgar Allan Poe

I love New York. It's given me so much as a designer. When I moved here, I wanted to tap into the glamour of the city immediately. More than anywhere else, New York offers itself up - you arrive and get a rush in a flash. It's dazzling. Everywhere you look, there is decoration, from a pair of jewel-encrusted shoes in the window in Bergdorf Goodman to the Chrysler Building. And New York is incredibly democratic. Everyone is packed into this tiny space. You are confronted with all manner of people, and I love that. — Tom Ford

As a creator, you can design any sort of jewelry that you like for the inside of other people's minds (or simply for the inside of your own mind). You can make work that's provocative, aggressive, sacred, edgy, traditional, earnest, devastating, entertaining, brutal, fanciful . . . but when all is said and done, it's still just intracranial jewelry-making. It's still just decoration. And that's glorious. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour. — Pope Benedict XVI

We may not preach a crucified Saviour without being also crucified men and women. It is not enough to wear an ornamental cross as a pretty decoration. The cross that Paul speaks about was burned into his very flesh, was branded into his being, and only the Holy Spirit can burn the true cross into our innermost life. — A.B. Simpson

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. 6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. — Guy Debord

When I was in my early twenties, I hoped one day to own a Victoria Cross, the ultimate decoration in Britain and the Commonwealth for bravery in the face of the enemy. — Michael Ashcroft

When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long. — Andrew Roberts

An important question to ask is, 'Where and when did decoration and utility first meet? — Edward J. Fraughton

When I think about the reference to baroque, I'm most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That's why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It's art, but it's decoration at the same time. — Camille Henrot

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration. — Edith Wharton

Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification. — Carl Zimmer

If you're opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry aout is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary. — Jason Fried

I pity you Juliet. You don't know what love is. You think it's Valentine's Day, and weekends in Italy. You think it's drinking champagne in some expensive restaurant and being bought stupid bloody underwear. But that's just the trimmings. The decoration. They're just gestures. Without trust, and respect, and kindness, they don't mean shit. I thought love was about caring about someone day in and day out, about being there when it's rucking amazing and still wanting to be there when it feels like crap, I thought it was about forever. — Alexandra Potter

But the silent stranger could hardly have understood what was passing: she was a German who had not long been in Russia and knew not a word of Russian, and she seemed to be as stupid as she was handsome. She was a novelty and it had become a fashion to invite her to certain parties, sumptuously attired, with her hair dressed as though for a show, and to seat her in the drawing-room as a charming decoration, just as people sometimes borrow from their friends for a special occasion a picture, a statue, a vase, or a fire-screen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration. — Tom Ford

Beautiful girls are not a decoration, arm candy, an object. They are, whether they know it or not, the very essence of our humanity. — Chloe Thurlow

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated. — Robert Wilson

The plain old Sam Vimes had fought back. He got rid of most of the plumes and the stupid tights, and ended up with a dress uniform that at least looked as though its owner was male. But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armourers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armour. It was gilt by association. — Terry Pratchett