Decorative Quotes & Sayings

Those men think I'm purely decorative, and they're fools for not knowing better. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation. — Max Ernst

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. — Oscar Wilde

She investigated further: moving along with little kisses down his throat and over his collarbone until she came to the same location on his neck that on hers was currently a decorative black and blue color. She bit him. Hard. Alexia never did anything by halves. — Gail Carriger

The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end. — Warren Buffett

I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative. — Richard Brautigan

I'm quite lucky, because I've got a small, decorative concrete pig. — Bill Bailey

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone. — Gertrude Jekyll

I love Prada shirts because they're so decorative and figure-hugging, but I also like Reiss shirts because they're clean, simple and look as if they've come off the peg from a design house. — Jamie Bamber

For I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life - on its social not its purely artistic effect. — Oscar Wilde

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like? — Italo Calvino

What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance. — Alan Watts

I'm just charmingly decorative. — Tellulah Darling

I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves. It is futile to argue as to which leaf, which design of branches, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming. — Bruce Lee

Decorative gestures add romance to a life. — Don DeLillo

I still cannot tap on your walls and discover by the hollow or firm sounds which of your walls are merely decorative, and which ones hold everything up. — Philip J. Hilts

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale. — Mark Rothko

Iconic clothing has been secularized ... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. — Angela Carter

Its, the gum tree, main appeal to me has been its combination of mightiness and delicacy - mighty in its strength of limb and delicate in the colouring of its covering. Then it has distinctive qualities; in fact I know of no other tree which is more decorative, both as regards the flow of its limbs and the patterns the bark makes on its main trunk. In all its stages the gum tree is extremely beautiful. — Hans Heysen

When meter is honored over thythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative. — Ellen Bryant Voigt

The men's tanned faces, the faces of the women, bright with cosmetics, all suddenly appeared similar, as though wearing identical masks; hard, smiling, decorative, devoid of feeling. Not one of the seemed capable of expressing affection or pity or any of the softer emotions. They frightened her, these gay, hard, animated, worldly masks; she would always be a stranger among them, lost, ill-at-ease, out of place. — Anna Kavan

Altogether, Olympia thinks the sight of herself satisfactory, but not beautiful: a smile is missing, a certain light about the eyes. For how very different a woman will look when she has happiness, Olympia knows, when her beauty emanates from a sense of well-being or from knowing herself to be greatly loved. Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative. — Anita Shreve

There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it. — Hugh Hardy

make vignettes (little 3-D decorative — Kelley Taylor

If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that's all that you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind: Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage. These are the things I cherish so in you. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world. But I know you'll make it a better place.
Marmee, Little Women — Louisa May Alcott

I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy. — Yves Klein

The finger-biter's feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree - they may have started in something real, but she'd tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative. — Elizabeth McCracken

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting. — Edward Hopper

I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn't been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn't positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn't; I maintain that I simply couldn't. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there's something interesting behind it. — Kate Morton

The sight of a tree at night full of glowing Clabbert lifestyles, while decorative, attracted too many Muggles wishing to ask why their neighbours still had their Christmas lights up in June. — J.K. Rowling

Look - here's a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We'd have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers will see a cloth which is turkey red, some will see one that's scarlet, while others may see still other shades. (To color-blind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome - my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out. — Stephen King

As I completed dinner preparation, Rosie set the table - not the conventional dining table in the living room, but a makeshift table on the balcony, created by taking a whiteboard from the kitchen wall and placing it on top of the two big plant pots, from which the dead plants had been removed. A white sheet from the linen cupboard had been added in the role of tablecloth. Silver cutlery - a housewarming gift from my parents that had never been used - and the decorative wineglasses were on the table. She was destroying my apartment! — Graeme Simsion

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. — Rebecca West

I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people. — Rene Magritte

Many cherish art as a special haven within an over-schematized world, where ambiguities can thrive. If an artwork's message is self-evident, maybe it's just an illustration, a decorative non-entity, a well-executed craft object, hardly counting as 'significant' art at all. It's not just that without an explanation the viewer is lost; without some written framework to steady it, the art itself risks losing its way, never gaining traction in the contemporary art system. From this perspective, both viewer and artwork alike are as if handicapped without the art-world's special assistance. — Gilda Williams

No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly." — Edmund Snow Carpenter

It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling - even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid - an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? — Wendell Berry

Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty. — Alison Weir

That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding. — Patrick DeWitt

The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative. — Susan Sontag

It was likely her due, then, that a familiar voice halted her progress just as she started to ascend the staircase. "You've certainly turned the afternoon on its head." Lucas regarded her with a wry smile from the first landing, his thick brown hair blending into an exceptionally large portrait of Gravethorne's favorite hounds. "How does it feel to be the most notorious debutante in London?"

Sparring with Lucas Bellamy held little appeal to her at the moment, but Amy was incapable of letting a jab go unanswered. She gripped the decorative knob on the newel post and lifted her chin. "Slightly inconvenienced yet decidedly more powerful, I think. — Rachel Pierson

We are all overdressed in our little flashy frocks, our slasher heels, and we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are. — Gillian Flynn

One of the reasons I love to come to Paris is because the decorative arts are so refined that I am always walking through one proscenium into another frame. — Ralph Gibson

The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace. — Wendell Phillips

Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality. — Bhikkhu Bodhi

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. — Oscar Wilde

The Veretian palace, afroth with ornament, paid only lip service to defence. The parapets were purposeless curving decorative spires. The slippery domes that he skirted would be a nightmare in an attack, hiding one part of the roof from the other. — C.S. Pacat

A chair is not just a product of decorative art in a space, it is a form and a space in itself — Finn Juhl

I like decorative, functional things that I feel comfortable in. — Joey Lauren Adams

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves. — Edward Albee

The debut show, "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary," is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There's good work here, but much of what's on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building [of Museum of Arts and Design], too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement. — Jerry Saltz

Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras. — Joseph Alsop

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the sea, prince, and so on. Some are decorative periphrases: a king can be a 'giver of rings' or a 'giver of treasure' (literally, a king was expected to provide his warriors with gifts after they had fought for him). — Ronald Carter

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade. — Anish Kapoor

If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt — George Bernard Shaw

Every decorative piece in this house is my feeling, my choice. — Connie Stevens

Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice. — W. H. Auden

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars - in short a paradox. — Robert Smithson

For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am. — Cornel West

Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost. — Peter York

I love the journeys of research and discovery their development takes me on. I see prints as less 'decorative' than many might, and more fundamental to a garment's core. — Dries Van Noten

People think of me as a stereotype: muse, privileged, decorative. Classically, the muses were the inspiration. They'd come and go - they wouldn't actually make things, get their hands dirty. I don't think I'm a muse, although I think I can help pull a trigger. I really like getting my hands dirty. — Amanda Harlech

64. Surprising and Distressing Things
While one is cleaning a decorative comb, something catches in the teeth and the comb breaks.
A carriage overturns. One would have imagined that such a solid, bulky object would remain forever on its wheels. It all seems like a dream
astonishing and senseless.
A child or grown-up blurts out something that is bound to make people uncomfortable.
All night long one has been waiting for a man who one thought was sure to arrive. At dawn, just when one has forgotten about him for a moment and dozed off, a crow caws loudly. One wakes up with a start and sees that it is daytime
most astonishing.
One of the bowmen in an archery contest stands trembling for a long time before shooting; when finally he does release his arrow, it goes in the wrong direction. — Sei Shonagon

A driver who thinks stop signs are suggestions and red lights are decorative accents. — Hailey Edwards

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire. — Ezra Pound

She reached into a pocket of her tunic and brought out a small decorative box. She placed it on the table and slid it toward him. He squelched the urge to push it back. "I came to bring you this. It's yours." — Grace Draven

Peasant families ate pork, beef, or game only a few times a year; fowls and eggs were eaten far more often. Milk, butter, and hard cheeses were too expensive for the average peasant. As for vegetables, the most common were cabbage and watercress. Wild carrots were also popular in some places. Parsnips became widespread by the sixteenth century, and German writings from the mid-1500s indicate that beet roots were a preferred food there. Rutabagas were developed during the Middle Ages by crossing turnips with cabbage, and monastic gardens were known for their asparagus and artichokes. However, as a New World vegetable, the potato was not introduced into Europe until the late 1500s or early 1600s, and for a long time it was thought to be merely a decorative plant.

"Most people ate only two meals a day. In most places, water was not the normal beverage. In Italy and France people drank wine, in Germany and England ale or beer. — Patricia D. Netzley

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail ... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory. — Charles Horton Cooley

For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art. — Sonia Delaunay

My rational mind was full of thoughts such as, 'what the Hell is in the air to cause the violet wavelengths to scatter instead of blue?' and 'the flowers, ivy, and decorative plants all have green leaves, so where do you get gold-leafed trees and red grass?' The rest of my mind was jumping up and down, shouting 'this is so cool!' My rational mind retreated to its cave to sulk. Miranda — Bryan Fields

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children. — Oscar Wilde

I didn't originally intend to be an artist; I was much more interested in decorative arts--daily life, beautiful objects. — Helaine Posner

We'll stick close together, but make no sign we are acquainted. The girls should go ahead so that they get through first. We'll follow close behind to be there for any trouble."

"Don't worry, my dears," said the professor gallantly, "I'll rescue you from any difficulties."

Yelena laughed and kissed the old man on the cheek. "Of course you will. I don't know why we bother with these other men, do you, Tashi?"

"But they are decorative, aren't they?" the Princess replied archly. It was fun to have a girl with whom she could gang up against the boys--she'd never had a friend like that before. "They give us something to look at on the boring stretches of the road." She let her eyes linger on Ramil, who appeared very warm all of a sudden.

Yelena swung herself into the saddle. "My, my, Princess, I didn't know you could flirt."

"I'm learning from a master--or should I say mistress--of that art," Tashi said with a bow. — Julia Golding

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative. — Piet Mondrian

Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group. — Wendell Berry

I love the idea of the 'vignette,' which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right? — Kate Bernheimer

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. — H.P. Lovecraft

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades. — Martin Filler

I think there's a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it's only fashion, that in the end it's only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions. — Suzy Menkes

Mirrors have come to mean much more than the original 'looking glass.' They are now a part of the decorative scheme of a modern home. By using them, there are no dark, gloomy corners, no drab caverns for halls. There can be a feeling of freedom, light, air, space. — Dorothy Draper

The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art. — Russell Lynes

Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an absolutely normal person would give: It's a tie! A lunatic, however, would say that what I have around my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit of colored cloth tied in a very complicated way, which makes it harder to get air into your lungs and difficult to turn your neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan, or I could be strangled by this bit of cloth.
If a lunatic were to ask me what this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. It's not even purely decorative, since nowadays it's become a symbol of slavery, power, aloofness. The only really useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something, though quite what you don't know. — Paulo Coelho

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up. — George Orwell

When Sweetu wasn't being reduced to merely existing as a bride, as a piece of meat to be handled and prodded, to have decorative contraptions stuck into her skull, her interests were otherwise unexpressed. She rarely complained, hardly asked for anything, and maybe that's because Indian girls grow up going to weddings and we watch the procedure and we know our roles: be demure, don't complain, cry but don't scream, get tea for anyone older than you, and calmly meet expectations. — Scaachi Koul

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life's novelties.
We've all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets.
I'd always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside. — Christopher Hawke

I really don't want to produce artwork that does not have meaning beyond simple decorative values. I want to use public space to create a public voice, and a public consciousness about the presence of people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way. By telling their stories we are giving voice to the voiceless and visualizing the whole of the American story. — Judy Baca

[Magnus] stumbled over a few people to the phone, only to find that he had actually reached for a large decorative cigarette dispenser. It was possible he was not quite at his best either. — Cassandra Clare

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I'd felt as I came in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn't before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again.
I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house's depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone.
What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up - successful mad scientists generally are - but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked ... lived in. — Maggie Stiefvater

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

If you're not honest with your work - if you're being merely decorative - then the world will know. People intuit honest work. They know when they are being tricked by clever metaphors . . . by dishonesty in the artist. — Michele Zackheim

The overscaled compositions being produced by so many abstract painters, which are full of movement and use of color, are ideal example, ideal transformations of an entire wall and entire room ... There is no denying that one of the major attractions of these successful large compositions is their structural decorative use in the contemporary scene ... That these large canvases can be superbly decorative may not be considered complimentary by some of the artists involved ... — Van Day Truex

I think that women should be decorative. — Raquel Welch

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed
linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.
She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean? — Richard Powers

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity. — Bill Bryson

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums. — Martin Filler

... a metaphor ... is like lying but more decorative. — Terry Pratchett

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Every woman is harmed by the cultural expectation that women are decorative possessions, sexual objects to be acted upon; and every man benefits from having been socialized to be the actor. — Anonymous