Quotes & Sayings About Ornaments

Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. — Alexander Pope

The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth. — Alphonsus Liguori

There is a city in which you find everything you desire-handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind-all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there. — Rumi

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one. — Arthur Golden

Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Two avenues of approach to these rewards lie open to the ambitious fictioneer. On the one hand, he may throw all intelligible standards of merit to the winds, and devote himself to manufacturing new stories that are frankly bad, trusting to the fact that nine persons out of ten are utterly devoid of esthetic sense and hence unable to tell the bad from the good. And on the other hand, he may take stories, or parts of stories that have been told before, or that, in themselves, are scarcely worth the telling, and so encrust them with the ornaments of wit, of shrewd observation, of human sympathy and of style
in brief, so develop them
that readers of good taste will forget the unsoundness of the material in admiration of the ingenious and workmanlike way in which it is handled. — H.L. Mencken

What greater ornament to a son than a father's glory, or to a father than a son's honorable conduct? — Sophocles

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented — Frank Lloyd Wright

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. — Virginia Woolf

All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu , whose nature is Existence- Intelligence ; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold. — Adi Shankara

Now you've a clean start ... you've brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing. — F Scott Fitzgerald

You see, for me [art]'s not one of life's ornaments, rococo relaxation to be greeted affably after a day of hard work; I'm inverted on this : for me it's my very breath, the one thing necessary, and all else is excretion and a latrine. — Arno Hintjens

The music, and the banquet, and the wine
The garlands, the rose odors, and the flowers, The sparkling eyes, and flashing ornaments
The white arms and the raven hair
the braids, And bracelets; swan-like bosoms, and the necklace, An India in itself, yet dazzling not. — Lord Byron

Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects - hardly recognizable domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles - made of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.
'It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters ... any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: "Use unknown".' — Edith Wharton

I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament. — Adolf Loos

It's like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they'd be born out of the cocoon as something else. — M.R. Carey

Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments. — Jean Genet

My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world. — Marcel Proust

The pictures placed for ornament and use, The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose. — Oliver Goldsmith

Call them what you want. Garden gnomes. Lawn ornaments. Little evil outdoor statuary hell-bent on world domination. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that, right now, they're hiding in plain sight, pretending to be symbols of merriment and good will. — Chuck Sambuchino

God's a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass. — Stephen King

In the Old Way, women might decorate themselves with ornaments bought with coin, but a warrior wore only the jewelry he took off the corpses of enemies slain by his own hand. Paying the iron price, it was called. — George R R Martin

Some Christmas tree ornaments do more than glitter and glow, they represent a gift of love given a long time ago — Tom Baker

Honesty needs no disguise nor ornament; be plain. — Thomas Otway

Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments. — George Eliot

Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated ... The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life ... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength. — Leo Tolstoy

A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear. — John Ruskin

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion. — John Stuart Mill

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. — Thorstein Veblen

I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value. — Douglas Coupland

Azazel is also listed as one of the Watchers, angelic creatures from the Book of Enoch, a text no longer canonical under any large Christian faith. These Watchers were not expelled from Paradise, but were punished by god for having children with humans, and teaching them science, technology, and other crafts. Azazel in particular taught humans how to make weapons, as well as ornaments and cosmetics. Other Watchers taught them how to write and make paper, how to read signs and predict the weather, and how to study the heavens with astrology. — Anonymous

didn't thank
didn't wave goodbye
didn't flutter the air with kisses
a mound of gifts unwrapped
bed unmade
no appetite

always elsewhere

though it was raining elsewhere
though strangers peopled the streets
though we at home slaved and
baked and wept and
hung ornaments
and perfumed the dark
did he marvel
did he thank

was he grateful did he know
was he human
was he there

always elsewhere:
didn't thank
didn't kiss
toothbrush stiffened with unuse
puppy whining in the hall
car battery dead
sweaters unraveled

was that human?

Went where? — Joyce Carol Oates

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason. — Robertson Davies

I ask mostly to see if I can get her to blush ten shades deeper, see if the color would bleed down her neck and light up her boobs like a pair of Christmas ornaments. — Addison Moore

No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbour a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons. Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all. — Saint John Chrysostom

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Good manners are not merely snobbish ornaments, as Mrs. Lippett's regime appeared to believe. They mean self-discipline and thought for others, and my children have got to learn them. — Jean Webster

The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it's always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are bulging with bright red kinnickkinnick berries, and the bright green leaves from the same bush. Tom and Nancy save the crop from each bird they kill and set it on the windowsill to dry translucent in the sunlight - a globe, a ball, filled with Christmas colors, perfect red and green; and then in December they hang these as ornaments on their tree. For — Rick Bass

Looking around, I felt a mad desire to go shopping for pink flamingo and garden gnome lawn ornaments. I could do a midnight visit, plant one of each in every yard. — Gayla Drummond

There was precious little nobility in the features of the High King's fleshy face. Like his body, his face was broad and heavy, with a wide stub of a nose, a thick brow, and deep-set eyes that seemed to look out at the world with suspicion and resentment. His hair and beard were just beginning to turn grey, but they were well combed and glistening with fresh oil perfumed ... heavily ... He was broad of shoulder and body, built like a squat turret, round and thick from neck to hips. He wore a sleeveless coat of gilded chain mail over his tunic ... Over the mail was a harness of gleaming leather, with silver buckles and ornaments. A jewelled sword hung at his side. His sandals had gold tassels on their thongs. — Ben Bova

Woman, to women silence is the best ornament. — Sophocles

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. — Vladimir Nabokov

Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ... the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing — John Milton

As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. — Karl Philipp Moritz

Instead, the room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade. The gilt mirror in the corner would bear its dispassionate testimony. All the ornaments and furnishings would be her companions through the years to come. And she realized that she would come to hate them, if she didn't already hate them, as one hates the witnesses of one's humiliation and futility. — Winston Graham

I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood ... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. — Michel De Montaigne

The Cross isn't an ornament, mere symbol. It's the mystery of God's love, that He died for our sins. — Pope Francis

The Royal Family doesn't go out shopping for their uniforms: they've got some guy sewing on all the ornaments in-house. You could say I've got my own in-house team as well. — Theophilus London

the development of culture is concurrent with the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use — Adolf Loos

He takes the greatest ornament from friendship, who takes modesty from it.
[Lat., Maximum ornamentum amicitiae tollit, qui ex ea tollit verecudiam.] — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Fierce Determination and Gentle Humility are the ornaments which make one attractive in the eyes of the Lord. — Radhanath Swami

The smell of rosin was strong. It reminded her of Christmas wreaths and red glass ornaments. It was a completely different world, a completely different season, than just a few steps away at the lake. — Sarah Addison Allen

In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? — William Shakespeare

Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ's sake. — John Bunyan

Charity is the perfection and ornament of religion. — Joseph Addison

Patience ornaments the woman and proves the man. — Tertullian

I've always thought about the theatre like a Christmas tree, all shining and bright with beautiful ornaments. But now it seems like a Christmas tree with the tinsel all tarnished and the colored balls all fallen off and broken ... '
Sure, I know what you mean ... And it's both ways ... Some of the ornaments fall and break and some stay clear and bright. Some of the tinsel gets tarnished and some stays shining and beautiful like the night before Christmas. Nothing's ever all one way. You know that. It's all mixed up and you've just got to find the part that's right for you.'
- Elizabeth and Ben — Madeleine L'Engle

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their "work" is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention. Why didn't I reread my F. Scott Fitzgerald sooner? I might have saved myself some time. — Sergio Troncoso

You'll see everything from gold teeth to hood ornaments. It's almost like Halloween during August. — David Carson

Money can help you to get medicines but not health. Money can help you to get soft pillows, but not sound sleep. Money can help you to get material comforts, but not eternal bliss. Money can help you to get ornaments, but not beauty. Money will help you to get an electric earphone, but not natural hearing. Attain the supreme wealth, wisdom; you will have everything. — Sivananda

Thus the young ladies are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men, and despise all personal ornaments, beyond decency and cleanliness: neither did I perceive any difference in their education made by their difference of sex, only that the exercises of the females were not altogether so robust; and — Jonathan Swift

You don't need candlelight and fireside glow to make Christmas happen. Trees, ornaments, gifts, and all of it are splendid embellishments. Not necessary, but so very nice. It's Him ... It's priceless to discover the pleasure of His company ... May your home know something of all this glory during these days. — Jack W. Hayford

We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners. — Edwin Percy Whipple

They pawned, between sobs, the last glittering ornaments of their last paradise. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender. — William Gaddis

The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Arms are my ornaments, warfare my repose. — Miguel De Cervantes

I'm fine here, Lenny. I'm discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It's quite a slow process, but a very useful one. Everybody ought to do the same at the end of their life. If I had any self-discipline I would beat my grandson to it and write my own memoirs. I have time, freedom, and silence, the three things I never had amidst all the noise of my earlier life. I'm preparing to die." "That won't — Isabel Allende

Golosh Street is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seemed to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Further down is a second-hand book-stall. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be if everyone went about without eyelids. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second storey front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.
("The Wondersmith") — Fitz-James O'Brien

Among the gorges and ravines that hang on Los Angeles's shoulders like a necklace, Topanga - nestled in the cleavage of the Santa Monica Mountains - is the most singular of ornaments. — Steve Erickson

Classical Sanskrit prose writers made very long sentences like this: "Lost in the forest and in thought, bent upon death and at the root of a tree, fallen upon calamity and her nurse's bosom, parted from her husband and happiness, burnt with the fierce sunshine and the woes of widowhood, her mouth closed with silence as well as by her hand, held fast by her companions as well as by grief, I saw her with her kindred and her graces all gone, her ears and her soul left bare, her ornaments and her aims abandoned, her bracelets and her hopes broken, her companions and the needle-like grass-spears clinging round her feet, her eyes and her beloved fixed within her bosom, her sighs and her hair long, her limbs and her merits exhausted, her aged attendants and her streams of tears falling down at her feet...." and it goes on. — Abraham Eraly

Christmas is a box of tree ornaments that have become part of the family. — Charles M. Schulz

There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear. — Michel De Montaigne

Let us give today first the vital things of life and all the grace and ornaments of life will follow. — Mahatma Gandhi

Shame is an ornament to the young; a disgrace to the old. — Aristotle.

In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain. — Marcel Proust

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry. — Alexander Pope

I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase.
It seemed like a lot of copper. — Raymond Chandler

I think that the new models of Chevrolet should have Barney Frank as a hood ornament. — Sean Hannity

Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate. — Democritus

His mum had loved her ornaments, as she called them, but when she died, his dad waited about a week before boxing them up and giving them to a charity shop. "I loved your mum, Quinton," he'd said, "but I hate them fuckin' porcelaincats. — India Drummond

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society. — Charles Lamb

A political action committee trying to raise money for a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign is selling "Ready for Hillary" champagne glasses and Christmas ornaments. Because if one thing improves the holidays, it's drinking mixed with politics. — Jimmy Fallon

In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own. — Barbara Kingsolver

Elegance is not an ornament worthy of man. — Seneca The Younger

The mind turned inwards is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world. Cotton made into various clothes we call by various names. Gold made into various ornaments, we call by various names. But all the clothes are cotton and all the ornaments gold. The one is real, the many are mere names and forms. — Ramana Maharshi

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. — Walter Benjamin

Sadly as some old mediaeval knight
Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield,
The sword two-handed and the shining shield
Suspended in the hall, and full in sight,
While secret longings for the lost delight
Of tourney or adventure in the field
Came over him, and tears but half concealed
Trembled and fell upon his beard of white,
So I behold these books upon their shelf,
My ornaments and arms of other days;
Not wholly useless, though no longer used,
For they remind me of my other self,
Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways
In which I walked, now clouded and confused. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning, humility, and virtue;
that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman's life both glorious and happy. — Laurence Sterne

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. — Henry David Thoreau

Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays. — Graham Greene

The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void. — William Gibson

Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her children. Nothing else mattered any more. — Irene Nemirovsky

The bride wore a dress of that peculiar style of calico known as "furniture prints," without trimming or ornaments of any kind. Whether it was cut "bias" or with "gores," I'm sorry to say I don't know, dress-making being as much of an occult science to me as divination. — George Kennan

Modesty is the richest ornament of a woman ... the want of it is her greatest deformity. — Charles Caleb Colton

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory. — Isaac D'Israeli

My Christmas tree glimmered with lights, ornaments, and tinsel. Though such holiday trimmings weren't in vogue any longer, I loved them. I pulled every box of family decorations from the attic and glamored the tree until it looked like a "fancy woman in a cheap brothel" as my aunt Loulane would say. — Carolyn Haines

Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual, consisting in those things which very life itself requireth either as necessary supplements, or as beauties and ornaments thereof; then an intellectual, consisting in those things which none underneath man is either capable of or acquainted with; lastly a spiritual and divine, consisting in those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here, but cannot here attain unto them. — Richard Hooker

What's happened? screamed Mrs. Twit. They stood in the middle of the room, looking up. All the furniture, the big table, the chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little side tables, the cabinet with bottles of beer in it, the ornaments, the electric heater, the carpet, everything was stuck upside down to the ceiling. The pictures were upside down on the walls. And the floor they were standing on was absolutely bare. What's more, it had been painted white to look like the ceiling. — Roald Dahl