Varnished Quotes & Sayings

There is a time for everything; even nothing. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. — David Beckham

I'd done an Edinburgh show before, in 1981, called 'The Importance of Being Varnished' - I was in the pun trade at the time. — Rory Bremner

If the yacht's sails were wind-tattered, if its polished brass and varnished wood were scarred from a hundred successful voyages, it would have suited him, because character should always come before beauty. — Neal Shusterman

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose. — Charlie Chaplin

So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you? — Elizabeth Gilbert

In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith. — John William Draper

They [zebras] looked like highly varnished animated toys. — Elspeth Huxley

For neither do the spirits damned
Lose all their virtue, lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnished o'er with zeal. — John Milton

There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available. — Ludwig Von Mises

Having me in the dining-room was almost the equivalent of having a Raeburn on the walls; I was classy, I was heavily varnished, and I offended nobody. — Robertson Davies

...Her heart was racing faster than an Enzo Ferrari, and her hands became icy cold and trembling. She went wild. Her senses varnished. Suddenly her purse dropped onto the floor, but neither one of them looked away to the ground beneath their feet. Their faces attracted each other until they could feel their breaths upon each other. His hands started moving towards her without him noticing - but Chioma noticed. He moved his hands over her hips, and she slipped hers around his huge biceps. She was no longer shy. — Nick Nwaogu

I used to spend hours at night, downstairs, in front of the only full-length mirror in the house, standing on the table working out what I would wear to school the next day. — Clemence Poesy

Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car. — Wallace Stevens

At the end of the day ... if your army won't fight, it's because they don't trust their incompetent, corrupt generals, they don't trust each other. This is an enduring civil war between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds. So I don't think we've got any options and we'd be ill-advised to start bombing where we really can't sort out the combatants or understand where the civilian population is. — Barry McCaffrey

I think that capitalism has just gone too far. And it is actually not limited to the United States. The excesses of capitalism is making us suffer all over the world right now. — Tadao Ando

If you are dressing up, then dress to the hilt, else let it go easy. But no matter what, pay attention to the nails. Whether you keep it short, long, varnished or plain, it has to look good. — Sonam Kapoor

When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape by which few but savages and hunters are attracted. But, when he is trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode: when he is aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used up as to bliss; then, whether he take to the serving out of red tape, or to the kindling of red fire, he is the very Devil. — Charles Dickens

Holy communication, Holy life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

When the long, varnished buds of beech Point out beyond their reach, And tanned by summer suns Leaves of bright bryony turn bronze, And gossamer floats bright and wet From trees that are their own sunset, Spring, summer, autumn I come here, And what is there to fear? And yet I never lose the feeling That someone else behind is stealing Or else in front has disappeared; Though nothing I have seen or heard, Makes me still walk beneath these boughs With cautious step as in a haunted house. — Andrew Young

In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. — Joseph Conrad

It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the bridge, was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down — Leo Tolstoy

War changes that. Crimes start to happen without reason, because people are upset, or angry, or just frustrated. Acts of violence are squalid, casual, mundane. Contrition, misery, fingerprints everywhere, children in tears. — Christopher Fowler

When humans become gods, when our wings grow so great as to beat about the very edges of the earth, no one can answer but us. — Kate Bernheimer

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination. — Graham Moore

Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? — David Mitchell

sealing the pores were undertaken, famously with a horse. The poor animal was carefully varnished all over with several layers of shellac (the same solution that is used to varnish furniture) to ensure a complete seal, and died within hours. It was assumed that it had asphyxiated, thus 'proving' that the skin played an important role in respiration as well as perspiration. — Ruth Goodman

I feel sorry for anyone that I am obsessed with. I am worse than gum in your hair, very, very close to the roots. — Margaret Cho

On the other hand, I had to remind myself that, unlike you, I'm the sort of person whose imagination gets overstimulated from very little. And sometimes I get confused between what I've nakedly perceived and what I've varnished upon that perception. — Joseph Olshan

Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship,
To have his pomp and all what state compounds
But only painted, like his varnished friends? — William Shakespeare

he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth. — Christopher Hitchens

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

How big are souls anyway? asked Coraline.
The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes. — Neil Gaiman

Far too often, unbelievers know Christians only for what we stand against, not what we stand for. — Greg Laurie

How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. — Edward Abbey

Bright lamplight bounced off golden varnished wood. The suddenly vivid colors of scarves, hats, hair and faces after the gray-green gloom they'd been immersed in all morning dazzled them. The solid warmth of the coal-fired range, dry and hot, pressed against them from the front as the lingering damp embedded in their backs brought forth a final, convulsive shiver. The sights and smells of rich food and aromatic coffee hit them, no longer just a hope in their hollow stomachs. This made them all as if drunk with good fortune and delighted them with sheer, physical pleasure. — Antonio Dias