#elegance

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms. ↗

— Salvador Dalí

#women #life

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple. ↗

— Natalie Babbitt

#philosophy #simplicity #simplicity

I am from the planet of elegance. ↗

— Ron Carter

#elegance #i #i am #planet

Elegance does not consist in putting on a new dress. ↗

— Coco Chanel

#does #dress #elegance #new #putting

Elegance is refusal. ↗

— Coco Chanel

#refusal

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#beauty #different #elegance #historians #intuition

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#belief #elegance #environment #feel #grace

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) ↗

— Alain de Botton

#complexity #complicated #construction #design #elegance

Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement. Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura’s version of political theory. ↗

— Yukio Mishima

#elegance #inaction #indifference #japan #passivity

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me. ↗

— Kate Mulgrew

#any #base #difference #elegance #everything