#sophistication

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intellectual-sophistication #internet #irony #nerd #nerdery

When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business. ↗

— Vera Wang

#business #decided #dress #find #get

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence. ↗

— Christopher Hampton

#decadence #feeble #i #rather #sophistication

With a woman of sophistication, class and modesty and refinement, I become a totally tongue-tied buffoon. I can't even look her straight in the face. ↗

— Iain Glen

#class #even #face #her #i

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful. ↗

— David Zucker

#any #attract #audience #aware #been

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. ↗

— George Santayana

#foe #man #simplicity #sophistication #spirit

Being a Chicano in Hollywood, my experience is that you're not given credit for any sophistication... You're just kind of some guy that just crossed the border, you know, on the back of a truck and that's it. ↗

— Cheech Marin

#back #being #border #credit #crossed

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#future #ghosts #life #manhood #nothingness

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe. ↗

— Don Herold

#else #globe #less #more #new

The expansion and sophistication of transnational crime represents one of the most dangerous threats we confront in the next millennium. ↗

— Rand Beers

#crime #dangerous #expansion #millennium #most