Gilding Quotes

This wasn't a case of gilding the lily. If there was a lily underneath all that, it had long since been crushed to a pulp. The party stopped in its tracks as she took off her cloak, frozen in wordless contemplation of a wardrobe that made the word "gaudy" sound sweet and demure by contrast. ~ Courtney Milan

The river - with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs' white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory - is a golden fairy stream. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don't miss it; perhaps we will wait our older faces with anticipation, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. ~ Naomi Wolf

Thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop. ~ Paul Gilding

The four words that will define this century: The Earth is full. ~ Paul Gilding

Sometimes, perhaps, thou hearest another pray with much freedom and fluency, whilst thou canst hardly get out a few broken words. Hence thou art ready to accuse thyself and admire him, as if the gilding of the key made it open the door the better. ~ William Gurnall

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.) ~ Gustave Flaubert

It is because gold is rare that gilding has been invented, which, without having its solidity, has all its brilliancy. Thus, to replace the kindness we lack, we have devised politeness which has all its appearance. ~ Francis De Gaston, Chevalier De Levis

We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution - like, what do we want to be when we grow up? ~ Paul Gilding

No paint or dye can give so splendid a colour as gilding. The merit of their beauty is greatly enhanced by their scarcity. With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. In their eyes the merit of an object which is in any degree either useful or beautiful is greatly enhanced by its scarcity, or by the great labour which it requires to collect any considerable quantity of it, a labour which nobody can afford to pay but themselves.

Book I, Chapter 11 - Rent of Land, part II ~ Adam Smith

While the darkness of the interior concealed her body, the streetlight behind them illuminated the pale oval of her face, gilding her cheeks in shades of amber and ghostly blue. The effect was . . . arresting. Vermeer had used natural light to paint women in this way, faces emerging from the shadows, forcing the viewer's eye to focus on what was most important: the look of grace. The mouth firmed in determination. The eyes poised to behold a revelation. ~ Meredith Duran

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding. ~ Samuel Johnson

The group's laughter echoed off the stained, plaster ceiling. I raised my beer, but before I clinked the bottles together, I challenged him. "You think you're a man I won't forget?"
"Ah'm nae any man ye've met before."
"Praise be," I smirked, "the others haven't been worth spit."
Then the whiskey came, and I was taken by the tawny light, forgetting to worry about my 'crazy'. Until Angus' efforts at gilding my heart, called my 'alter' to the fore. ~ Cheryl R Cowtan

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust - dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. ~ Gustave Flaubert

But vilifying those we love always alienates us from them to a certain extent. Idols should not be touched: the gilding comes off on the hands. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Our system - of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth - is eating itself alive. ~ Paul Gilding

How strange this mass of ancient treasures
Mementoes of past pains and pleasures;
These volumes, clasped with costly stone,
With print all faded, gilding gone ~ The Brontë Sisters

The dreams are gilding each day. Each day shines with the smiling thought." Silence , be wildly thought by Jihene Kochrad ~ Jihene Kochrad

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ~ William Shakespeare

Who cares what a man's style is, so it is intelligible,
as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock's feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. ~ Henry David Thoreau

When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required. ~ Paul Gilding

At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun. ~ Barry Goldwater

It is never too late to begin rebuilding, Though all into ruins your life seems hurled; For see! how the light of the New Year is gilding The wan, worn face of the bruised old world. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties. ~ Philip Sidney

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The old man has been long at the fair. He is acquainted with the jugglers at the booths. His curiosity has been satisfied. He no longer cares for the exceptional, the monstrous, the marvelous and deformed. He looks through and beyond the gilding, the glitter and gloss, not only of things, but of conduct, of manners, theories, religions and philosophies. He sees clearer. The light no longer shines in his eyes. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

If you want to change the world, change it through the market ~ Paul Gilding

The lightsome countenance of a friend giveth such an inward decking to the house where it lodgeth, as proudest palaces have cause to envy the gilding. ~ Philip Sidney

One is quite astonished to find how many things there are in the landscape, and in every object in it, one never noticed before. And this is a tremendous new pleasure and interest which invests every walk or drive with an added object. So many colours on the hillside, each different in shadow and in sunlight; such brilliant reflections in the pool, each a key lower than what they repeat; such lovely lights gilding or silvering surface or outline, all tinted exquisitely with pale colour, rose, orange, green or violet. ~ Winston Churchill

The afternoon was brilliant, soft spring sunshine gilding the ancient stone to warm honey, and somewhere, tantalising, just out of reach, the scent of jasmine rose above the odours of donkey and charcoal and leather. ~ Deanna Raybourn