The Finer Things In Life Quotes

Hip-hop is about tearing down the system to better it, tearing down the system to better themselves. No matter how flimsy it might seem, they always wanted the finer things in life. ~ Russell Simmons

I wish I could say I'm low maintenance, but I like some of the finer things in life ... like a toothbrush. ~ M.A. George

Some people prefer the finer things in life, I'm alright just hanging out with the ghost of Vincent Price ~ Wednesday 13

He noted that she sipped the wine immediately, without the usual ritual of those accustomed to sampling fine vintages... no swirling of the glass to test the aroma, or the rivulets that the English called "legs" and the French more poetically referred to as "tears." As a member of the beau monde, Vivien should have been experienced at such a ritual. However, she did not look like a worldly courtesan accustomed to the finer things in life... she looked like a sheltered, naive young woman. ~ Lisa Kleypas

After splashing icy water on their faces and rubbing them fiery red with one of the rough sweet-smelling towels, they came in and took their places at the big kitchen table. This morning the table wore a bright red-and-white checked cloth and a pot of red geraniums. Mrs. Campbell handed the girls their plates, each with a slice of ham and half of a crisp, tan waffle. ~ Betty MacDonald

Mr. Brundy, you are no doubt as well acquainted with my circumstances as I am with yours, so let us not beat about the bush. I have a fondness for the finer things in life, and I suppose I always will. As a result, I am frightfully expensive to maintain. I have already bankrupted my father, and have no doubt I should do the same to you, should you be so foolhardy as to persist in the desire for such a union. Furthermore, I have a shrewish disposition and a sharp tongue. My father, having despaired of seeing me wed to a gentleman of my own class, has ordered me to either accept your suit or seek employment. If I married you, it would be only for your wealth, and only because I find the prospect of marriage to you preferable –but only slightly!- to the life of a governess or a paid companion. If, knowing this, you still wish to marry me, why, you have only to name the day."

Having delivered herself of this speech, Lady Helen waited expectantly for Mr. Brundy's stammering retraction. Her suitor pondered her words for a long moment, then made his response.

"'ow about Thursday? ~ Sheri Cobb South

In any case it pleased him to imagine himself secretly in league with secret beings who appreciated the finer things in life, like the way the sunlight this afternoon broke itself into pieces in the dark waters of the creek, never or be reassembled. ~ Douglas Watson

I like when my man is worldly, knows the finer things in life, is well traveled, educated. It's important to me that he's able to talk to all types of people, from doctors to dishwashers. ~ Kiana Tom

I am passionate about music and my work to the bottom of my very soul, but I also very much enjoy good clothes and some of the finer things in life. Rappers do, too, and perhaps it's one of the reasons I've been welcomed so warmly into their world. ~ Clive Davis

Most of the class was Black or Puerto Rican and we all loved music. But we hated music class with a passion. The teacher talked to us as though we were inferior savages, incapable of appreciating the finer things in life. She lectured about symphonies and concertos and sonatas and the like in a snooty voice. ~ Assata Shakur

...as long as you have a bougie heart, you can aim for the finer things in life. ~ Ibi Zoboi

I don't want the finer things in life, like preserves of jam and thick soft quilts, until I get what I need: the machinery to make that stuff for me. ~ M.C. Humphreys

Virtue and wisdom are sublime things, but if they create pride and a consciousness of separateness from the rest of humanity, they are only the snakes of self reappearing in a finer form. ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. ~ John Ruskin

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of. ~ Charles Ives

They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things. ~ Don DeLillo

In case you didn't know, in secondary school - especially in the early years of secondary school - diversity is not celebrated. In secondary school, being different is the worst crime you can commit. Actually, in secondary school, being different is pretty much the only crime you can commit.Most of the things the UN considers crimes are not considered crimes at secondary school. Being cruel is fine. Being brutal is fine. Being obnoxious is fine. Being superficial is especially fine. Explosive acts of violence are fine. taking pleasure in the humiliation of others is fine. Holding someone's head down the toilet is fine (and the weaker the someone, and the dirtier the toilet, the finer it is). None of these things will hurt your social standing. But being different - that's unforgivable. Being different is the fast-track to
Pariah Town. a pariah is someone who's excluded from mainstream society. And if you know that at twelve years of age, you're probably an inhabitant of Pariah Town. ~ Gavin Extence

Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.

Speak-
But don't split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.

Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer: a thread
The star wants to descend on:
So as to swim down beliow, down here
Where it sees itself shimmer:in the swell
Of wandering words. ~ Paul Celan

However, one can also cognize the existence of the thing prior to the perception of it, and therefore cognize it comparatively a priori, if only it is connected with some perceptions in accordance with the principles of their empirical connection (the analogies). For in that case the existence of the thing is still connected with our perceptions in a possible experience, and with the guidance of the analogies we can get from our actual perceptions to the thing in the series of possible perceptions. Thus we cognize the existence of a magnetic matter penetrating all bodies from the perception of attracted iron filings, although an immediate perception of this matter is impossible for us given the construction of our organs. For in accordance with the laws of sensibility and the context of our perceptions we could also happen upon the immediate empirical intuition of it in an experience of if our senses, the crudeness of which does not affect the form of possible experience in general, were finer. Thus wherever perception and whatever is appended to it in accordance with empirical laws reaches, there too reaches our cognition of the existence of things. If we do not being with experience, or proceed in accordance with laws of the empirical connection of appearances, then we are only making a vain display of wanting to discover or research the existence of any thing. ~ Immanuel Kant

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: "There's no danger."
"No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
"Slothrop's knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!"
"The whole thing's falling apart, Pointsman!"
"Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there've been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys - "
"That's the P.M.'s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!"
"We've already begun to run into a deficit - "
"Funding," IF you can keep your head, "is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being 'knocked out,' is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal '46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head."
"Your Interested Parties again?" sez Rollo Groast.
"Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted ~ Thomas Pynchon

We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he *had* allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the 'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over *all* for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. ("The Jolly Corner") ~ Henry James

The war against materialism in our hearts is exactly that: a war. It is a constant battle to resist the temptation to have more luxuries, to acquire more stuff, and to live more comfortably. It requires strong and steady resolve to live out the gospel in the middle of an American dream that indentifies success as moving up the ladder, getting the bigger house, purchasing the nicer car, buying the better clothes, eating the finer food, and acquiring more things. ~ David Platt

I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are available in America. ~ Hinton Helper

I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A judge. That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I shall ask, What is your verdict? You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Things will become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son. ~ Virginia Woolf

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness.

It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control. ~ William Styron

...Let me tell you something, Allen. I've been around now, enough to know there are some bigger things in the world than marriage and a prosaic settling down under one roof."

"Now, I'll tell you something." He sat up straighter under the wheel. "There isn't, - not a thing - when it's two people who really care, and, and settling down under one roof, as you say, is the beginning of a real home. There's nothing finer... ~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

There is probably nothing finer than to climb free and unencumbered by equipment, reveling in the gymnastic upward movement, like Preuss or a Dulfer before you, relying only upon yourself, keeping a sharp eye on things, feeling the rock beneath your feet and fingertips. ~ Hermann Buhl

A lady is a female person who has the grace to consider the feelings of others before her own, at all times, and in all places. It has nothing to do with fine clothes or posh accent, or how much money her father's got. And it don't even matter if she smokes, drinks, or never observes the finer points of unnecessary etiquette. None of these things have anything to do with it unless they conflict with the first rule. In other words, it depends who she's with. A lady is naturally born and cannot be moulded or trained to be anything else. She just is. ~ Bernie Morris

A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely you see that... Put it this way. Dragons all love life's finer things- music, art, treasure- the works of the spirit; yet in their personal habits they're foul and bestial- they burn down cathedrals, for instance, and eat maidens- and they see in their whimsical activities no faintest contradiction... Dragons never grow, never change... Believe me, nothing in this world is more despicable than a dragon. They're a walking- or flying- condemnation of all we stand for, all we pray for our children, nay, for ourselves. We struggle to improve ourselves, we tortuously balance on the delicate line between our duties to society and our duties within- our duties to God and our own nature. ~ John Gardner

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; part and counterpart wandered independently about the earth in the stupidest manner for a while, till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes -- what was called a strange destiny. ~ Thomas Hardy

There is doubtless such a thing as a 'national character'. In art, it is the lowest common denominator. The more specific the character, the more commonplace it is. That is why creation always requires overcoming such a character.

An artist, if he is anything, is an individual. But to be an individual means embodying your own truths, suffering your own experiences, and inventing your own style. But these things can only occur by renouncing facility, and the most unfortunate facility comes from these so-called national characters, formed by the sedimentation of collective mediocrity, which lies there ready-made. National character is by definition that which remains in a culture after you have removed the personal effort involved in thinking, the personal experience of life and the triumph of individual creation. ~ Mihail Sebastian

That a language may retain its vitality and dignity, two things are necessary. In the first place, it must keep in close touch with life, and must respond to those constant alterations which look like corruptions but which are quite as often signs of growth. In the second place, it must submit to some kind of selective authority which creates a generally recognized but slowly changing norm of speech. Without the former condition a language will become rigid, conventional, and emotionless; without the second it will just as surely tend to become provincial and formless--even unintelligible, except locally and ephemerally. ~ Paul Elmer More

If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things? ~ Ted Chiang

Families can be the most detrimental things to have in your life. They are sometimes the most poisonous relationships that people have. Sometimes family is the thing that keeps you from ever achieving what you want to achieve, and yet people hold it and hold it and grab it and try to fix it and twist it and turn it. ~ Amy Sherman-Palladino

I think if you don't regret a few things, you didn't take enough risks in life. ~ Lauren Gallagher

The whole purpose of life is to gain enlightenment.
Nothing else is significant compared to that completely natural, exalted state of consciousness.
So always strive for that.
Set your life around that goal.
Don't get caught up in small things, and then it will be yours. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

In practice, some come to see easily, some with difficulty. But whatever the case, never mind. Difficult or easy, the Buddha said not to be heedless. Just that
don't be heedless. Why? Because life is not certain. Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future! ~ Ajahn Chah

The two hardest things to contemplate in life ( ... ) are failure and age, and those are one and the same. ~ Ian Caldwell

Adam had never been powerful in his life.

Being the magician isn't about being powerful when you have things and useless when you don't. The magician sees what is out there and finds connections. The magician can make anything magical.

Now, are you the magician? Or aren't you? ~ Maggie Stiefvater

There's no short-cut in life but with right knowledge, you can fast-track things to come to pass. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

If you're going to blame your hard times for all the things that are wrong in your life, you better also blame them for the good stuff too!"

Rachel Hollis, Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be ~ Rachel Hollis

Being a Southerner, I'm interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting. ~ Karin Slaughter

One always imagines things happen in hot blood,' he said. 'An ill-considered remark starts a row. Hard words follow, misunderstandings. Matters that can be put right in the end. Unfortunately life doesn't work out like that. First of all there is no row, secondly, nothing can be put right. ~ Anthony Powell