Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

We have exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity.

A man or woman can be known and respected for good taste, regardless of job or income level, if they make good choices in clothes, have good table manners, are kind and organize their home to look warm, welcoming, clean, and appropriate to their station in life.

Sire, you are looking at a plain man, and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

There are many things which may not be uttered by men in threadbare coats.

It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)

Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud.

Intellect may arrive at certain inferences, but intellect is an unconsicous phenomenon. You are almost behaving sleepily. Intelligence is awakening, and unless you are fully awake, whatsoever you decide is bound to be wrong somewhere or other.

Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.

Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think.

Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.

One needs to be successful in the conventional way to learn just how far away from success it may be.

My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence.

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.

A country gentleman should bring his lady to visit London as soon as he can, that they may have agreeable topicks for conversation when they are by themselves.

An affected laugh shows lack of self-respect in a man and lewdness in a woman. It is carelessness to go about with one's hands inside the slits in the sides of his hakama.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

I suspect guys who say, "I just send out for a sandwich for lunch," as lazy men trying to impress me.

We are not sufficiently astonished by the fact that any science may be possible.

May you grow to be proud, dignified, and true, and do unto others as you'd have done to you.