Cultural Refinement Quotes

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

The people of Northern Italy are the most civilized people I have ever met.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish. ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.

A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

You can pay for school, but you can't buy class

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human.

There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art.

Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

I'm a cosmopolitan sophisticate of culture and intelligence. The culmination of technology and civilized experience.

A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom.

Taste, when once obtained, may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but knowledge is of perpetual growth and has infinite demands. Taste, like an artificial canal, winds through a beautiful country, but its borders are confined and its term is limited. Knowledge navigates the ocean, and is perpetually on voyages of discovery.

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

Arts are a luxury, proof that a civilization has risen above 'politics and war.'

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.