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Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration. -- E. M. Forster
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. -- Ernest Hemingway
Decoration can be a state of mind, an unusual perception, a ritual whisper. -- Ettore Sottsass
Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms. -- Thomas Bailey Aldrich
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live. -- Frank Stella
Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration. But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away. -- Ismail Haniyeh
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament. -- Igor Stravinsky
I think taking design out of the studio and really having a relationship with the people that you're making it for really convinced me of how powerful a thing design is. It's not just an aesthetic decoration. -- Genevieve Gorder
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration. -- Richard Schickel
Decoration is just make-up for the wrinkles of the idea. -- Thomas Manss
Practice design, Not Decoration: Don't just make pretty talking points. Instead, display information in a way that makes complex information clear. -- Nancy Duarte
Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful. -- Albert Hadley
Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins... -- Clement Greenberg
Music is interior decoration. -- Wayne Shorter
I'm just not very interested in decoration. -- Phoebe Philo
Interior decoration partly thrives on being social. -- Nicholas Haslam
I've never used ethnic music as decoration for profit. -- Bill Laswell
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration. -- Jeffrey Zeldman
A formally harmonious product needs no decoration; it should be elevated through pure form. -- Ferdinand Porsche
After the design is firmly fixed, the decoration is added. Decorating is the final enhancement. -- Albert Hadley
Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration. -- Tom Ford
A Christian should resemble a fruit tree with real fruit, not a Christmas tree with decorations tied on -- John Stott
I think there is always a need for pure design. With pure design, you don't need so much decoration. -- Jil Sander
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated! -- Wayne Shorter
There are schools teaching 'stage decoration' as a subject, and they actually call it that. I say: 'Burn those schools!' -- Robert Wilson
I love Christmas, not just because of the presents but because of all the decorations and lights and the warmth of the season. -- Ashley Tisdale
I like interior decoration, so I might do something in that. I might, at some point, take two years off to study interior decoration. -- Sania Mirza
I've been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving. -- Jeffrey Veen
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration. -- Edith Wharton
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. -- William C. Bryant
An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience. -- Joseph Addison
Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration. -- Thom Mayne
I have a love for colorful things. I'm a fashion maximalist. I come from the school of people who look at the decoration in Marie Antoinette's bedroom, and think 'Why so reserved?' -- Suzy Menkes
We talk about feelings. And about sex. And about bodies, and their gratification, violation, repair, decoration, deferred, maybe permanently deferred, mortality. Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, is, kindness. -- A. S. Byatt
With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art. -- Virginia Postrel
I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women. -- Tyne Daly
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. -- Steven Pinker
Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration. -- Martin Filler
Once you find out that someone likes a certain game on Facebook, now you know what kind of virtual gift you can get them. You can send them a little decoration. Social games give you goals where you can help and reward your friends. -- Bing Gordon
The modern scene in decoration is not a unified or controlled one. The unified control of the arts during the reign of Louis XIV no longer exists; today the designer is free to achieve a wider variety and more personal approach to the interior. -- Van Day Truex
You couldn't define the '80s when the '80s were happening. We kept changing. We had shoulder pads, then we didn't. It was revealing, and then it was decoration. It was a lot of things at once. It was defined when it was over. -- Donatella Versace
The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. -- Thomas Carlyle
When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long. -- Andrew Roberts
For people like me, books are something solid and real, whereas digital stuff is a bit more ethereal. I like the trophy on my shelf, the presence in my home. A nice book is just as valuable as a decoration as a beautiful porcelain urn - and, let's face it, a hell of a lot more useful. -- John Romaniello
When I was little, I went to the Sahara desert and met an older woman with beautiful earrings that came all the way down to her stomach. She told me, 'For us Tuareg, jewelry is not meant for decoration. It absorbs negative energy that comes your way.' So think twice when you buy a vintage ring! -- Sofia Boutella
Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated. -- Robert Wilson
Content informs design; design without content is decoration. -- Jeffrey Zeldman
A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. -- Frank Zappa
Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. -- Edward Tufte
The Gospel is not reformation, decoration or renovation. It is liberation. -- Reinhard Bonnke
What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. -- Rebecca West
It is not enough to wear an ornamental cross as a pretty decoration. -- A. B. Simpson
Do you think that the Lord gave them to me for a decoration? -- Alice von Hildebrand
I only like decoration if it plays second to the architecture of a dress, -- Madeleine Vionnet
Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence. -- Henri Nouwen
Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. -- Mark Twain
A formally harmonious product needs no decoration, it should be elevated through pure form, -- Ferdinand Alexander Porsche
An important question to ask is, 'Where and when did decoration and utility first meet? -- Edward J. Fraughton
The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence. -- James Ensor
You might be a redneck if an expired license plate means another decoration for your living room wall. -- Jeff Foxworthy
No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy. -- Pablo Picasso
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague. -- Fernando Pessoa
The greatest satisfaction is not the decoration. It is knowing that I am able to help someone who needs help. -- Jimmy Page
[Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy. -- Pablo Picasso
Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty. -- Bruce Lee
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I was painting furniture, learning to stencil, and explore all kinds of traditional techniques of decoration. I learned from books that I picked up. -- Paul Smith
My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration. -- H. G. Wells
Clothes should never be decoration....whe n someone feels at peace with the clothes, they feel more seductive, more desirable, more sensual, more everything. -- Haider Ackermann
I've been collecting crystals for many, many years for healing purposes and decoration. I guess since my name is Crystal, I have no choice. -- Crystal Renn
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. -- Albert Camus
Being a winner is more than getting a first place trophy, it is acting like the effort was an honour and the trophy is just a decoration. -- Bryan Mosley
You create your own decoration. You choose your color, you choose your mood. ... If you are depressed, you put some bright yellow and suddenly you are happy. -- Philippe Starck
Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament. -- Igor Stravinsky
I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. -- Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply. -- John Bright
Your body's always going through changes. It's fattening or thinning or wrinkling or blotching, and the only thing you really have control over is putting some decoration on it. -- Bill Ayers
It is also absolutely correct that some British folk customs have descended directly from pagan rituals, such ... the giving of presents and decoration of homes with greenery at midwinter. -- Ronald Hutton
There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice. -- Katherine Anne Porter
Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader. -- William Zinsser
Spurn everything that is added by way of decoration and display by unneccesary labour. Relect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything. -- Seneca
It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. -- Clement Greenberg

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