Style Quotes

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

Victor Hugo

One man's style must not be the rule of another's.

Jane Austen

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

Arthur Rimbaud

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

Benjamin Haydon

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Susan Sontag

A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

Katherine Anne Porter

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

Christian Nevell Bovee

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Jefferson

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

Margaret Oliphant

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

Willem de Kooning

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

Jean Cocteau

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Jean Cocteau

Taste is the feminine of genius.

Lord Edward Fitzgerald

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clich?, not from real life.

Ezra Pound

Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.

Gore Vidal

To possess taste, one must have some soul.

Marquis De Vauvenargues

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

G. K. Chesterton

Style Is the hallmark of a temperament stamped on the material in hand.

Andre Maurois

You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

George Bernard Shaw