An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
form of writing raised to the highest level of expressive communication. Carl William Brown



60,000 QUOTES SPIDER
 


QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON STYLE

 

 

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

 

Renata Adler (American author of essays, short stories, journalism, book reviews, and film critic)

 

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

 

Martin Amis (1949-, British author)

 

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

 

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, American author)

 

A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.

 

Coco Chanel (1883-1971, French couturier)

 

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.

 

Edna W. Chase

 

Style is the dress of thoughts.

 

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield (1694-1773, British statesman, author)

 

Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.

 

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield (1694-1773, British statesman, author)

 

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

 

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963, French author, filmmaker)

 

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 (1889-1963, French author, filmmaker)

 

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

 

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974, British critic)

 

Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't.

 

Linda Ellerbee

 

Style is the image of character.

 

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794, British historian)

 

Style is the image of character.

 

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794, British historian)

 

To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body -- both go together, they can't be separated.

 

Jean-Luc Godard (1930-, French filmmaker, author)

 

'Tis beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just IT. Some women will stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.

 

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936, British author of Prose, Verse)

 

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

 

Paul Klee (1879-1940, Swiss artist)

 

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

 

Willem De Kooning (1904-,1997, Dutch-born American artist)

 

Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural.

 

Francois De La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680, French classical writer)

 

Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.

 

Andre Malraux (1901-1976, French statesman, novelist)

 

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

 

Andre Maurois (1885-1967, French writer)

 

Happy the society whose deepest divisions are ones of style.

 

Peter McKay

 

To give style to one's character -- a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)

 

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

 

Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897, British novelist, historian)

 

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

 

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662, French scientist, religious philosopher)

 

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 (1890-1980, American short-story writer, novelist)

 

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 cliche, not from real life.

 

Ezra Pound (1885-1972, American poet, critic)

 

Fashions fade, but style is eternal.

 

Yves Saint-Laurent (1936-, Algerian-born French fashion designer)

 

Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, German philosopher)

 

I do not much dislike the matter, but the manner of his speech.

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)

 

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.

 

Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)

 

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

 

Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)

 

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

 

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955, American poet)

 

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745, Anglo-Irish satirist)

 

Spend all you have for loveliness.

 

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933, American poet)

 

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

 

Gore Vidal (1925-, American novelist, critic)

 

Elegance is innate.... It has nothing to do with being well dressed.

 

Diana Vreeland

 

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892, American poet)

 

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first is personality, which no one should copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.

 

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)

 

Fashion is general; style is individual.

 

Edna Woolman

 

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