Hosea Ballou Quotes

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Men are like wine,--not good before the lees of clownishness be settled.

It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.

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

Failing is part of my process. A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb 7 times to make it good. So I tweak it.

You can polish and iterate and double down on what the magic was. You can make a much better thing. A much cleaner thing, a much more solid thing. And that's what 'Borderlands 2' is to 'Borderlands.'

There are lots of aspects to work on my game, which the coaches do with me every day.

I think there is always room for improvement, and every day is a chance to get better.

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to take something everyone already knows and make it a little better.

I am trying to re-shape and improve my central position.

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 desire to see the time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry shall become much more general than at present.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.

The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

If you succeed not, cast not away the quills yet, nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk, but bring all to the forge and file again; turn it new.

Until the juice ferments a while in the cask, it isn't wine. If you wish your heart to be bright, you must do a little work.

The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship.

I'm still rough around the edges and need a lot of polishing.

Good breeding consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.