Excessive Refinement Quotes

Luxury and excessive refinement are sure forerunners of the decadence of states, because when all individuals seek their own interests they neglect the public weal.

Beware of too much taste as it leads to sterility.

Too much good taste can be very boring. Independent style, on the other hand, can be very inspiring.

Too much good taste can be boring

Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

Words are like diamonds. Polish them too much, and all you get are pebbles.

There is such a thing as too much couth.

I think sometimes when things have too much time to develop you overthink it and you start making changes that aren't necessary.

Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.

There is such a thing as too much education for working people .... I have seen cases where young people were spoiled for labor by being educated to a little too much refinement.

Too great refinement is false delicacy, and true delicacy is solid refinement.

Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it.