Precious Objects Quotes

These are icons to be treasured.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

It has no equal in any other country, and one finds there rare and precious objects from all parts of the world. I saw objects made of tortoise shell, such as caskets, combs, knife handles, etc. I also discovered rock crystal of great beauty, artistically worked by artisans of surpassing taste. It has been brought from the Maghrib, but some was said to have recently arrived from the Sea of Qulzum [Red Sea] that was even more lovely and transparent than the Maghribi crystal. I saw elephant tusks from Zanzibar. There was also the hide of an ox from Abyssinia that resembles leopard skin and is used to make slippers. From this same country there also came a very large domestic bird…I saw copper vases from Damascus that can hold thirty minas of water each…

Ah, Meese has brought us her finest goblets! A moment, whilst Kruppe sweeps out cobwebs, insect husks and other assorted proofs of said goblets' treasured value.

As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public.

I want to create the kinds of things that if the house burns down you want to run and save.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.