Quotes About Luxury

“Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”

— Teju Cole

“To believe that man's aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.”

— Leon Eisenberg

“Against Self-Pity
It gets you nowhere but deeper into
your own shit
pure misery a luxury
one never learns to enjoy.”

— Rita Dove

“The question is not how can I overcome fear? The question is: how can I use it creatively? If you have problems (and we all do), how are you going to deal with them? To be is to be imperfect. Contentment is resiliency, the willingness and the ability to see the opportunities presented by mistakes. Take what you like and pay for it - failure is the price you pay for success. It is the wages of growth. Success is failing forwards, figuring out how to conduct suffering, and in its reconstruction to transform it into illumination. Eschew impatience. Let stillness teach you where your centre is, where your origins are. Be impeccable in all your dealings with the world. Integrity isn't a luxury - it's an essential. Remember the best advice of the I Ching: perseverance furthers.”

— Billy Marshall-Stoneking

“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”

— Coco Chanel

“Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.”

— Will Durant

“His hair was getting longer, bordering on unkempt. As a prince, he'd always been groomed to near perfection. But then he became an emperor. The weeks since his coronation had been spent trying to stop a war, hunt down a wanted fugitive, avoid getting married, and endure his own kidnapping. As a result, haircuts became a dispensable luxury. She”

— Marissa Meyer

“Epistles; let them peruse the large number of precepts against avarice and luxury which are everywhere read to the congregations that meet for this purpose, and which strike the ear, not with the uncertain sound of a philosophical discussion, but with the thunder of God's own oracle pealing from the clouds.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“True luxury is being able to own your time - to be able to take a walk, sit on your porch, read the paper, not take the call, not be compelled by obligation.”

— Ashton Kutcher

“I don't believe in simply accumulating money, but I have the luxury to say that, because I have enough for all my needs.”

— Kathleen Turner

“We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.”

— J.G. Ballard

“Such refinements, under the odious name of luxury, have been severely arraigned by the moralists of every age; and it might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the superfluities, of life. But in the present imperfect condition of society, luxury, though it may proceed from vice or folly, seems to be the only means that can correct the unequal distribution of property. The diligent mechanic, and the skilful artist, who have obtained no share in the division of the earth, receive a voluntary tax from the possessors of land; and the latter are prompted, by a sense of interest, to improve those estates, with whose produce they may purchase additional pleasures.”

— Edward Gibbon

“I never had the time or luxury to think about inventing my own colour theory. When colour came, I was interested in expressing things that happened around me in time.”

— Rene Burri

“When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He felt a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived & the need for display which apparently went along with it,”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“But having quills is a waste, even a double luxury when one can choose not to have quills but open hands.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Love is a luxury." "No. Love is an element." An”

— Laini Taylor

“Patent monopoly creates a lot of problems. It allows the patentee to charge the maximum to consumers. This may not be a problem if the patented product is a luxury item, like parts that go into a smartphone, but can violate basic human rights if it involves things such as life-saving drugs.”

— Ha-Joon Chang

“I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.”

— Hedi Slimane

“I have a kind of objective luxury about my career.”

— Martin Short

“Doubtless imagine that I have acquired all the wealth and luxury that you see me enjoy without difficulty or danger, but this is far indeed from being the case. I have only reached this happy state after having for years suffered every possible kind of toil and danger.”

— Anonymous.

“At a Clinton press conference, I'm given the luxury of daydreaming, of being comfortable enough that he could find Peru on a map, say, that I don't have to hang on his every word, praying he won't fuck up.”

— Sarah Vowell

“To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can't afford, and when they're caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success . . . car dealerships pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest . . . It's endless, the pitching-endless, exhilarating, soul-sucking, and as unrelenting as death. As ordinary as morning sprinklers.”

— Jess Walter

“I am not a person who pursues luxury. I am not like those people who, once they have money, compulsively squander it or show it off.”

— Wang Jianlin

“When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant.”

— Peter Diamandis

“Time is my biggest luxury. Finding time to do things outside of fashion, which I think for a designer is incredibly important.”

— Phoebe Philo

“I think our love was all the better for being stretched out by our necessity to study hard to keep up with our work. To have all the time in the world to devote to love may be idyllic for a summer, but linked sweetness long drawn out is the greater luxury. [ ... ] During these summer absences, I longed for her, and wrote to her, and loved her more than ever, abstinence sharpening the appetite.”

— Robertson Davies

“Play is the best natural resource in a creative economy. Kids need more of it. It is the work of childhood. We hope to intrinsically change the opinion that play is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity for kids' lives.”

— Darell Hammond

“The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.”

— Colum McCann

“Ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice.”

— Simone De Beauvoir

“Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their own imagination, which sometimes puts sceptres in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

“I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.”

— Don Hertzfeldt

“I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“I'm just auditioning. I've only gotten directly offered two or three movies, ever. I don't have the luxury of being able to say no a lot, and I don't really have the luxury of just getting to pick and choose certain things.”

— Madeline Zima

“Education is fundamental. And I know some aren't blessed to be afforded the luxury, 'cause as sad as it is in 2016, it is still a luxury. I'd say when you're young, look for someone, an older woman, you'd like to emulate. Not necessarily her career, but the soul and essence of that woman. I use women like Susan Taylor and Tyra Banks to girdle me up so I can find my own strength and forge my own path.”

— Eva Marcille

“Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be.”

— Evan Sayet

“Sex is perhaps like culture - a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals - it's mass propulsion still!”

— Alice B. Toklas

“Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury - or at least comfort - so there's a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.”

— Gregory Benford

“No logo, and you don't advertise for anyone. I don't believe in imposed luxury. I believe in built luxury. Something you refine with your own taste. Mass luxury is not my luxury.”

— Lapo Elkann

“Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.”

— Dan Bern

“Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off.”

— Lars Ulrich

“Jesus didn't save you so you could cruise to heaven in a luxury liner. He wants you to be useful in His kingdom! The moment you got saved, He enrolled you in His school the school of suffering and affliction.”

— David Wilkerson

“Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can't afford.”

— Stephen King

“O Luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree!”

— Oliver Goldsmith

“All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste.”

— Joseph Joubert

“Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life ... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.”

— Vita Sackville-West

“A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.”

— H.L. Mencken

“Think'st thou there is no tyranny but that Of blood and chains? The despotism of vice
The weakness and the wickedness of luxury
The negligence
the apathy
the evils Of sensual sloth
produces ten thousand tyrants, Whose delegated cruelty surpasses The worst acts of one energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.”

— Lord Byron

“After all that corrupt poets, and more corrupt philosophers, have told us of the blandishments of pleasure, and of its tendency to soften the temper and humanize the affections, it is certain, that nothing hardens the heart like excessive and unbounded luxury; and he who refuses the fewest gratifications to his own voluptuousness, will generally be found the least susceptible of tenderness for the wants of others.”

— Hannah More

“Too many?pass judgement on wartime decisions in the luxury of a peacetime environment.”

— Harry S. Truman