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Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Simplicity
Taste
Mankind
Free
Left
Complicates
Life
Minimalism
Instinctively
Acquired

More quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to beon the side of the stars at all, unless he makes refusals.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould