Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual, the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life. Whenever education and refinement grow away from the common people, they are growing toward selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. That is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellowmen is not God's refinement. Men who walk on tiptoe all through life, holding up their skirts for fear they shall touch their fellows—who are delicate and refined in feeling, and who ring all the bells of taste high up in their own belfry where no one else can hear them, these dainty fools are the greatest sinners of all, for they use their higher faculties to serve the devil with. Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object. If refined sense and exalted sense be not so useful as common sense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind; as gold, though less serviceable than iron, acquires from its scarcity a value which is much superior. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. But the direct contrary I believe to be the case. Rude periods have that grossness of manners which is as unfriendly to virtue as luxury itself. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished. The same refinement which brings us new pleasures, exposes us to new pains. I'm becoming more and more myself with time, I guess that's what grace is, the refinement of your soul through time. The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Henry Ward Beecher
William Hazlitt
David Hume
Joseph Warton
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Jewel
Albert Einstein
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