Sophistication Quotes

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
― Clare Boothe Luce

“The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children. ”
― Jim Henson

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among my friends to protect me against my own lack of sophistication. I don't mind. I suspect that I am never quite as unsophisticated as they think I am, but I don't mind.”
― Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography, 1920-1954

“Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Social conditioning, accompanied by moral and mental constraints, now serve to render the mediocre mind nearly incapable of unbiased assessment.”
― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

“The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”

The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view….”
― Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

“I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“They became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t-in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Now domestication and sophistication of men by women are the norm and acceptable by society, but they are terrible for manhood.”
― Debasish Mridha M.D.

“My rage is derived from eyes so sharp they see through the idiocy being passed off as sophistication.

Under the cloak of universal themes and terms such as freedom, change, and acceptance, madness ensues, being readily welcomed by those whose mind's eye questions nothing.”
― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

“When it turns out that the greatest enemy of truth is not falsehood, but gibberish, it turns out that the greatest intellectual virtue is not deductive brilliance or factual erudition, but common sense. When it turns out that the greatest enemy of decency is not hatred, but arbitrariness, it turns out that the greatest moral virtue is not kindness or mercy, but perseverance. When it turns out that the greatest enemy of good taste is not vulgarity, but ostentation, it turns out that the greatest aesthetic virtue is not elegance or refinement, but moderation. And when it turns out that the greatest enemy of civilization is not barbarity, but infantilism, it turns out that the greatest cultural virtue is not sophistication, but integrity.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“How fast everything had seemed, and how special and different and sophisticated and rich. All the things that had struck me at first—the odd formality that would have been unfriendliness at home, the attitudinizing, the orgies of talk, the tension and snobbery—seemed to make life so complicated. But then you acquire a taste for complicated things, nothing simpler will satisfy you. Go back home, and it's a let-down, there's something missing, everything is slower, duller, the conversation makes you want to bang your head against the wall.”
― Rachel Ingalls, Something to Write Home About

“She was white, wore perfume and smiled openly with the Negro customers, so I knew she was sophisticated. Other people's sophistication tended to make me nervous and I stayed shy of Louise.”
― Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

“There were glamorous young men with dyed hair who rustled like old cellophane. Older men had airs of sophistication and cold grace, giving the impression that if they were not so terribly tired they would go to places (known only to a select few) where the conversation was more scintillating and the congregation more interesting.

There were young women who had the exotic sheen of recently fed forest animals. Although they moved their fine heads languorously this way and that, nothing in the room excited their appetites. Unfashionable red lips cut across their white faces, and the crimson fingernails, as pointed as surgical instruments, heightened the predatory effect. Older, sadder women were more interesting to me. Voluminous skirts and imported shawls did not hide their heavy bodies, nor was their unattractiveness shielded by the clanks of chains and ribbons of beads, or by pale pink lips and heavily drawn doe eyes. Their presence among the pretty people enchanted me. It was like seeing frogs buzzed by iridescent dragonflies.”
― Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

“I like doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does. I think that's the way to live.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“Experience of a wise person is nothing but collective sophistication of years.”
― Mukesh Kwatra

“Sensuality is the spirit of excellence.”
― Lebo Grand

“In order to be good, one needs to be virtuous, not "nice". In order to be true, one needs to be honest, not "authentic". In order to be wise, one needs to be discriminating, not "open-minded". And in order to be civilized, one needs to be principled, not "sophisticated".”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“An amateur should be more willing to be impressed by the professional than eager to impress the professional.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Learning and knowing something is cool, but superb knowledge comes when you leave your books and become the inner world's friend.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Mme Therbouche: Ah oui, qu’avez-vous fait jusqu’à présent pour la morale ?
Diderot: (sans vergogne). Mais... j’ai offert mon exemple.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Le Libertin

“Digital sophistication implies intelligence, profundity, uniqueness, urban fit, and multidimensional understanding.”
― Pearl Zhu, Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit

“I've never met—have you?—a truly sophisticated man. World-weary and discreet—of course. But never sophisticated.”
― Timothy Findley, The Wars

“A reading of the facts of ethnology and culture history proves plainly that maxima of culture have frequently been reached in low levels of sophistication; that minima of culture have been plumbed in some of the highest. Civilization, as a whole, moves on; culture comes and goes.”
― Some Snob

“They were not hired for their looks or their sophistication; the most competent ones specialized in puzzles, music, and foreign languages.”
― Sarah Rose, D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II

“The audience was far different from that healthy, joyous throng at the Christmas Pantomime. The theatre was full, but there were no children: the onlookers were mostly of the unwholesome 'men about town' type, the type that is known as 'sophisticated': those poor, hunted, complex-ridden people who have never found the gateway that leads to the crystal sunlight of simplicity.

[Edgar Hopkins]”
― R. C. Sherriff

“I don’t know how many more times I have to say the word 'ethereal' to make people understand what the vibe of this wedding is.”
― Jenny Han, Always and Forever, Lara Jean