A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Charles Horton Cooley

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
Josef Albers

I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
Richard Brautigan

I like decorative, functional things that I feel comfortable in.
Joey Lauren Adams

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.
Anish Kapoor

In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.
Gertrude Jekyll

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.
Gyorgy Ligeti

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Max Ernst

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
Edward Hopper

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
Mark Rothko

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.
Ken Follett