A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
Robert Green Ingersoll

Half the issues they - are so polished they're talking about - are dead by the time they get into the office, and into the midst of their tour where they're really productive.
James Stockdale

I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has had her fair share of life's knocks.
Pauline Hanson

I love a finished speaker, I really, truly do I don't mean one who's polished, I just mean one who's through.
Richard Armour

I really don't like when things are all polished and perfect - the perfect love story and the hair is perfect.
Marisa Tomei

Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.
Bishop Robert South

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.
Ernst Mach

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
James Joyce

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.
Edmund Burke

Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
Lin Yutang

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.
Lord Byron

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.
Jean de la Bruyere

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
Daniel Defoe

The toute ensemble was such as to make polished society blush, when compared with these savages.
Zebulon Pike

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

When I first came out, like a lot of the artists at that time, I had a very polished, very overproduced sound.
Taylor Dayne

When you think of a movie, most people imagine a two hour finished, polished product. But to get to that two hour product, it can take hundreds or thousands of people many months of full time work.
George Kennedy

You work on an idea, your first interpretation is very raw and you work it and you work it and it gets polished and polished. It gets to a certain level and then it comes down off that peak.
Kim Weston