A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.
Juan Goytisolo

And it's sad because it's like a surprise to people - almost an anomaly - when artists are actually refined and trained on an instrument. That's the last thing people think about.
Vanessa Carlton

Certainly I was relatively a refined person. No way a tramp.
Beatrice Wood

Contentment is, after all, simply refined indolence.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.
Morihei Ueshiba

Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.
Benjamin Haydon

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.
Arthur Balfour

His daughter returned from her boarding school, improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but, in her conversation, he sought in vain for that refined and fertile mind which he had fondly expected.
Emma Willard

I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.
Frances Burney

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
Jose Saramago

I've refined my mechanics, refined my pitches. I've gotten more confidence, and I've gotten more determination. I've got a better idea what I'm doing out there.
Randy Johnson

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston Bachelard

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.
William Empson

Men... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.
Frederick William Robertson

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
Thomas Mann

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
Thomas Mann

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.
Laurence Stern

Over the course of those 12 episodes we discarded what didn't work and kept what did and that refined it.
Dave Rowntree

People understand we have a dependence upon foreign oil. What they do not understand and find incredibly ridiculous is that we import refined product just making us more dependent on the industry.
John Shimkus