C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Elegance
Elegance is not an ornament worthy of man.
Elegance is exquisite polish.
Many a woman will pass for elegant in a ballroom, or even at a court drawing room, whose want of true breeding would become evident in a chosen company.
Neither refinement nor delicacy is indispensable to produce elegance.
Elegance of manner is the outgrowth of refined and exalted sense.
When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and groveling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.
The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know; but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Elegance is something more than ease; it is more than a freedom from awkwardness or restraint. It implies, I conceive, a precision, a polish, a sparkling, spirited yet delicate.
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.