“For as lack of adornment is said to become some women, so this subtle oration, though without embellishment, gives delight.”
Supposedly from De Oratore, 78 ("...for women more easily preserve the ancient language unaltered, because, not having experience of the conversation of a multitude of people, they always retain what they originally learned..."), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Loveliness / Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, / But is when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most", James Thomson, The Seasons, "Autumn", Line 204
Disputed
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Marcus Tullius Cicero 180
Roman philosopher and statesman -106–-43 BCRelated quotes
Woman and Her Era (1864), pt. 2, ch. 1
“Asking a storyteller not to embellish is like asking a fish to give up water.”
Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 32 (p. 118)
"The West Lake, the Beauty" (《饮湖上初晴后雨》) (1073), in Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 200
“Not to be able to utter one’s thought without giving offence, is to lack culture.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 192
“Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.”
Source: The Midwich Cuckoos
“Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.”
The Rape of Lucrece (1594).
From a letter to Harold Preece (c. December 1928)
Letters
Context: I could name all day, those women I deem great in Greece alone and the records would scarcely be complete. And what of Joan of Arc and Emma Goldman? Kate Richards O’Hare and Sarah Bernhardt? Katherine the Great and Elizabeth Barrett Browning? H. D. and Sara Teasdale? Isibella of Spain who pawned her gems that Columbus might sail, and Edna St. Vincent Millay? And that queen, Marie, I think her name was, of some small province - Hungary I believe - who fought Prussia and Russia so long and so bitterly. And Rome – oh, the list is endless there, also - most of them were glorified harlots but better be a glorified harlot than a drab and moral drone, such as the text books teach us woman should be. Woman have always been the inspiration of men, and just as there are thousands of unknown great ones among men, there have been countless women whose names have never been blazoned across the stars, but who have inspired men on to glory. And as for their fickleness – as long as men write the literature of the world, they will rant about the unfaithfulness of the fair sex, forgetting their own infidelities. Men are as fickle as women. Women have been kept in servitude so long that if they lack in discernment and intellect it is scarcely their fault.