Quotes about clothing

A collection of quotes on the topic of clothes, cloth, clothing, likeness.

Quotes about clothing

Andrzej Majewski photo

“Man invented clothing to cover the superficial and to discover the inside.”

Andrzej Majewski (1966) Polish writer and photographer

Aphorisms. Magnum in Parvo (2000)

Oscar Wilde photo
Jacque Fresco photo
Freddie Mercury photo

“Listen, if you guys wanna move around and shift your asses a little, it's okay. It's okay by us, right? You can take all your clothes off if you like too, doesn't matter... Fuck off!”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

laughs
During a concert in Montreal, Canada, (24 or 25 November 1981), first released as videotape We Will Rock You (1984) http://www.ultimatequeen.co.uk/Videos/wewillrock.htm, and later on DVD as Queen Rock Montreal (2007).

Michel Foucault photo
The Mother photo
Ian Smith photo
P.T. Barnum photo

“Dr. Franklin says "it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.”

P.T. Barnum (1810–1891) American showman and businessman

Source: The Art of Money Getting; Or, Golden Rules for Making Money

Cassandra Clare photo
Mary Kay Ash photo
Leonard Cohen photo
Yves Saint Laurent photo
Louis IX of France photo

“Our clothing and our armour ought to be of such a kind that men of mature experience will not say that we have spent too much on them, nor younger men say we have spent too little.”

Louis IX of France (1214–1270) King of France

On se doit assemer en robes et en armes en tel manière que li preudome de cest siècle ne dient que on en face trop, ne les joenes gens de cest siècle ne dient que on en face peu.
Page 171. http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/chroniq/joinv/JV006.htm
Jean de Joinville Livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz nostre roy saint Looys

Aisha photo
Baruch Ashlag photo
Nathuram Godse photo

“I was moving around the refugee camps and helping the destitute with food and clothes. But I did not wander half-naked because the refugees were naked.”

Nathuram Godse (1910–1949) Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi

Godse referring to Gandhi's way of empathising with destitutes not by helping them but by imitating their unfortunate circumstances
Excerpts from the play Mee Nathuram Godse boltoy

Ellen G. White photo
Karl Lagerfeld photo
Karl Lagerfeld photo
Karl Lagerfeld photo
Karl Lagerfeld photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Yves Saint Laurent photo
George Lincoln Rockwell photo
Leonardo DiCaprio photo

“If you hear of any incident about me - a fight, a change of clothes, a little extra gel in the hair, don't believe it till you talk to me.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes

Kenzaburō Ōe photo

“The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola photo

“If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.”
Si quem enim videris deditum ventri, humi serpentem hominem, frutex est, non homo, quem vides; si quem in fantasiae quasi Calipsus vanis praestigiis cecucientem et subscalpenti delinitum illecebra sensibus mancipatum, brutum est, non homo, quem vides. Si recta philosophum ratione omnia discernentem, hunc venereris; caeleste est animal, non terrenum. Si purum contemplatorem corporis nescium, in penetralia mentis relegatum, hic non terrenum, non caeleste animal: hic augustius est numen humana carne circumvestitum.

8. 40-42; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Shigeru Miyamoto photo

“I don't know what Mario will look like next; maybe he will wear metallic clothing with a red hat.”

Shigeru Miyamoto (1952) Japanese video game designer and producer

1991, before the release of Super Mario 64.

Francis of Assisi photo
Nas photo
George Orwell photo
U.G. Krishnamurti photo

“Food, clothing and shelter — these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Stopped in Our Tracks, Book Two: Excerpts from U.G.'s Dialogues http://www.well.com/user/jct/chandra.htm (2005) by K. Chandrasekhar

Saint Peter photo
Nâzım Hikmet photo
Nikola Tesla photo
George Orwell photo

“At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 38
Context: My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. … At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.

Etty Hillesum photo
Billie Joe Armstrong photo
Joseph Goebbels photo
Socrates photo

“Just as fine clothes and handsome shoes would not be suitable to me.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Diogenes Laertius

Terry Pratchett photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Mark Gatiss photo
Raymond Chandler photo
Yukio Mishima photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?

Isaac Bashevis Singer photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Gillian Flynn photo
Dorothy Day photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Martina Navrátilová photo

“Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.”

Martina Navrátilová (1956) American-Czech tennis player

Source: Queer Notions, A Fabulous Collection of Gay and Lesbian Wit and Wisdom, 1996, p. 18.

Louise Labé photo
William Shakespeare photo
Arundhati Roy photo

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf, given at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM, 29 Sep 2002.
Speeches
Source: War Talk

Oscar Wilde photo

“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)
Source: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Mark Twain photo
Marguerite Duras photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Groucho Marx photo
Mark Twain photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Mark Twain photo

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

More Maxims of Mark (1927) edited by Merle Johnson
Variant: Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Cassandra Clare photo
Erving Goffman photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel: a tattered, painted bag of clothes; a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.”

Es gibt kein öderes und widrigeres Geschöpf in der Natur als den Menschen, welcher seinem Genius ausgewichen ist und nun nach rechts und nach links, nach rückwärts und überallhin schielt. Man darf einen solchen Menschen zuletzt gar nicht mehr angreifen, denn er ist ganz Außenseite ohne Kern, ein anbrüchiges, gemaltes, aufgebauschtes Gewand.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 128
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just photo
George Washington photo

“Do not conceive that fine Clothes make fine Men, any more than fine feathers make fine Birds—A plain genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace & embroidery in the Eyes of the judicious and sensible.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Bushrod Washington http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-chron-1780-1783-01-15-12 (15 January 1783)
1780s

Marc Jacobs photo
Adam Mickiewicz photo

“For mum we're fly. What mum you don't know who am I? I am Józio. And this is my sister Rózia. Now we're fly in sky! There is better than mum. See how heads in ray. Clothes with lucifer light. And on my hand as butterfly airfoil in sky we have all what we want, every day other toy, where we go here is grass, where we touch here is a flower. But we have what we want, torture us boring and trepidation. Oh mum for Your children road to heaven has been closed! On Always!”

Do mamy lecim do mamy! Cóż to, mamo nie znasz Józia? Ja to Józio ja ten samy. A to moja siostra Rózia. My teraz w raju latamy, Tam nam lepiej niż u mamy. Patrz jakie główki w promieniu, Ubiór z jutrzenki światełka, A na oboim ramieniu Jak u motylków skrzydełka, w raju wszystkiego dostatek, Co dzień to inna zabawka, gdzie stąpim wypływa trawka, gdzie dotkniem rozkwita kwiatek. Lecz choć wszystkiego dostatek dręczy nad nuda i trwoga. Ach mamo dla twoich dziatek zamknięta do nieba droga!
Part two.
Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/mic_fore.htm

Lady Gaga photo
José Saramago photo

“In between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things. […]
Let's take this ant, or, rather, let's not, because that would involve picking it up, let us merely consider it, because it is one of the larger ones and because it raises its head like a dog, it's walking along very close to the wall, together with its fellow ants it will have time to complete its long journey ten times over between the ants' nest and whatever it is that it finds so interesting, curious or perhaps merely nourishing in this secret room […]. One of the men has fallen to the ground, he's on the same level as the ants now, we don't know if he can see them, but they see him, and he will fall so often that, in the end, they will know by heart his face, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his ear, the dark arc of his eyebrow, the faint shadow at the corner of his mouth, and later, back in the ants' nest, they will weave long stories for the enlightenment of future generations, because it is useful for the young to know what happens out there in the world. The man fell and the others dragged him to his feet again, shouting at him, asking two different questions at the same time, how could he possibly answer them even if he wanted to, which is not the case, because the man who fell and was dragged to his feet will die without saying a word. Only moans will issue from his mouth, and in the silence of his soul only deep sighs, and even when his teeth are broken and he has to spit them out, which will prompt the other two men to hit him again for soiling state property, even then the sound will be of spitting and nothing more, that unconscious reflex of the lips, and then the dribble of saliva thickened with blood that falls to the floor, thus stimulating the taste buds of the ants, who telegraph from one to the other news of this singularly red manna fallen from such a white heaven.
The man fell again. It's the same one, said the ants, the same ear shape, the same arc of eyebrow, the same shadow at the corner of the mouth, there's no mistaking him, why is it that it is always the same man who falls, why doesn't he defend himself, fight back. […] The ants are surprised, but only fleetingly. After all, they have their own duties, their own timetables to keep, it is quite enough that they raise their heads like dogs and fix their feeble vision on the fallen man to check that he is the same one and not some new variant in the story. The larger ant walked along the remaining stretch of wall, slipped under the door, and some time will pass before it reappears to find everything changed, well, that's just a manner of speaking, there are still three men there, but the two who do not fall never stop moving, it must be some kind of game, there's no other explanation […]. [T]hey grab him by the shoulders and propel him willy-nilly in the direction of the wall, so that sometimes he hits his back, sometimes his head, or else his poor bruised face smashes into the whitewash and leaves on it a trace of blood, not a lot, just whatever spurts forth from his mouth and right eyebrow. And if they leave him there, he, not his blood, slides down the wall and he ends up kneeling on the ground, beside the little trail of ants, who are startled by the sudden fall from on high of that great mass, which doesn't, in the end, even graze them. And when he stays there for some time, one ant attaches itself to his clothing, wanting to take a closer look, the fool, it will be the first ant to die, because the next blow falls on precisely that spot, the ant doesn't feel the second blow, but the man does.”

Source: Raised from the Ground (1980), pp. 172–174

Charles Spurgeon photo
Rich Mullins photo

“Yes, it's embarrassing to be born again, but imagine how embarrassing it must have been to be born the first time. At least this time you get to wear clothes!”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997)
In Concert

Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Albert Schweitzer photo

“Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
Again and again their will-to-live becomes, as it were, intoxicated: spring sunshine, opening flowers, moving clouds, waving fields of grain — all affect it. The manifold will-to-live, which is known to us in the splendid phenomena in which it clothes itself, grasps at their personal wills. They would fain join their shouts to the mighty symphony which is proceeding all around them. The world seem beauteous…but the intoxication passes. Dreadful discords only allow them to hear a confused noise, as before, where they had thought to catch the strains of glorious music. The beauty of nature is obscured by the suffering which they discover in every direction. And now they see again that they are driven about like shipwrecked persons on the waste of ocean, only that the boat is at one moment lifted high on the crest of the waves and a moment later sinks deep into the trough; and that now sunshine and now darkening clouds lie on the surface of the water.
And now they would fain persuade themselves that land lies on the horizon toward which they are driven. Their will-to-live befools their intellect so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It forces this intellect to show them a map which lends support to their hope of land. Once again they essay to reach the shore, until finally their arms sink exhausted for the last time and their eyes rove desperately from wave to wave. …
Thus it is with the will-to-live when it is unreflective.
But is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we either drift aimlessly through lack of reflection or sink in pessimism as the result of reflection? No. We must indeed attempt the limitless ocean, but we may set our sails and steer a determined course.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 256

Livy photo

“There is nothing that is more often clothed in an attractive garb than a false creed.”

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book XXXIX, sec. 16
History of Rome

Pedro Muñoz Seca photo

“You can take my money from me; you can take my watch away; you can stripe me off my clothes; you may even can kill me. And yet, there is only a thing you will not be able to take away from me, no matter how hard you try: the fear I am feeling.”

Pedro Muñoz Seca (1879–1936) Spanish writer

Said in november 1936 during the summary trial in which he was condemned to death.
Source: http://www.abc.es/20081104/opinion-firmas/mataron-munoz-seca-20081104.html

Fanny Kemble photo
George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle photo

“Little General Monck
Sat upon a trunk,
Eating a crust of bread;
There fell a hot coal
And burnt in his clothes a hole,
Now little General Monck is dead.”

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle (1608–1670) English soldier and politician

Nursery rhyme; The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd ed. 1997), pp365-6
About

W.B. Yeats photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo

“Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees.”

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält.
Abend (Evening) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902)

Jonathan Swift photo

“She wears her clothes, as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 1

Nasreddin photo
Jean Jacques Rousseau photo

“Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Clothed in sorrow's dark array,—
Days of absence, I am weary:
She I love is far away.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Avril Lavigne photo
Robert Herrick photo
Henri Barbusse photo
James A. Michener photo