A truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with excellency of heart.
An old puzzle asks how a barometer can be used to measure the height of a building. Answers range from dropping the instrument from the top and measuring the time of its fall to giving it to the building's superintendent in return for a look at the plans. A modern version of the puzzle asks how a personal computer can balance a checkbook. An elegant solution is to sell the machine and deposit the money.
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.' A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, "there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it." A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.
The human brain is a most unusual instrument of elegant and as yet unknown capacity.
I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming-- or buying software-- on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.