C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Ornament
All finery is a sign of littleness.
Ornaments were invented by modesty.
The world is still deceived by ornament.
Jewelry and profuse ornaments are unmistakable evidences of vulgarity.
The true ornament of matrons is virtue, not apparel.
Women, like roses, should wear only their own colors, and emit no borrowed perfumes.
The love of ornament creeps slowly but surely into the female heart.
Women of society, as well as Hottentots, run naturally to ornaments and gewgaws.
Around the neck what dross are gold and pearl!
When I behold the passion for ornamentation, and the corresponding power, I feel as if women had so far shown what they are bad for, rather than what they are good for.
Dumb jewels often, in their silent kind, more than quick words, do move a woman’s mind.
Jewels! It’s my belief that when woman was made, jewels were invented only to make her the more mischievous.
Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning, humility, and virtue;—that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman’s life both glorious and happy.
Women have that feminine sensuousness which delights in color and odor and richness of fabric. Their sense of beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization, they would pierce their noses, and dye their fingernails, and wear strings of glass beads.
We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.