Base

Famous quotes containing the word base:

    The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.
    Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

    The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)

    Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
    Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
    To smother up his beauty from the world,
    That when he please again to be himself,
    Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
    By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
    Of vapors that did seem to strangle him
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)