Subtle

Famous quotes containing the word subtle:

    I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous ... as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)