Contempt Quotes - Page 17

• Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Passion, Ambition, Pride

  14 Copy quote

• The God of Hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A God who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved - cursed, not worshiped. A heaven presided over by such a God must be below the lowest hell.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Pain, Heaven, Religion

  "The Great Infidels" by Robert Green Ingersoll, 1881.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Technology, Mirrors, People

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away”, p.11, HarperCollins UK

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love life and want to hold onto it. But my passion for justice for my tormented people, for their dignity and freedom, must be greater still. For of what value is a life of slavery, of humiliation and contempt for that which you hold most dear: Your identity! I will therefore not give in to the Turkish Inquisition.

  Leyla Zana

  Passion, Love Life, People

  Leyla Zana (1999). “Writings from Prison”

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most unequivocal sign of contempt for man is to regard everybody merely as a means to one's own ends, or of no account whatever.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mean, Men, Unequivocal

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.215, Courier Corporation

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• When thou seest thine enemy in trouble, curl not thy whiskers in contempt; for in every bone there is marrow, and within every jacket there is a man.

  Saadi

  Men, Enemy, Curls

  17 Copy quote

• If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men.

  James Farley

  Wise, Men, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner,
  And take to light claret instead of pale ale;
  Look down with an utter contempt upon butter,
  And never touch bread till its toasted--or stale.

  Henry Sambrooke Leigh

  Light, Wish, Looks

  Henry Sambrooke Leigh (1869). “Carols of Cockayne”, p.186

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must actually be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming impure. Behold, I teach you the superman: he is the this sea, in him can your great contempt go under.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Sea, Becoming

  4 Copy quote

• Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

  Diane Johnson

  Travel, Thinking, Islands

  Diane Johnson (1993). “Natural opium: some travelers' tales”, Alfred A. Knopf

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We often see malefactors, when they are led to execution, put on resolution and a contempt of death which, in truth, is nothing else but fearing to look it in the face--so that this pretended bravery may very truly be said to do the same good office to their mind that the blindfold does to their eyes.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Death, Eye, Office

  4 Copy quote

• Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon on all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment.

  Washington Irving

  Business, Reality, Romance

  Charles Fenno Hoffman, Lewis Gaylord Clark, John Holmes Agnew, Kinahan Cornwallis, Washington Irving (1840). “The Knickerbocker: Or, New York Monthly Magazine”, p.304

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

  George Santayana

  Reality, Hypocrisy, World

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Dialogues in limbo. Platonism and the spiritual life. A long way round to Nirvana. The prestige of the infinite. Ultimate religion”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.

  Samuel Johnson

  Age, Looks, Youth

  Samuel Johnson (1999). “Rasselas”, p.14, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Pride, Vanity, Dine

  Jack Vincent, Benjamin Franklin (2010). “Benjamin Franklin's the Way to Wealth”, p.83, The Way to Wealth

  32 Copy quote

  Show source

• Content may dwell in all stations. To be low but above contempt may be high enough to be happy.

  Thomas Browne

  May, Enough, Lows

  Sir Thomas Browne (1844). “Religio Medici. Its sequel, Christian Morals ... With resemblant passages from Cowper's Task, and a verbal index. [Edited by John Peace.]”, p.147

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For both parties in a controversy, the most disagreeable way of retaliating is to be vexed and silent; for the aggressor usually regards the silence as a sign of contempt.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Party, Silence, Way

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1909). “The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: The First Complete and Authorized English Translation”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing is more despicable than the old age of a passionate man. When the vigour of youth fails him, and his amusements pall with frequent repetition, his occasional rage sinks by decay of strength into peevishness; that peevishness, for want of novelty and variety, becomes habitual; the world falls off from around him, and he is left, as Homer expresses it, to devour his own heart in solitude and contempt.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Fall, Heart, Men

  5 Copy quote

• ... don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

  Zadie Smith

  Pain, Distance, Eyebrows

  Zadie Smith (2003). “White Teeth”, p.177, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

  Thomas Mann

  Respect, Real, Self

  13 Copy quote

• This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.

  Matt Haig

  Clothes, Body, Planets

  19 Copy quote

• I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

  A.M. Homes

  Feelings, Faces, My Family

  A.M. Homes (2012). “May We Be Forgiven”, p.108, Granta Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt; whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.155, Oxford University Press

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• Crime is contagious....if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  War, Government, Law

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ronan merely invested a look with as much contempt as he could muster. A lady reached over the top of Noah to pat Matthew's head fondly before continuing down the aisle. She didn't seem to care that he was fifteen, which was all right, because he didn't, either. Both Ronan and Declan observed this interaction with the pleased expressions of parents watching their prodigy at work.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Expression, Parent, Looks

  4 Copy quote