Deformity Quotes

• He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Strong, Memories, Men

  Robert Louis Stevenson “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, Lulu.com

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• The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

  William Blake

  Nature, Moving, Eye

  William Blake (1977). “The Portable William Blake”, p.136, Penguin

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• No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.

  John Ruskin

  Real, Heart, Mean

  "Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain".

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• An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Artist, Pleasure, Shows

  25 Copy quote

• His modesty amounts to deformity.

  Margot Asquith

  Modesty, Amount

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• I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Beauty, Beautiful, Nature

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• Error, indeed is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced more true than truth itself.

  Irenaeus of Lyons

  Errors, Dresses, Naked

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• He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Love, Feet, Streets

  "The Life of Lord Byron". Book by Thomas Moore, 1831.

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• From whence comes it that a cripple in body does not irritate us, and that a crippled mind enrages us? It is because a cripple sees that we go right, and a distorted mind says that it is we who go astray. But for that we should have more pity and less rage.

  Blaise Pascal

  Should Have, Mind, Doe

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• Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?

  Victor Hugo

  Heart, Destiny, Men

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• Affectation is certain deformity; by forming themselves on fantastic models, the young begin with being ridiculous, and often end in being vicious.

  Robert Blair

  Ridiculous, Affection, Fantastic

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• Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.

  Clarence Darrow

  Hatred, Charity, Moral

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• "I should hope so," Laigle replied, "for my coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and 1 only feel its presence because it keeps me warm."

  Victor Hugo

  Friendship, Hurt, Wrinkles

  "Les Miserables".

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• Art is significant deformity.

  Roger Fry

  Art, Significant, Art Is

  Quoted in VirginiaWoolf, Roger Fry (1940)

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• In all human love it must be realized that every man promises a woman, and every woman promises a man that which only God alone can give, namely, perfect happiness. One of the reasons why so many marriages are shipwrecked is because as the young couple leave the altar, they fail to realize that human feelings tire and the enthusiasm of the honeymoon is not the same as the more solid happiness of enduring human love. One of the greatest trials of marriage is the absence of solitude. In the first moments of human love, one does not see the little hidden deformities which later on appear.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Love, Couple, Men

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• To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

  William Blake

  Nature, Eye, Science

  William Blake (1977). “The Portable William Blake”, p.136, Penguin

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• It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

  Max Beerbohm

  Strength, Nature, Men

  Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.95, New York Review of Books

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• Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Funny Relationship, Age, Vices

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• Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.

  Frank Zappa

  Modern, Behave, Hideous

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• It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Character, Democracies Have, Government

  Alexander Hamilton (1850). “The works of Alexander Hamilton; compris. his corresp. and his polit. and official writings, excl. of the federalist, civil and military. Ed. by John C. Hamilton”, p.440

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• Deformity of the heart I call
  The worst deformity of all;
  For what is form, or what is face,
  But the soul's index, or its case?

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Heart, Soul, Faces

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• Ashamed of the many frailties they feel within, all men endeavor to hide themselves, their ugly nakedness, from each other, and wrapping up the true motives of their hearts in the specious cloak of sociableness, and their concern for the public good, they are in hopes of concealing their filthy appetites and the deformity of their desires.

  Bernard de Mandeville

  Heart, Men, Desire

  "The Fable of the Bees". Book by Bernard Mandeville. Remark T, p. 262, 1732.

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• Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Powerful, Men, Luxury

  Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1854). “De Quincey's Writings: Essays on philosophical writers and other men of letters. 1854-60. [v. 14 stereotyped”, p.142

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• We all have insecurities, and the thing that makes them crippling is that we all have the ability to blow them up into such huge issues in our minds, that we might as well have a facial deformity. It keeps us from really going out there and living our lives, and forgetting about hating yourself and just experiencing the world around you.

  Christina Ricci

  Hate, Blow, Issues

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• I was born with lots of deformities.

  Gemma Arterton

  Born

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