Flattering Quotes - Page 8

• Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from those rules, is consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.

  Adam Smith

  Practice, Principles, Banking

  Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart (1843). “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, p.104

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• Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie.

  Isak Dinesen

  Lying, Self, People

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.166, Vintage

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• These flattering mirrors reflect imperfectly what is within; the countenance is often a gay deceiver. What defects of mind lie hidden under its beauty! What fair exteriors conceal base souls!

  Pierre Corneille

  Lying, Gay, Mirrors

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• I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

  Richard Siken

  Dream, Thinking, Long

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• Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Giving

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.34, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

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• Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Girl, Disappointment, Hysteria

  Helen Oyeyemi (2013). “The Opposite House”, p.29, A&C Black

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• It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Animal, Ideas

  Kurt Vonnegut (1997). “Hocus Pocus”, p.141, Penguin

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• How flattering,” I grumbled. “My soul glows.

  Rick Riordan

  Soul, My Soul

  Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

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• I’m sorry, you just remind me of someone. (Rose) Old boyfriend? (Gallagher) No, my great-grandfather. (Rose) That’s not particularly flattering. I thought I looked rather good for my age. (Gallagher)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Sorry, Rose, Grandfather

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• I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.

  Jodi Picoult

  Baby, Children, Night

  "My Sister’s Keeper". Book by Jodi Picoult, 2005.

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• [The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues.… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

  Harry S. Truman

  Liars, Kissing, Men

  Letter to his sister, 14 Nov. 1947, in Off the Record: the Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (1980) p. 119

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• Paparazzi need more flattering lenses.

  Sandra Bullock

  Lenses, Needs, Paparazzi

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• Drunkenness is a flattering devil, a sweet poison, a pleasant sin, which whosoever hath, hath not himself, which whosoever doth commit, doth not commit sin, but he himself is wholly sin.

  Saint Augustine

  Sweet, Devil, Poison

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• The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Feelings, Movement, Spontaneous

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• I thought I recognized you." Really? He remembered me looking like Swamp Thing? How flattering.

  Josh Lanyon

  Swamps, Remembered

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• Mine" he said. Adam's eyes narrowed. "I don't think so. She is mine." It would of been flattering,I thought,except that at least one of them was talking about dinner and I wasn't certain about the other.

  Patricia Briggs

  Eye, Thinking, Talking

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• Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.

  Samuel Johnson

  Age, Credit, Form

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1840). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.527

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• An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.

  Gertrude Stein

  Audience, Pleasant, Ifs

  Gertrude Stein (1974). “How Writing Is Written”

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• Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Men, Talking

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

  George Eliot

  Memories, Self, Doe

  George Eliot (2016). “Impressions of Theophrastus Such: Top Novelist Focus”, p.64, 谷月社

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• It's absolutely fun to walk around and have people respect you. When Michael Jackson did Thriller, I was in the park one day, and a girl came up to me and said, "Man, the only people they talk about around here are Michael Jackson and you." It was pretty flattering to be considered in the same light as the king of pop in my area.

  Rick Ross

  Girl, Kings, Fun

  Source: www.brownpoliticalreview.org

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• A lot has been said about single mothers. Most of it has been less than flattering.

  Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  Mother, Said, Has Beens

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• The less we show our love to a woman, Or please her less, and neglect our duty, The more we trap and ruin her surely, In the flattering toils of philandery.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Toil, Our Love, Ruins

  "Eugene Onegin". Book by Alexander Pushkin, 1833.

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• I love men that love women. Morgan Freeman, who I worked with on 'RED,' was very flattering to me. But he is flattering to all women. He is a woman-charmer.

  Helen Mirren

  Men, Red, Charmers

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• But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.

  Orson Scott Card

  Winning, Naughty, Risk

  Orson Scott Card (2003). “Shadow Puppets”, p.333, Macmillan

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