Imbecility Quotes - Page 3

• Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Money, Heart, Greed

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• Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Insecurity, Canvas, Blank

  Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Willem Gogh (1927). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, 1872-1886: With a Memoir by His Sister-in-law, J. Van Gogh-Bonger ...”

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• To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Dream, Sex, Integrity

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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• A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.

  I. F. Stone

  Movement, Moral, Mark

  I. F. Stone (2009). “The Best of I.F. Stone”, p.235, PublicAffairs

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• The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Catholic, Church, Divinity

  "The Life of Hilaire Belloc". Book by Robert Speaight, 1957.

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• If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.

  Denis Diderot

  Character, Criticism, Vices

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• Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Falling In Love, Love Is, Mind

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• Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.

  Samuel Johnson

  Time, Men, Resolution

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1824). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., Comprehending an Account of His Studies, and Numerous Works, in Chronological Order: A Series of His Epistolary Correspondence and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Pieces of His Composition, Never Before Published; the Whole Exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great Britain, for Near Half a Century During which He Flourished”, p.99

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• The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

  Quentin Crisp

  Love, Philosophical, Profound

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• The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance

  Jane Austen

  Beautiful, Girl, Sex

  Jane Austen (2009). “Northanger Abbey”, p.69, Wild Jot Press

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• IMBECILITY, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Inspiration, Fire, Divinity

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.117, University of Georgia Press

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• To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)

  Charlotte Bronte

  Eye, Heart, Character

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.213, Penguin

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