Perverseness Quotes

• But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

  Jane Austen

  Love, Sister, Wedding

  Jane Austen (2009). “Northanger Abbey”, p.8, Wild Jot Press

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• Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Silly, Heart, Character

  Edgar Allan Poe (2004). “The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.63, Wordsworth Editions

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• Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Character, Men, Giving

  Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Parker Willis, James Russell Lowell, Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1850). “The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: With Notices of His Life and Genius”, p.283

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• Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Memories, Remembrance, Never Ending

  1846 Of the significance of the bird in his poem'The Raven'.'The Philosophy of Composition', in Graham's Magazine, Apr.

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• The perverseness of my fate is such that he's not mine because he's mine too much.

  John Dryden

  Fate, Too Much, Mines

  John Dryden, Paul Hammond, David Hopkins (2007). “Dryden: Selected Poems”, p.746, Pearson Education

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• Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore she is unsure in herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil. ... Thus in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good.

  Albertus Magnus

  Nature, Clever, Women

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• Today social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of the world. The abyss between those who are within the world 'order' and those who are excluded is widening day by day. The use of leading-edge technologies has made it possible to accumulate wealth in a way that is fantastic but perverse because it is unjustly distributed. Twenty-percent of humankind control eighty percent of all means of life. That fact creates a dangerous imbalance in the movement of history.

  Leonardo Boff

  Mean, Technology, Order

  Leonardo Boff (2001). “The Prayer of Saint Francis: A Message of Peace for the World Today”, p.43, Orbis Books

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• Always meet petulance with gentleness and perverseness with kindness. A gentle hand can lead even en elephant by a hair. Reply to thine enemy with gentleness.

  Zoroaster

  Kindness, Hair, Hands

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• No adversity is in kind or degree peculiar to us; but if we survey the conditions of other men (of our brethren everywhere, of our neighbours all about us), and compare our case with theirs, we shall find that we have many consorts and associates in adversity, most as ill, many far worse bestead than ourselves; whence it must be a great fondness and perverseness to be displeased that we are not exempted from, but exposed to bear a share in the common troubles and burdens of mankind.

  Isaac Barrow

  Adversity, Men, Degrees

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• Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

  Ted Solotaroff

  Disappointment, Mean, Writing

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• Doubt is most often the source of our powerlessness. To doubt is to be faithless, to be without hope or belief. When we doubt, our self-talk sounds like this: 'I don't think I can. I don't think I will.'... To doubt is to have faith in the worst possible outcome. It is to believe in the perverseness of the universe, that even if I do well, something I don't know about will get in the way, sabotage me, or get me in the end.

  Blaine Lee Pardoe

  Motivational, Believe, Thinking

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• A completely indifferent attitude toward clothes in women seems to me to be an admission of inferiority, of perverseness, or of alack of realization of her place in the world as a woman. Or--what is even more hopeless and pathetic--it's an admission that she has given up, that she is beaten, and refuses longer to stand up to the world.

  Hortense Odlum

  Fashion, Attitude, Clothes

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• Perverseness is your whole defence.

  Jonathan Swift

  Defence, Whole

  Jonathan Swift, John Mitford (1871). “The Poetical Works of Jonathan Swift”, p.235

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• Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

  Thomas Mann

  Solitude, Originality, Absurd

  Thomas Mann, Stanley Appelbaum (1995). “Death in Venice”, p.19, Courier Corporation

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• From the loving example of one family a whole State may become loving, and from its courtesies, courteous; while from the ambition and perverseness of the one man the whole State may be thrown into rebellious disorder. Such is the nature of influence.

  Confucius

  Ambition, Men, Example

  Confucius (2016). “Delphi Collected Works of Confucius - Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism (Illustrated)”, p.1142, Delphi Classics

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• I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O. I am not big on women looking naive. There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy of sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it-and sometimes a lot of it-like a masquerade.

  Alexander McQueen

  Thinking, Clothes, Romance

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• The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.

  Thomas Mann

  Adventure, Sadness, Men

  Thomas Mann (2012). “Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book”, p.101, Courier Corporation

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• I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain.

  Anais Nin

  Crush, Hurt, June

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• Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn't understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.

  Marguerite Duras

  Love, Moving, Enough

  Marguerite Duras (2011). “The Lover”, p.37, Pantheon

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• There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

  Matthew Specktor

  Art, Betrayal, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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