Pretension Quotes - Page 9

• This re-appearance of the doctrine of freewill serves to support that of the pretension of the natural man to be not irremediably fallen, for this is what such doctrine tends to. All who have never been deeply convicted of sin, all persons in whom this conviction is based on gross external sins, believe more or less in freewill

  John Nelson Darby

  Believe, Men, Support

  John Nelson Darby (1881). “Letters by J.N.D., 1849-1875; extracts tr. from the French”

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture....He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher.

  Mark Twain

  Kindness, Humorous, Love You

  7 Copy quote

• Under the guidance of the Reich, Europe would speedily have become unified. Once the Jewish poison had been eradicated, unification would have been an easy matter. France and Italy, each defeated in turn at an interval of a few months by the two Germanic Powers, would have been well out of it. Both would have had to renounce their inappropriate aspirations to greatness. At the same time they would have had to renounce their pretensions in North Africa and the Near East; and that would have allowed Europe to pursue a bold policy of friendship towards Islam.

  Adolf Hitler

  Greatness, Europe, Two

  "The Testament of Adolf Hitler: the Hitler-Bormann documents, February-April 1945". Book by Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann, London: Cassell, (February 4, 1945), 1961.

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man who cannot control his temper is not very likely to control his passions, and no matter what his pretensions in religion, he moves in daily life very close to the animal plane.

  David O. McKay

  Life, Moving, Anger

  8 Copy quote

• and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Problem, Findings, Being Loved

  8 Copy quote

• I do assure you, Sir, that I have no pretension whatever of that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.

  Jane Austen

  Heart, Men, Honour You

  Jane Austen (1853). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.97

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

  Anton Chekhov

  Art, Stupid, Reading

  10 Copy quote

• No Swaraj government with any pretension to being a popular government can possibly be organised and maintained on a war-footing.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  War, Government, Organised

  Mahatma Gandhi (1927). “Young India, 1924-1926”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.

  Ada Lovelace

  Truth, Science, Order

  83 Copy quote

• I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise.

  Jean-Georges Noverre

  Artist, Past, Self

  7 Copy quote

• I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.

  George Saunders

  Writing, Effort, Trying

  30 Copy quote

• To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Knowing, Doe, Speak

  4 Copy quote

• The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Knowledge, Performances, Mere

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.114

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

  Frederic Raphael

  Doe, Vineyards, Television

  12 Copy quote

• Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

  Carl Sagan

  Aristocracy, Earth, Monkeys

  4 Copy quote

• Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.

  Georg Simmel

  Self, Long, Perfection

  Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (1950). “The Sociology of Georg Simmel”, p.33, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

  Alfred Nobel

  Writing, Purpose, Now And Then

  6 Copy quote

• Nothing is more important than honesty in prayer. There are no pretensions in prayer, so the best place to begin is wherever you are.

  Robert H. Schuller

  Prayer, Honesty, Important

  7 Copy quote

• Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

  Angela Carter

  Change, Historical, Enemy

  15 Copy quote

• Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Girl, Fighting, Winning

  "The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents". Book by William A. DeGregorio, 1991.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.

  Horatio Greenough

  Essentials, Majesty, Clothings

  Horatio Greenough, Harold A. Small (1947). “Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture”, p.75, Univ of California Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.

  Colin McGinn

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Writing

  8 Copy quote

• There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you're famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it's a sprawling city, there's so many different parts to it.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Different

  Source: logger.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn't know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.

  David Wong

  Insightful, World, Proud

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we are aware of our inner-growth potential yet have no pretensions about ourselves, when we are vulnerable, then we can change.

  Amit Goswami

  Growth, Vulnerable, Inner Growth

  Amit Goswami, Richard E. Reed, Maggie Goswami (1993). “The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World”, Tarcher

  35 Copy quote

  Show source