Pretentiousness Quotes

• Pretentiousness repels but authenticity attracts, and vulnerability is the pathway to intimacy.

  Rick Warren

  Pathways, Authenticity, Intimacy

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• What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle's, and of a rabbit, rabbit's. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Animal, Duplicity

  "Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers". Book by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1893.

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• We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Self, Hatred, Form

  Aleksandar Hemon (2013). “The Book of My Lives”, p.1965, Pan Macmillan

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• Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

  David Ogilvy

  Business, Trying, Jargon

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• I once heard that Quentin Tarantino, who I obviously love and think is a genius, says that there's no such thing as guilty pleasure, there's only pleasures. And I do love that idea, because I do think that there's a pretentiousness when people make a list of their favorite things. I like to live a life where I don't think of my pleasures as guilty pleasures.

  Mindy Kaling

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Interview with Genevieve Koski, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2011.

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• I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Real, Character, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

  Raymond Chandler

  Drinking, Boys, Community

  Raymond Chandler (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.64, Grove Press

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• I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."

  Greg Mottola

  Fun, Writing, Guy

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• There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

  Glenway Wescott

  Pain, Disappointment, Literature

  Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Thomas Wolfe (1945). “The Crack-up”

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• She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

  George Meredith

  Sweet, Rawness, Comedy

  George Meredith (1956). “The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative”, p.4, Library of Alexandria

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• My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.

  Lauren Groff

  Children, Son, Musician

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• L.A. has a lot of tackiness to it, but at the same time, in that funny kind of fantasy pretentiousness, it's unpretentious because it's all here. It's what you make of it. It's a land of opportunity in a lot of ways. It's a great for an immigrant because it is what you make of it, and especially artists as workers in this culture, it offers so much, in terms of variety, of diversity. For years, the alleys of Los Angeles were my art store.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Art, Opportunity, Diversity

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.

  Colin Meloy

  Rocks, Stuff, Records

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.

  Richard Mitchell

  Ignorance, Laughing, Special

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• In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

  Polybius

  Children, War, Men

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• The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

  Brenda Ueland

  Believe, Writing, People

  Brenda Ueland (1987). “If You Want to Write”

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• Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist.

  Cornel West

  Religious, Light, Views

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Personally I don't spend much time thinking about being funny. For me it's always been just a way to get by, a way to be likable yet to remain removed. When I speak up, it's not because I have any particular answers; rather, I have a desire to puncture the pretentiousness of those who seem so certain they do.

  Wendy Wasserstein

  Humor, Thinking, Desire

  Wendy Wasserstein (1991). “Bachelor Girls”, Vintage

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• Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?

  Haruki Murakami

  Husband, Views, People

  "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Book by Haruki Murakami, 1997.

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• In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.

  Karl Popper

  Views, Simplicity, Moral

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• I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man's Cellini or a road company Cosimo de' Medici ... the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist.

  Lucius Beebe

  Men, Thinking, Numbers

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• I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

  E. M. Forster

  Thinking, Literature, Philosophic

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.46, Stanford University Press

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