Top 100 Affectation Quotes
#1. Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,
John Cheever
#3. Our sex bears the disgrace not only of a great deal of genuine poltroonery, but also of much which is mere affectation.
Frances Power Cobbe
#4. There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.
Samuel Johnson
#5. What used to be called 'good manners' is now regarded as mere affectation. Open a door for a young woman, and she's likely to call security.
Terry Wogan
#8. All affectation; 'tis my perfect scorn;
Object of my implacable disgust.
William Cowper
#9. Bombs were generally the tools of cowards or the desperate, those who either had no stomach for looking their opponents in the eyes or those who were so outclassed that honor had become a dangerous and entirely unaffordable affectation.
Evan Currie
#10. We're all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.
Thomas Frank
#11. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.
Russell Brand
#12. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.
Samuel Johnson
#13. If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.
Maria Edgeworth
#14. In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.
Voltaire
#16. Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
William Shakespeare
#17. Affectation is certain deformity; by forming themselves on fantastic models, the young begin with being ridiculous, and often end in being vicious.
Robert Blair
#18. To spend too much time in them [studying] is sloth, to use them too much for ornament is affectation, to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor* of a scholar ... .
Francis Bacon
#19. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.
Henry Fuseli
#20. I wear glasses myself. As an affectation, as a badge of high intellect and to see with.
Simon Munnery
#21. I must confess I am a fop in my heart; ill customs influence my very senses, and I have been so used to affectation that without the help of the air of the court what is natural cannot touch me.
George Etherege
#22. Pride destroys all symmetry and grace, and affectation is a more terrible enemy to fine faces than the small-pox.
Richard Steele
#23. Nothing is so contemptible as that affectation of wisdom, which some display, by universal incredulity.
Oliver Goldsmith
#24. Avoid all affectation and singularity. What is according to nature is best, and what is contrary to it is always distasteful. Nothing is graceful that is not our own.
Jeremy Collier
#25. Affectation of candour is common enough - one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design - to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad - belongs to you alone.
Jane Austen
#26. I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity ... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#27. Mannerism is not character, and affectation is the avowed enemy of grace. Every dancer ought to regard his laborious art as a link in the chain of beauty, as a useful ornament for the stage, and this, in turn, as an important element in the spiritual development of nations.
August Bournonville
#28. Among the numerous stratagems by which pride endeavors to recommend folly to regard, there is scarcely one that meets with less success than affectation, or a perpetual disguise of the real character by fictitious appearances.
Samuel Johnson
#29. Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
Fanny Brice
#30. I'm developing more stuff in my voice, more Nick Swardson. It's me as myself in a sense and kind of in my voice, no accent no affectation. I'm growing into my own persona.
Nick Swardson
#31. He who would be singular in his apparel had need have something superlative to balance that affectation.
Owen Feltham
#32. More men are ruined by underestimating the value of money than by overestimating it. Let us, then, abandon the affectation of despising money, and frankly own its value.
Orison Swett Marden
#33. I'm trying to learn to smoke, which is rather weird when everyone is trying to stop. I'm not a smoker. But my character only smokes as an affectation.
Francesca Annis
#34. I did not myself set a high estimation on wealth, and had the affectation of most young men of lively imagination, who suppose that they can better dispense with the possession of money, than resign their time and faculties to the labour necessary to acquire it.
Walter Scott
#35. Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
Oscar Wilde
#36. Everyone gives much more and the receipts are considerable. Typical of American generosity. Their hospitality, their cordiality are like that too, spontaneous and without affectation. It's what's best in them.
Albert Camus
#37. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.
Dave Eggers
#39. The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation
Henry Fielding
#40. In oratory affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn.
Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury
#42. Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#43. As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?
Abraham Lincoln
#44. Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Jean Baudrillard
#45. I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused.
Ingmar Bergman
#46. There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.
Charles Lamb
#47. A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
Lord Chesterfield
#48. Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid
Giuseppe Verdi
#49. Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun
#50. In thy apparel avoid singularity, profuseness, and gaudiness. Be not too early in the fashion, nor too late. Decency is half way between affectation and neglect. The body is the shell of the soul, apparel is the husk of that shell; the husk often tells you what the kernel is.
Francis Quarles
#52. The characteristic of coquettes is affectation governed by whim.
Henry Fielding
#53. Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.
William Hazlitt
#54. I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.
Quentin Crisp
#55. Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#56. Affectation proceeds from one of these two causes,
vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.
Henry Fielding
#57. Chopin's rubato possessed an unshakeable emotional logic. It always justified itself by a strengthening or weakening melodic line, by exaggeration or affectation.
Karol Mikuli
#58. For what benefit is beauty, the greatest blessing of heaven, if it be mixed with affectation? What youth, if corrupted with the severity of old age? Lastly,
Erasmus
#59. must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the affectation of an archaic
Herodotus
#60. Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
Jacques Barzun
#61. The conservative social critique always boils down to the same simple message: liberalism - meaning everything from racy TV to deconstructionists in the Yale French Department - is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil.
Thomas Frank
#62. Let us shun self-analyzation, self-consciousness, morbidness, affectation, attitudinizing. Let us look ahead as little as possible, keeping our eyes on our brushes and on the world of beauty around us.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer
#63. To be polite to everybody except the people they love most is a nervous affectation that afflicts many families ... when they come home, they take off their smiles and soft words, and sit about, spiritually in their underwear. This isn't pretty.
Margaret Fishback
#64. I have sometimes thought
that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!
Thomas Hardy
#65. The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#66. How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really considered a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affectation is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.
Charles G. Dawes
#67. But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of "acting spiritual" and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude
Sam Harris
#68. The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
William Hazlitt
#69. Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.
Stephen King
#71. Affectation is fond of making a greater show than reality ... Nature and truth have never learned to blow the trumpet, and never will.
Lydia M. Child
#72. There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
John Ruskin
#73. Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;Who loving novels, full of affectation,Receive the manners of each other nation.
Guillaume De Salluste Du Bartas
#74. Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it
else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#75. The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#76. And the things which conduce in any way to the commodity of life, and of which fortune gives an abundant supply, he [my father] used without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them.
Marcus Aurelius
#77. Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.
Oliver Goldsmith
#78. Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
Ellen Glasgow
#79. The body should be bedecked naturally and without affectation, with simplicity, with neglect rather than nicety, not with costly and dazzling apparel, but with ordinary clothes, so that nothing be lacking to honesty and necessity, yet nothing be added to increase its beauty.
Ambrose
#80. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
Samuel Johnson
#81. Modesty is a learned affectation. It's no good. Humility is great, because humility says, 'There was someone before me. I'm following in somebody's footsteps.'
Maya Angelou
#82. Affectation discovers sooner what one is than it makes known what one would fain appear to be.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#83. Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.
Jacques Barzun
#84. We are made ridiculous less by our defects than by the affectation of qualities which are not ours.
John Lancaster Spalding
#85. Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.
Samuel Johnson
#86. Affectation hath always had a greater share both in the action and discourse of men than truth and judgment have ...
Aphra Behn
#87. Artlessness will never do in love matters; and that girl is born a simpleton who has it either by nature or affectation.
Jane Austen
#88. Affectation naturally counterfeits those excellences which are placed at the greatest distance from possibility of attainment, because, knowing our own defects, we eagerly endeavor to supply them with artificial excellence.
Samuel Johnson
#90. External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.
Jaron Lanier
#91. I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.
William Shakespeare
#92. I'm a religious woman. And I feel I have responsibility. I have no modesty at all. I'm even afraid of it - it's a learned affectation and it's just stuck on me like decals. Now I pray for humility because that comes from inside out.
Maya Angelou
#93. Some are Atheists by Neglect; others are so by Affectation; they, that think there is no God at some times; do not think so at all times.
Benjamin Whichcote
#94. Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn't just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health.
Sylvia Brownrigg
#95. The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
Jonathan Swift
#96. One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.
Josh Billings
#98. They are stupid, they are beasts, they are meat, they are death. I am talking simply but without any affectation.
Vaslav Nijinsky
#99. Silk handkerchief that erupted out of the breast pocket, an affectation he had adopted to distance himself from the Westminster hordes in their banal Christmas-stocking ties and Marks & Spencer suits.
Michael Dobbs
#100. My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.
Zadie Smith
