Baser Quotes

#1. For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.

Honore De Balzac

#2. There's something tightly woven throughout the fabric of our humanity that runs entirely opposite to the baser instinct of looking out for our own good.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#3. We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money ...

Thomas Bernhard

#4. It was worse
knowing he knew the difference between kindness and cruelty and chose the baser of the two.

C.J. Roberts

#5. If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#6. Your basic Southern Baptist would willingly delay his personal ascent into heaven for the baser pleasure of hanging around to see you burn in hell.

Rick Gavin

#7. A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

Victor Hugo

#8. When you make people angry, they act in accordance with their baser instincts, often violently and irrationally. When you inspire people, they act in accordance with their higher instincts, sensibly and rationally. Also, anger is transient, whereas inspiration sometimes has a life-long effect.

Peace Pilgrim

#9. The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.

Charles Caleb Colton

#10. By every mortal standard, the worst faeries in the world were those in the Dark Court. They fed on the baser emotions; they engaged in activities that the other-also amoral-faery courts repudiated. They were also the only ones she truly trusted or understood.

Melissa Marr

#11. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality.

William Shakespeare

#12. We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.

Jacqueline Carey

#13. We make very little progress when we strive to conquer baser instincts in a good mood. However, vast strides are possible when we are miserable and work with ourselves to replace our misery with joy and understanding.

Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

#14. We need religion, government, and laws to force a level of control over our baser natures. I intend to strip away the disease that is intelligence, to rip away the deception that allows humanity to believe itself mightier and more deserving of this planet.

James Rollins

#15. I regard Duryodhana and his party as the baser impulses in man, and Arjuna and his party as the higher impulses.

Mahatma Gandhi

#16. Politics has high and low moments. Sometimes it brings out the better angels of our nature; sometimes baser instincts.

Jim Leach

#17. But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.

Joe R. Lansdale

#18. People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government ... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

Charles W. Colson

#19. Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.

Machado De Assis

#20. Trust your fears. When a quiet voice whispers, "you are being used", listen. Ignore your baser desires.

Michael R. Fletcher

#21. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

C.S. Lewis

#22. We have taught our people to use prayer too much as a means of comfort - not in the original and heroic sense of uplifting, inspiring, strengthening, but in the more modern and baser sense of soothing sorrow, dulling pain, and drying tears - the comfort of the cushion, not the comfort of the Cross.

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

#23. Constancy ... that small change of love, which people exact so rigidly, receive in such counterfeit coin, and repay in baser metal.

Lord Byron

#24. What people do in the name of religion is not necessarily religious. It often has baser reasons behind it.

Matthew Reilly

#25. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

Margaret Wertheim

#26. You have become what you are through countless lives and lessons. There is something you can offer others; if only working on your self-discipline, fighting your own baser urges.
Do that then. Do what is offered. Learn and grow as you can.
That in itself is service.

Edward Fahey

#27. Th' ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire, Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair.

John Milton

#28. Let us subdue the ravages of the baser-self, and aspire to the higher calling of exalting joy through compassion, for that is the one true purpose of humanity.

Bryant McGill

#29. Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton

#30. Pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold.

Catharine Beecher

#31. We could overcome the baser aspects of our nature ... and give this planet the kind of caretakers it deserves.

Jon Stewart

#32. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#33. If you'll not let me be spiritual about it, you'll have to put up wi' my baser nature. I'm going to be a beast." He bit my neck. "Do ye want me to be a horse, a bear, or a dog?

Diana Gabaldon

#34. Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.

Robert Kirkman

#35. Labor is the true alchemist that beats out in patient transmutation the baser metals into gold.

William Morley Punshon

#36. But what was possible or practical had been replaced by a far baser impulse. Hope.

Ted Dekker

#37. The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You

Lev Grossman

#38. How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire.

Simon Greenleaf

#39. Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.

Peter Hoeg

#40. Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened - Man's forgiveness give and take!

Omar Khayyam

#41. I have but shadowed forth my intense longing to lose myself in the Eternal and become merely a lump of clay in the Potter's divine hands so that my service may become more certain because uninterrupted by the baser self in me.

Mahatma Gandhi

#42. When scrutiny is lacking, tyranny, corruption and man's baser qualities have a better chance of entering into the public business of any government.

Jacob K. Javits

#43. For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.

Marcello Malpighi

#44. One should refrain from contempt for the baser specimens of humanity, for whom liberation amounts to shaving the heads of women who have slept with Germans.

Coco Chanel

#45. In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions.

J.M. Coetzee

#46. The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary.

Francis W. Newman