Top 100 Contemptible Quotes
#1. An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all.
Lord Chesterfield
#2. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.
George Mason
#4. Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.
Arthur Murphy
#5. None of God's Creatures absolutely consider'd are in their own Nature Contemptible; the meanest Fly, the poorest Insect has its Use and Vertue.
Mary Astell
#6. There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us
these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
#8. A person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.24
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#9. Men are so self-complacent in their own affairs, and so willing to deceive themselves, that they are rescued with difficulty from this pest. If they wish to defend themselves they run the risk of becoming contemptible.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#10. To be outspoken when truth is under attack, when charity is being bruise, or when important issues of life are at stake is a good and courageous thing. To be outspoken when nothing is at stake except the feelings of someone else is a small and contemptible thing.
Lawrence G. Lovasik
#11. Satan has frightened men from reading the sacred writings, and has rendered Holy Scriptures contemptible, so as to ensure his poisonous philosophy to prevail in the church.
Martin Luther
#12. There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
Jonathan Swift
#13. I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.
Bertrand Russell
#14. It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible.
Isaac Asimov
#15. He who betrays other people's trust is the most contemptible man
Khem Veasna
#16. [F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation ...
Nikolai Gogol
#17. How contemptible! Of all things in the world inconstancy is my aversion. Let
Jane Austen
#18. As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#19. Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.
Josiah Bartlett
#20. Nothing is so contemptible as that affectation of wisdom, which some display, by universal incredulity.
Oliver Goldsmith
#21. Among the wealthy, compassionate men claim the richest wealth, For material wealth is possessed by even contemptible men. Find and follow the good path and be ruled by compassion. For if the various ways are examined, compassion will prove the means to liberation.
Thiruvalluvar
#23. A sign of this is what happens (10) in our actions, for we delight in contemplating the most accurately made images of the very things that are painful for us to see, such as the forms of the most contemptible insects and of dead bodies.
Aristotle.
#24. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.
Albert Einstein
#25. The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.
Francis Bacon
#26. There is no more contemptible sound than a gunshot.
Jonathan Heatt
#27. Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men. It refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego: it establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and squabbles and rascalities on earth.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#28. I've always been that contemptible thing, a luxury communist.
Bruce Robinson
#29. Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.
Christopher Marlowe
#30. I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
C.S. Lewis
#31. A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#32. In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.
Mary Hunter Austin
#33. I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.
Wyndham Lewis
#34. More contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good.
Ayn Rand
#35. Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.
Joseph Addison
#36. A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
William Hazlitt
#37. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke
#38. War, like children's fights, are meaningless, pitiless, and contemptible.
Rumi
#39. There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#40. It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Francis Bacon
#41. It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
Arthur Machen
#42. There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
John Locke
#43. For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#44. Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?
Charlotte Bronte
#46. She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.
Robert Silverberg
#47. We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man..
Edgar Allan Poe
#48. I don't want to paint myself as some kind of saint - that would be laughable - but I do think I've been able over the years to write humanely about subjects who are controversial and even contemptible. I've profiled pedophiles, stalkers, serial rapists, prison gang members and corrupt politicians.
Robert Draper
#49. Why is it considered so glorious to kill an enemy, when it is not considered contemptible to create one?
Anne E.G. Nydam
#50. MacMurrough shifted his gaze from the thick spittle-wet mouth and stared instead through the garden windows. What a dreary drunk he was. He recalled the Spartan custom of inebriating slaves that young men should see how contemptible was drunkenness. Nowadays we leave it to our leshishlashors.
Jamie O'Neill
#51. If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.
John Galt
#52. There is no creature so contemptible but by resolution may gain his point.
Roger L'Estrange
#53. If young men and young women are brought up to consider frugality contemptible, and industry degrading, it is vain to expect they will at once become prudent and useful, when the cares of life press heavily upon them.
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#54. Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#55. There can be there ought to be no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.
Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
#56. Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in the cause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument is to be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cook mushrooms.
Mary Virginia Terhune
#57. The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a But.
Henry Ward Beecher
#58. How can a Man respect his Wife when he has a contemptible Opinion of her and her Sex?
Mary Astell
#59. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Susan Sontag
#60. A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
Woodrow Wilson
#61. Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
W. H. Auden
#62. People like Mr Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly and completely contemptible.
George Galloway
#63. There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.
Martial
#64. [A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it.
[Man and the Gospel (1865)]
Thomas Guthrie
#65. Thou contentedly let the years slip by and make no effort to repay, then thou hast but the contemptible soul of a slave. No man is otherwise who cannot respect himself and no man can respect himself who does not repay honest debts.
George S. Clason
#66. Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.
William Blake
#67. What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?
W.C. Fields
#68. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.
Ayn Rand
#69. There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible.
Samuel Johnson
#70. Of all the vulgar arts of government, that of solving every difficulty that might arise by thrusting the hand into the public purse is the most illusory and contemptible.
Robert Peel
#71. To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the man who rejects men for being too good.
Ayn Rand
#72. Did you ever look into the personalities of male cooks, Army, logging camp, etc.? They're all supposed to be crazy, incomprehensible, contemptible. And angry. The act of feeding adult males seems to have strange personality effects.
James Tiptree Jr.
#73. What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
W. Clement Stone
#74. A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!
Michel De Montaigne
#75. With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief.
Washington Irving
#77. When you hear people in church, debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.
Bertrand Russell
#78. You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.
Thomas Paine
#81. It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.
Thomas Jefferson
#82. There are some vile and contemptible men who, allowing themselves to be conquered by misfortune, seek a refuge in death.
Agathon
#83. If a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man that despises them is no contemptible one.
William Cowper
#84. Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.
William Jennings Bryan
#85. The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature-and struggle never to let him discover otherwise.
Ayn Rand
#86. There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.
Wilkie Collins
#87. What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#88. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.
Northrop Frye
#89. People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Lawrence Durrell
#90. Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.
Joseph Addison
#91. Get to live;
Then live, and use it; else, it is not true
That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone
Makes money not a contemptible stone.
George Herbert
#92. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#93. Well, all right. Something in what you say, I suppose. Consider you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard, but have booked Spink-Bottle. Stay where you are, then, and I hope you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers
P.G. Wodehouse
#94. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature.
David Hume
#95. ...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
Joseph Conrad
#96. Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life
Walt Whitman
#98. Whatsoever is done out of pure love, be it ever so little or contemptible in the sight of men, is wholly fruitful; for God measures more with how much love one worketh, than the amount he doeth.
Ellen G. White
#99. Those guys are doing the Koch Brothers bidding and are against all the evidence of the rational mind, saying global warming does not exit. They are contemptible human beings. I wish there were a law you could punish them with. I don't think there is a law that you can punish those politicians under.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#100. The whole purport of literature ... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
Thornton Wilder
