Top 100 Contrived Quotes
#1. I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.
Darin Strauss
#2. After a while, a joke, if you say it too much, just becomes contrived, or fake-sounding.
Dave Chappelle
#3. I don't go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it's contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.
Steven Wright
#4. There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. - SAMUEL JOHNSON
Kingsley Amis
#5. A celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin.
William Godwin
#6. It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.
Louis Thomas McFadden
#7. Cupid is naked and does not like artifices contrived by beauty.
Propertius
#8. She had on a blue bonnet, and with a pair of lovely eyes of the same colour, has contrived to make me feel devilish odd about the heart.
Susanna Rowson
#9. Sitcom storylines are usually incredibly contrived.
Josh Thomas
#10. We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable.
Ana Castillo
#11. Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman's business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such
as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association
the going will be hard indeed.
Phyllis McGinley
#12. It destroys the soul to hear that you're all hype, that you have no talent, and that your whole career has been contrived.
Freddie Mercury
#13. All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.
John Ruskin
#14. Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.
Dave Grohl
#15. The (Academy Award) ceremonies are a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.
George C. Scott
#16. A character to me can't be contrived. I don't like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth.
Jack Kirby
#17. The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.
Learned Hand
#18. Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.
Esther Perel
#19. Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#20. Only equals make friends, every other relationship is contrived and off balance.
Maya Angelou
#21. The greatest enemy of truth is often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
Steve Berry
#22. My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
John Adams
#23. Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.
Manny Farber
#24. He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.
H.G.Wells
#25. People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#26. I feel that if you made your writing too contrived to meet the market, it wouldn't be any good.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
#27. Gentlemen can now only behave as such, or be tolerated as such, in circumstances that are manifestly contrived or unreal.
Simon Raven
#29. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.
Simon Schama
#30. There is a famous saying: "If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear".
Sogyal Rinpoche
#31. The same rule that teaches the propriety of a partition between the various branches of power, teaches us likewise that this partition ought to be so contrived as to render the one independent of the other.
Alexander Hamilton
#32. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.
Peggy Orenstein
#33. You see reality TV and it's not reality TV. It's contrived and everything is plotted and scripted nearly. Documentaries are the same and just as bad.
Ricky Gervais
#34. This book is not about "homeschooling" at all. School is an artificial institution contrived by man. This book is about educating a child in the heart of the family given to that child by his Creator.
Elizabeth Foss
#35. I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.
Tony Campolo
#36. To this crib I always took my doll; human beigns must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow
Charlotte Bronte
#37. If anyone can crack the publicity nut and figure out how to not come across hammy and contrived, I'd love to talk to them.
Gale Harold
#38. When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.
Jesse Eisenberg
#39. O fools, awake! The rites ye sacred hold
Are but a cheat contrived by men of old
Who lusted after wealth and gained their lust
And died in baseness-and their law is dust.
Al-Ma'arri
#40. Man, considered not merely as an organized being, but as a rational agent and a member of society, is perhaps the most wonderfully contrived, and to us the most interesting specimen of Divine wisdom that we have any knowledge of.
Richard Whately
#41. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
T. S. Eliot
#42. We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.
Val Edward Simone
#43. The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament ...
Soren Kierkegaard
#44. We are accused here of polygamy, and actions the most indelicate, obscene, and disgusting, such that none but a corrupt and depraved heart could have contrived. These things are too outrageous to admit to belief ...
John Taylor
#45. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
George Orwell
#46. I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
Ada Lovelace
#47. ALGEBRA is a general Method of Computation by certain Signs and Symbols which have been contrived for this Purpose, and found convenient.
Colin Maclaurin
#48. If coincidences are coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?
Words by Fox Mulder on the X-Files
Kathy Goodhew
#49. The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them.
Joseph Roth
#50. I'm a socially concerned citizen of India. I have strong views on issues of social and political relevance. But it's very difficult to voice it in an intelligent manner without it sounding contrived. Because people think you're saying or doing all this as a PR exercise, not from your heart.
Sonam Kapoor
#51. If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?
Clyde Bruckman
#52. It's a no win situation. It's a mug's game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
Daniel Dennett
#53. The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.
Janet Fitch
#54. As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
E. M. Forster
#55. When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradually in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring sight.
Henry David Thoreau
#56. Nothing is contrived. At night, the clothes should pour like liquid over the body.
Oscar De La Renta
#57. Belief is like that, a circle, and often I find that the seemingly simplistic explanations from childhood for the unexplainable have merit, maybe more so than all the educated and contrived answers of adulthood.
Frances A. Washburn
#58. Great men are the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do and attain.
Thomas Carlyle
#59. I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet - or a kind of poet - buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison
James Dickey
#60. I live three blocks away from the beach, so every day I walk down to the beach to run or go swimming. Hiking is a big one for me - so long as it's something where I'm not thinking about working out, like in a contrived class or the gym.
Dylan Penn
#61. The first Rudiments of Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security.
Bernard De Mandeville
#62. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.
John Adams
#63. Earnshaw was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.
Emily Bronte
#64. Leadership can't be forced or contrived. It has to be your personality.
Aaron Rodgers
#65. Great as the planning were for the dinner, the lot was so contrived that not a soul in the house be supposed to be kept from the break of day ceremony of Blessing in the church.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#66. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.
Garth Greenwell
#67. One of the most egregiously stupid books I've ever come across. I would recommend reading this only because it's the epitome of all that is moronic, superficial, contrived, hollow, false and utterly laughable in publishing today.
Kris Saknussemm
#68. The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.
Del Close
#69. What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story; This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.
Peter Bradshaw
#70. Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people
but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Ben Horowitz
#72. I don't really see how any song can not feel contrived if it isn't honest, and how could I write honest songs if I don't write about stuff going on in my life and how I'm feeling?
Lily Allen
#73. I wonder what her fate will be?' 'What we've all contrived to make it,' he
Edith Wharton
#74. It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.
Michel Gondry
#75. A football match should be decided by an action of play. Not some contrived process whose end result is to mark a fine player such as Bossis, Baresi or Baggio for the rest of his career.
Michel Patini
#76. Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
Sam Shepard
#77. I understand that in your youth you contrived a few outrages of your own."
"In my youth?" sputtered Navarth. "I have contrived outrages all my life!
Jack Vance
#78. Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience
To do no contrived murder: I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service: nine or ten times
I had thought to have yerk'd him here under the ribs.
William Shakespeare
#79. The bad stuff that is part and parcel of contrived social existence takes a back seat when you concentrate on the heart of Life itself.
Valley Brown
#80. I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
Miriam Toews
#81. The animal frame, though destined to fulfill so many other ends, is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine-that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel.
James Prescott Joule
#82. Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.
Adam Smith
#83. Although pretend play is important, it is still the means to an end, not the end itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking a contrived, pretend drama can substitute for real interpersonal comfort in dealing with important emotional issues.
Stanley Greenspan
#84. As soon as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude. There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Samuel Johnson
#85. Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.
Susie Bright
#86. What passes for education, culture or maturity in most minds is merely how individuals want to think of themselves, a contrived egocentric self-concept, not actual and effective principles and values. This is what is known in the cliche as the "veneer" of civilization.
Kenny Smith
#87. The restoration of man's inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age - unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one's realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.
Josef Pieper
#88. Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
Wilhelm Reich
#89. Feelings are murky, contrived and confusing. And the worst thing about them is no matter how hard you try, you can never sort them. They tangle more and more with thinking.
Saru Singhal
#90. Any difficulties posed by lack of rooms, space or even beds should never be permitted to interfere with the demands of hospitality to family or friends. Something can always be contrived.
Jane Austen
#91. He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.
Eudora Welty
#92. Cadiz is a city of magic, like Cracow or Dublin, to set the mind on fire at a turn of a corner ... The eye is continually fed, the imagination stirred, by a train of spectacles as charming as if they had been contrived.
Honor Tracy
#93. A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.
Cordelia Fine
#94. Love? And not even some platonic cosmic love, but the carnal attraction between two mammals? Do you really think that an all-knowing super-computer or aliens who contrived to conquer the entire galaxy would be dumbfounded by a hormonal rush?' By
Yuval Noah Harari
#95. My records do not require a lot of thought of 'What is this?' and 'What is that?' That would be too contrived for me.
Van Morrison
#96. It's not about how much movement you do, how much interaction there is, it just reeks of credibility if it's real. If it's contrived, it seems to work for a while for the people who can't filter out the real and unreal.
Fred Durst
#97. Corporately contrived art product replaces inspired intellectual property with ineffectual poperty.
Vanna Bonta
#98. Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.
B.F. Skinner
#99. There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.
Wendell Berry
#100. Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon
Kristin Cashore
