Top 90 Detestable Quotes
#1. The most detestable race of enemies are flatterers.
Tacitus
#2. I am so satiated with the great number of detestable books with which we are inundated that I am reduced to punting at faro.
Voltaire
#3. If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all ... How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#4. The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.
Oscar Wilde
#5. But it was dreadful to think of Henry, slowly or swiftly corrupted by his detestable father and mother, growing up with the fat slime of their abominations upon him.
Arthur Machen
#6. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich.
Ambrose Bierce
#7. The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#8. Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Virginia Woolf
#9. Although deceit is detestable in all other things, yet in the conduct of war it is laudable and honorable; and a commander who vanquishes an enemy by stratagem is equally praised with one who gains victory by force.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#10. Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park.
D.H. Lawrence
#11. Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.
Emile M. Cioran
#12. Superficial views of God and His holiness will produce superficial views of sin and atonement. God hates sin. It is His uncompromising foe. Sin is vile and detestable in the sight of God ... The sinner and God are at opposite poles of the moral universe.
Billy Graham
#13. Why don't men ... leave off those detestable stiff collars, stocks, and things, that make them all look like choked chickens, and which hide so many handsomely-turned throats, that a body never sees, unless a body is married, or unless a body happens to see a body's brothers while they are shaving.
Fanny Fern
#14. The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
Voltaire
#15. What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.
David Gascoyne
#16. You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi - were they not, mama? Blanche Ingram
Charlotte Bronte
#18. As I grow older, I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me.
H. Rider Haggard
#19. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable
Oscar Wilde
#20. It is the perfect contradiction: It is glamorous and degenerate, cultured and crude, beautiful and detestable, ethical and decadent, exciting and scary all at the same time.
Leslie Haskin
#21. What is passable in youth is detestable in later age
Jane Austen
#22. Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#23. Anarchy is as detestable in grammar as it is in society.
Maurice Druon
#24. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#25. What is detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.
Charles Dickens
#26. When something is detestable, and yet inevitable, what one must do is not merely to endure it-a hard task whatever one may do-but find an excuse for loving it. Everything is a matter of points of view, and misfortune is often only the sign of a false interpretation of life.
Henry De Montherlant
#27. I find mirrors detestable; I dislike seeing myself. Of course, there's a mirror in the bathroom, but it's a magnifying one for shaving. Photographs are fine, but I don't like mirrors because they take you by surprise.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
#28. Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#29. Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Eliot
#30. The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.
Oscar Wilde
#31. One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.
Honore De Balzac
#32. If people want to get into leadership through corrupt practices, through corrupt means, I think that's detestable; we have to take action.
Jakaya Kikwete
#33. How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?
Gabrielle Hamilton
#34. We find in them an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.
Voltaire
#35. How detestable, I ask you, is this madness: that man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God?
John Calvin
#36. When a man sees something desirable, he must reflect on the fact that with time it could come to involve what is detestable. When he sees something that is beneficial, he should reflect that sooner or later it, too, could come to involve harm.
Xun Zi
#37. To me you are detestable, disgusting - a stranger, yes, a perfect stranger!' She uttered that word stranger, so terrible to herself, with anguish and hatred.
Leo Tolstoy
#38. Dearest, I don't like you a bit," Anthony interrupted again. "I think you're a very detestable, selfish pig and prig. But I'm often wildly in love with you, and so I see you're not. But I'm sure your only chance of salvation is to marry me.
Charles Williams
#39. Gina. I wish to goodness that detestable thing had never set his foot inside our doors!
Henrik Ibsen
#40. A detestable, viscous place populated by slugs
Paul Majkut
#41. Which of them, then, was more detestable? The one who was loathsome by nature, or the one who wanted to be loathsome but hadn't enough ambition to excel at it>
Orson Scott Card
#42. Nothing is a greater stranger to my breast, or a sin that my soul more abhors, than that black and detestable one, ingratitude.
George Washington
#43. Nothing is more detestable than a professed declaimer who retails his discourses as a quack does his medicines.
Jean Baptiste Massillon
#44. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination
you know.
Joseph Conrad
#45. Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
A.E. Housman
#46. Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.
Samuel Johnson
#47. The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.
William E. Gladstone
#48. Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.
Henry Ward Beecher
#49. There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
John Cheever
#50. Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
Charles Bukowski
#51. Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.
C.S. Lewis
#52. He was a particularly detestable boy. He reminded me of myself when I was younger.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#53. Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the end.
Karel Capek
#54. Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
#55. 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
#56. Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.
William Ralph Inge
#57. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
Henry James
#58. Nothing can atone for the lack of modesty; without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable.
Richard Steele
#59. It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all.
Stephen Charnock
#60. It is a detestable vice not entirely limited to children. Always speak the truth, all the truth in all things at all times! No man ever rose to greatness on the wings of obsequious deceit.
Rick Yancey
#61. The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
Samuel Butler
#62. Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial
Arthur Schopenhauer
#63. If you destroyed the underpinnings of this great American sport, you are a hated, ugly, detestable person.
Curt Flood
#64. Custard: A detestable substance produced by a malevolent conspiracy of the hen, the cow, and the cook.
Ambrose Bierce
#65. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
Charles Darwin
#66. I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
Oscar Wilde
#67. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
Thomas Paine
#68. The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.
Frederic Bastiat
#69. Constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness
Bertrand Meyer
#70. What we did see - for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned - was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be";
H.P. Lovecraft
#71. The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God. They believe it took a miracle to undo them.
Voltaire
#72. His [Donald Trump] words were foul and detestable and we all should acknowledge that.
Kit Malthouse
#73. Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.
Alice Meynell
#74. We feel something like respect for consistency even in error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice; but the vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable.
Thomas Paine
#75. The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.
Charles Darwin
#76. How can a man be so brave and so stupid, so gentle and so cruel, so warming and so detestable
all at the same time?
James Clavell
#77. If my sinfulness appears to me in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#79. Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one ... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.
Mark Twain
#80. I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active.
Tony Kushner
#81. Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
#82. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
Charles Dickens
#83. People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others ...
Randall Jarrell
#84. It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness.
Honore De Balzac
#86. When you locate good in yourself, approve of it with determination. When you locate evil in yourself, despise it as something detestable.
Xun Zi
#87. You see, the problem with me is I'm so good even my friends think I'm doing something wrong. Flair and flamboyance is not illegal. It may be detestable, it may be offensive, but it's not illegal.
Don King
#88. Forcing someone into drug addiction is like stabbing a corpse everyday, the most detestable crime.
Sumit Agarwal
#89. I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.
Romain Rolland
#90. He who puts on a religious demeanor abroad to gain himself a great name among men, and at the same time lives like an atheist at home, shall at the last be unmasked by God, and presented before all the world for a most detestable hypocrite.
Thomas Brooks
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