Top 38 Most Respectable Quotes
#1. DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.
Ambrose Bierce
#2. Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place.
Virginia Woolf
#3. Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.
Imre Lakatos
#4. An honest, sensible, humane man, ... laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity ... is really the most respectable man in society, [and] makes himself and all about him most happy.
John Adams
#5. I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Tom Stoppard
#6. Even the most respectable woman has a complete set of clothes in her wardrobe ready for a possible abduction.
Sacha Guitry
#7. Don't forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings.
Frederick The Great
#8. The Gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.
David Lloyd-Jones
#9. Gambling has held human beings in thrall for millennia. It has been engaged in everywhere, from the dregs of society to the most respectable circles.
Peter L. Bernstein
#11. Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.
Mark Twain
#12. It is asserted by most respectable writers upon our government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen.
John L. DeWitt
#13. Below her, on rough benches, sat not only most of the trash in Maycomb County, but the county's most respectable men.
Harper Lee
#14. I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meanerthan I could have imagined ... The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. In populous cities, which are the seat of commerce and manufactures, the middle ranks of inhabitants, who derive their subsistence from the dexterity or labour of their hands, are commonly the most prolific, the most useful, and, in that sense, the most respectable part of the community.
Edward Gibbon
#16. Sex is the most respectable and holy thing in all creation, the most serious act in life.
George Sand
#17. The body - the cage - is everything of the most respectable - but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.
Agatha Christie
#18. If wrappings of cloth can impart respectability, the most respectable persons are the Egyptian mummies, all wrapped in layers and layers of gauze
Kamala Suraiyya Das
#19. His talent was to express his readers' most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.
Ken Follett
#20. Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike
#21. Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.
Lord Chesterfield
#22. My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.
Ben Aaronovitch
#23. Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.
Paul Gauguin
#24. As a general rule, it may be affirmed that the man who never intrigues for office may be most safely entrusted with office ... Such a man cannot desire promotion unless he received it from the respectable part of the community, for he considers no other promotion to be honorable.
Noah Webster
#25. Respectable men and women content with the good and easy living are missing some of the most important things in life. Unless you give yourself to some great cause you haven't even begun to live.
William P. Merrill
#26. Results for I looked as respectable as the bum they were booking. I fancied I smelled better, but perhaps not. I've noticed that most of us don't have a clue what we smell like to other people. It's almost as though our noses blank us out in self-defense.
Sue Grafton
#27. I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.
Ugo Betti
#28. By far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others,
Larry McMurtry
#29. Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.
Wyndham Lewis
#30. In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
Martha Graham
#31. A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp ... moreover, for the most part these "experts" have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances, regretfully.
Wolfgang Smith
#32. Most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.
Sarah-Patton Boyle
#33. With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It's OK to fuck around if you're a feminist but it's also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren't feminists and won't respect you and won't call you again if you fuck around.
David Foster Wallace
#34. Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.
Gay Talese
#35. I had the most reversed education possible. Every parent wants their son to be a businessman, respectable - me, it was the opposite. When I had an artist career my mum was like, 'Oh finally, I'm proud of you!'
David Guetta
#36. My uncle, Mr. Stephen Maple, had been at the same time the most successful and the least respectable of our family, so that we hardly knew whether to take credit for his wealth or to feel ashamed of his position.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#37. When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection.
Bertrand Russell
