Top 74 No Pretensions Quotes
#1. Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
#2. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.
Yuval Noah Harari
#3. They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em.
Alex Winter
#4. No pretensions of goodness, of trying to do the right thing. We'd both wanted to embrace this fucked-up thing between us.
Leah Raeder
#5. Nothing is more important than honesty in prayer. There are no pretensions in prayer, so the best place to begin is wherever you are.
Robert H. Schuller
#6. I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
Jane Austen
#7. I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
George Saunders
#8. I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
David S.Goyer
#9. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
Ada Lovelace
#10. I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.
Hazel Henderson
#11. With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split.
Howard Thompson
#12. I have strengths, and I have weaknesses. I don't pretend to be able to write a great thesis or doctorate - I have no pretensions in that direction.
Bob Ainsworth
#13. When we are aware of our inner-growth potential yet have no pretensions about ourselves, when we are vulnerable, then we can change.
Amit Goswami
#14. What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.
Richard A. Falk
#15. The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Frederic Raphael
#16. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#17. If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.
Harold Bloom
#18. Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.
John Adams
#19. Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility.
Pat Conroy
#20. And it was always
without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of
finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#21. A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#22. Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
Joan Fontcuberta
#23. I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports.
John Edgar Wideman
#24. Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
Frederick Buechner
#25. A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#26. The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#27. But as the clerical pretensions are more exacting than all others, being put forward with an assertion that no answer is possible without breach of duty and sin, so are they more galling.
Anthony Trollope
#28. A canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.
Irving Stone
#29. It was always a considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell..
Terry Pratchett
#30. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.
Julian Fellowes
#31. And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.
Chitralekha Paul
#32. Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
Freda Adler
#33. I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.
Hugo Chavez
#34. My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.
Iris Murdoch
#35. As a gentleman- assuming you still have some pretensions in that direction- of honor- again, perhaps presumptuous, but still supposing your passing acquaintance with the concept- it is your duty- I won't even trouble to speculate here, but remain naively hopeful- to protect those under your care.
Connie Brockway
#36. Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits
Frederick Crews
#37. Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.
Alain De Botton
#38. Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
Norm MacDonald
#39. Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
Adam Smith
#40. Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#41. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!
Anthony Doerr
#42. All the pretensions you make of attachment to your Master, and all the devout actions which you may perform, are no recompense for disobedience.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#43. When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees.
Tom Stoppard
#44. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive-and getting away with it-is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.
Greg Bear
#45. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.
William James
#46. A man who cannot control his temper is not very likely to control his passions, and no matter what his pretensions in religion, he moves in daily life very close to the animal plane.
David O. McKay
#47. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#48. Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.
J.M. Roberts
#49. Most cats don't like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running.
Seanan McGuire
#50. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
Charlotte Bronte
#51. Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other.
The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists.
Douglas Wilson
#52. Good God, is the man a heathen?'
'Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.
Melanie Jackson
#53. True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can any feigned thing be lasting.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#54. What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. - Darcy
Jane Austen
#55. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?
Joy Williams
#56. I wasn't brave, or strong, or badass. And all those quirky lines I fed you? A foolish attempt at sounding strong.
The truth is: I was just a lost girl. Someone who was clueless on how to get out of the hole she'd dug for herself.
I didn't want to be the way I was. I wanted to be normal.
L. Duarte
#57. What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the truth in our own hearts.
Elias Hicks
#58. If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.
Vincent D'Onofrio
#59. There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.
Charles Caleb Colton
#61. Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.
Mary Douglas
#62. And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.
Aldous Huxley
#64. Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#65. What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?
Denis Norden
#66. As a Christian, I'm passionately opposed to American pretensions that we have special standing with God; to political office-seekers who play on our religious differences; and to the religious arrogance that says, 'Our truth is the only truth.'
Parker Palmer
#67. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.
Jane Austen
#68. Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.
Darrell Drake
#69. People. Falling for each others' pretensions, fakeness and whatever various faces they can put on to wear. And then they call it love. What a fantasy. What a blasphemy. Humanity bores me.
C. JoyBell C.
#70. As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn.
Jo Weldon
#71. Life is a conspiracy to shower you with a nonstop feast of interesting experiences, all of which are designed to help you grow your intelligence, shed your pretensions, and master the art of ingenious love.
Rob Brezsny
#72. To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem ... ridiculous.
William Hazlitt
#73. Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot
despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists
be both.
Thomas Szasz
#74. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant. And that is the force of human freedom.
George W. Bush
