Top 56 Quotes About Baseness
#1. That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.
William Gibson
#2. What will a man not do when frantic with love? To what baseness will he not demean himself? What pangs will he not make others suffer, so that he may ease his selfish heart?
William Makepeace Thackeray
#3. There are two infinities in this world: God up above, and down below, human baseness.
Jules De Goncourt
#4. There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
Simone Weil
#5. When the scale of sensuality bears down that of reason, the baseness of our nature conducts us to most preposterous conclusions.
Roger Chamberlain
#6. There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [ ... ] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.
H.G.Wells
#7. Here mankind discarded civilization as if it were an article of clothing and left behind every decent feeling: love; loyalty; simply everything. Here it stood naked, and exhibited it's wretched soul. Here, faced with the realm of death, all the baseness and cruelty of mankind was on display.
Schoschana Rabinovici
#8. How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.
Nancy Horan
#9. It must not be thought that gold can be injured by rust, or virtue by baseness.
David R. Fideler
#10. If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.
Seneca The Younger
#11. I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
Georg Brandes
#12. Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.
Madame De Stael
#13. There be some sports are painful, and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This
William Shakespeare
#15. I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
William Shakespeare
#16. It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of baseness the party is accused of.
Stanislaw Leszczynski
#17. The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.
Thomas Carlyle
#18. THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!
Henry James
#19. Do you know what is more hard to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is the baseness, the hideous ingratitude, of man.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#20. In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.
Francis Bacon
#21. It (the heart) is supposed in popular language, to be the seat sometimes, of courage, sometimes of affection, sometimes of honesty, or baseness.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#22. It is much safer to be feared than loved because ... love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#24. [H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary.
John Locke
#25. I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#26. Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?
Epictetus
#27. There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
Edmond De Goncourt
#28. Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.
Walter Savage Landor
#29. The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#30. No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.
Josiah Royce
#31. Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant H. McGill
#32. It becomes possible to admit that plainness may coexist with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness; and yet to hold that mental and physical perfection are fundamentally connected, and will, when the present causes of incongruity have worked themselves out, be ever found united.
Herbert Spencer
#33. The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.
Milan Kundera
#34. When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.
Henry Miller
#35. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
#36. Life is not an easy matter ... . You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Leon Trotsky
#37. I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me's no joke.
John Barth
#38. The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.
Thomas Carlyle
#39. There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.
William Gilmore Simms
#40. Baseness that does not possess its own starting point [or principle] is always less harmful than that which does possess it, and intellect is such a starting point. It
Aristotle.
#42. To live an honest life you have to strive hard, get involved, fight, make mistakes, begin something and give it up, begin again, struggle endlessly, and suffer loss. As for tranquility - it's spiritual baseness.
Leo Tolstoy
#43. The moment one conceives the meaning of human greatness is the moment when one understands the baseness, the triviality and the meanness of the material from which we have to mould it.
Bill Hopkins
#45. National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#46. I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. 11.
Teresa Of Avila
#47. To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
#48. Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.
Francis Bacon
#49. It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.
George Gissing
#50. And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the greatest baseness, and all that in perfect sincerity.
The Adolescent (or, The Raw Youth)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#51. 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
#52. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Milan Kundera
#53. No, no, there must be a limit to the baseness even of publishers.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#54. There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.
Theodore Roosevelt
#55. While he gazed
The beauty of her flesh abashed the boy,
As though it were the beauty of her soul:
For as the base man, judging of the good,
Puts his own baseness in him by default
Of will and nature, so did Pelleas lend
All the young beauty of his own soul to hers
Alfred Tennyson
#56. Nor is the darkness of colour a proof of the earth's baseness; for the brightness of the sun, which is visible to us, would not be perceived by anyone who might be in the sun.
Nicholas Of Cusa
