Top 49 Quotes About Imbecility
#1. While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
Harriet Martineau
#2. The pristine virtue is nothing but absolute absurdity, utter obscurity and sheer imbecility.
Chandrashekar
#3. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system.
Blaise Cendrars
#4. Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.
Augustus William Hare
#5. I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.
Jane Austen
#6. What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude.
Gustave Flaubert
#7. Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
#8. Nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.
Thomas Jefferson
#9. If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y
H.L. Mencken
#10. When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was
gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.
C.S. Lewis
#11. The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility.
-Admiral Jacky Fisher of the British Navy
Erik Larson
#12. If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.
Denis Diderot
#13. A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.
I. F. Stone
#14. The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
Hilaire Belloc
#15. I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life ... I can't dispute it.
Bill Bryson
#16. That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.
H.L. Mencken
#17. Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love" ... is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#18. An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.
Hilaire Belloc
#19. We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#20. I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.
Anita Brookner
#21. History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. IMBECILITY, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.
Ambrose Bierce
#24. If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure by way of a variety -
Honore De Balzac
#26. I do not take advice or listen to the words of hypocrites or beings that are not self-realized. It's nothing personal. I am simply no fan of beings that try to sound wise, while trying to mask their imbecility.
Lionel Suggs
#27. The youth who follows his appetites too soon seizes the cup, before it has received its best ingredients, and by anticipating his pleasures, robs the remaining parts of life of their share, so that his eagerness only produces manhood of imbecility and an age of pain.
Oliver Goldsmith
#28. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
Samuel Johnson
#29. Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.
Vincent Van Gogh
#30. I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves
Edgar Allan Poe
#31. Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
William Godwin
#32. Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
William, Saroyan
#33. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
Vincent Van Gogh
#35. This, let me remind you again, is a love story; you can see it by the imbecility, not a repulsive imbecility, the exalted imbecility of these proceedings, this station in torchlight, as if they had come there on purpose to have it out for the edification of concealed murderers.
Joseph Conrad
#36. Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
Samuel Johnson
#37. A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
Havelock Ellis
#38. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tristan Tzara
#39. Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."
H.L. Mencken
#40. The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is - Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.
Margaret Fuller
#42. He had found the secret of keeping for ever on the run the fundamental imbecility of mankind; he had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made himself master of every moment of our existence.
Joseph Conrad
#43. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
Thomas Hardy
#45. All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.
George Jean Nathan
#46. Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.
Frederic Bastiat
#47. It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
Wallace Stegner
#48. Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility.
Norman Douglas
