Top 54 Quotes About Ostentation
#1. To me all palaces are preposterous, a tasteless, dreary expression of ostentation.
Charlie Chaplin
#2. Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
Barbara Kingsolver
#3. This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks - to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls.
Michael Swanwick
#4. It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures, as to make up the state of our treats.
William Penn
#5. The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
William Hazlitt
#6. Pendantry is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be discovered either in the choice of a subject or in the manner d treating it.
Samuel Johnson
#7. The ostentation of our love, which, left unshown, is often left unloved.
William Shakespeare
#8. It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world; or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.
Joseph Addison
#9. Whatever is done without ostentation, and without the people being witnesses of it, is, in my opinion, most praiseworthy: not that the public eye should be entirely avoided, for good actions desire to be placed in the light; but notwithstanding this, the greatest theater for virtue is conscience.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#10. Fashion is the veriest goddess of semblance and of shade; to be happy is of far less consequence to her worshippers than to appear so; even pleasure itself they sacrifice to parade, and enjoyment to ostentation.
Charles Caleb Colton
#11. For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.
Bertrand Russell
#12. A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty. No, it is not possible that minds degraded by a multitude of futile concerns would ever raise themselves to anything great. Even when they had the strength for that, the courage would be missing.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#13. As you see in a pair of bellows, there is a forced breath without life, so in those that are puffed up with the wind of ostentation, there may be charitable words without works.
Joseph Hall
#14. In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
Hanya Yanagihara
#15. On his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and
Joseph Conrad
#16. Unless some other factor is operative, in large, weak and underpopulated states, the luxury of ostentation prevails over that of comfort; but in countries which are more populous than extensive, the luxury of comfort always diminishes ostentation.
Cesare Beccaria
#17. The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus
Max Weber
#18. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else.
Beatrice Warde
#19. Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
William Hazlitt
#20. [Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#21. That an author's work is the mirror of his mind is a position that has led to very false conclusions. If Satan himself were to write a book it would be in praise of virtue, because the good would purchase it for use, and the bad for ostentation.
Charles Caleb Colton
#22. But with art came idolatry; with construction came ostentation and oppression; with commerce came luxury.
James Oscar Boyd
#23. Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.
Joyce Cary
#24. The luxury of ostentation affords a much less substantial and solid gratification, than the luxury of comfort, if I may be allowed the expression.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#25. Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical
these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
William Shakespeare
#26. An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one's humility a sin.
Robert Harris
#27. When blessed with wealth, let them withdraw from the competition of vanity and be modest, retiring from ostentation, and not be the slaves of fashion.
William Wilberforce
#28. People of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt.
Michel De Montaigne
#29. Had there not been five bad qualities, all the people would have been righteous. Contentment with ignorance; love for worldly life; miserliness inspite of much wealth; ostentation in (good) deeds; and pride in their own intelligence.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#30. That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
#31. Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument,
Isabel Allende
#32. Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but
eat as you ought. For remember that in this manner Socrates also universally avoided all ostentation.
Epictetus
#33. His virtual home showed none of the ostentation of others in the Brotherhood, no Gothic-fortress-perched-on-impossible-cliffs or Caligulean excesses of decor (usually accompanied by an equally Caligulean want of decorum.)
Tad Williams
#34. Pedantry, in the common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books and a total ignorance of men.
Henry MacKenzie
#35. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny
Mark Twain
#36. Neither the Choice of his Friends, nor that of his Dishes, was the Result of Pride or Ostentation. He took Delight in appearing to be, what he actually was, and not in seeming to be what he was not; and by that Means, got a greater real Character than he actually aim'd at.
Voltaire
#37. Affectation of candour is common enough - one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design - to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad - belongs to you alone.
Jane Austen
#38. Luxury and Ostentation usually make me feel antsy, like I'm going to get a case of Gout
Stephan Jenkins
#39. Simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.
Alexander Pope
#40. I have seldom seen much ostentation and much learning met together.
Joseph Hall
#41. Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn
#42. Keep thyself therefore, truly simple, good, sincere, grave, free from all ostentation, a lover of that which is just, religious, kind, tender-hearted, strong and vigorous to undergo anything that becomes thee.
Marcus Aurelius
#43. Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches.
John Locke
#44. She said that she did not wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that that was because of a New England dislike for necrological ostentation.
Ford Madox Ford
#45. Nobility of spirit has more to do with simplicity than ostentation, wisdom rather than wealth, commitment rather than ambition.
Riccardo Muti
#46. If we want to eliminate bad qualities like hatred, envy, pride and ostentation, we have to employ Sathya, Dharma, Santhi and Prema and Ahimsa as the cleaning instruments.
Sathya Sai Baba
#47. Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.
Francis Bacon
#48. In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.
Michel De Montaigne
#49. I don't do marriage. I think it's incredibly naff. And I don't like vulgar displays of ostentation.
Jenny Eclair
#50. The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
William Hutton
#52. It is the duty of all who make philosophy the entertainment of their lives, to turn their thoughts to practical schemes for the good of society, and not pass away their time in fruitless searches, which tend rather to the ostentation of knowledge than the service of life.
Joseph Addison
#53. Barbarian that I am, I had eaten all of it. It had tasted quite nice too. Still, I took note of this fact and resigned myself to throw away half of a perfectly good cheese if it was set in front of me. Such is the price of civilization.
Patrick Rothfuss
#54. He appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes.
John Le Carre
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
