Top 97 Quotes About Pretension
#1. I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension.
Herb Kelleher
#2. I don't think couture will die. But it should have no pretension that it will conquer the world. It's not something that will disappear because all you need is a thread and a needle to start making something couture.
Olivier Theyskens
#3. I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.
David Bowie
#5. One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South. What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.
Paul Theroux
#6. The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.
Billy Collins
#7. General Otis is proclaimed American Military Governor of the Philippines and I protest a thousand times and with all the force in my soul against such pretension.
Emilio Aguinaldo
#8. Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course.
Sreesha Divakaran
#9. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down
toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.
Carl Sagan
#10. Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light.
Ken Macrorie
#11. This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term. (Hear, hear.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee
#12. Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.
Henry David Thoreau
#13. I have no pretension whatever of that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
Jane Austen
#14. Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.
E. T. Bell
#15. Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#16. Elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care and simplicity. Outside this, believe me, there is no elegance. Only pretension.
Christian Dior
#18. Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself.
Hosea Ballou
#19. When you're somebody who has the pretension to make art, it's completely different from when someone else says I want to make a book of your art. You don't decide the title, you don't decide the size, the order of the photographs ... so it's completely out of control!
Luis Gonzalez
#20. Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma.
Patrick White
#21. I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant.
Daniel Boulud
#22. It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.
Arthur Smith
#23. Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.
Victor Hugo
#24. The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
D. A. Carson
#25. Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned - to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension.
Marcus Aurelius
#26. He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and his pretension itself is a very great prejudice.
Anatole France
#27. When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretension
Henry Rollins
#28. It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.
Robert Charles Wilson
#29. It is one thing to read scandalous verse, quite another to disguise it behind lofty pretension.
Maggie Fenton
#30. My new world is etched in diamonds and sealed in gold, drowning in pretension.
Dawn Ius
#31. What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.
David Duchovny
#32. I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#33. I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.
Tom Bodett
#34. I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
Alfred Nobel
#35. Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.
Amelie Nothomb
#36. Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language.
George Carlin
#37. Artists love without reservation. They give their hearts completely and leave nothing on the table. They are naked and unashamed. They leave no room for pretension. And because they have given all of themselves, they live without regret.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#38. Think meanly of me, Lina," said he. "Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea; I make no pretension to be better than my fellows.
Charlotte Bronte
#39. In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.
Adam Ferguson
#41. News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#42. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
#44. The heathen mythology not only was not true, but was not even supported as true; it not only deserved no faith, but it demanded none. The very pretension to truth, the very demand of faith, were characteristic distinctions of Christianity.
Richard Whately
#45. I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.
Stephen Mangan
#46. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
Rokia Traore
#47. The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.
Jim Crace
#49. The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,
by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. I wondered why people consider escapism so bad, even the escapism on display right then. At first it might appear unseemly, but in the end its lack of pretension gives it its own sort of beauty.
Saadat Hasan Manto
#51. Be thorough in all you do; and remember that although ignorance often may be innocent, pretension is always despicable.
William E. Gladstone
#52. To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#53. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
Margot Fonteyn
#54. Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#55. For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?
John Campbell Shairp
#56. In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.
Horatio Greenough
#57. Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.
Virat Kohli
#58. In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#59. Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.
Tom Bodett
#60. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.
William James
#61. Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
William Hazlitt
#62. By now, cooking has become so thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly, seemed like a good way to take hold of it again.
Michael Pollan
#63. We are in a position of financial and social power, and we could be agents of change in our society. Without pretension, I believe we could be a nice little gardener who takes care of the garden, and hopefully our neighbor will do the same. Then, maybe we'll achieve a better world.
Guy Laliberte
#64. Professionalism is like love: it is made up of the constant flow of little bits of proof that testify to devotion and care. Everything else is pretension or incompetence.
Tomislav Sola
#65. No Swaraj government with any pretension to being a popular government can possibly be organised and maintained on a war-footing.
Mahatma Gandhi
#66. I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously. I'm fighting the war against pretension.
Kesha
#67. Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.
John O'Donohue
#68. Mercy is a vice, a pretension to powers we do not have. Those who give mercy commit an unpardonable offense to the victim. And that is not our duty here on earth.
Mario Puzo
#69. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness
your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture ... He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher.
Mark Twain
#70. I would define boastfulness to be the pretension to good which the boaster does not possess.
Theophrastus
#71. We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.
J.K. Rowling
#72. A Senate vote on gay marriage is a destructive pretension against the plan of God
Pope Francis
#73. I love everything about Philadelphia, and its food is like the city itself: real-deal, hearty, and without pretension. We've always had an underdog vibe as a city, but that just makes us try harder, and I love our scrappiness and scruffiness.
Lisa Scottoline
#74. Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid's lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.
Stephen King
#75. I have to say that my husband and my children are so tough, there really is no space for pretension.
Miuccia Prada
#76. Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension!
Isaac Asimov
#79. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of god.
Elif Shafak
#80. Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett
#81. He had perfected the art of looking interested, and could grasp in surprise at any and every predictable punchline.
Ian Rankin
#82. The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.
Oscar Wilde
#83. Why do you pretend, when you can make it real? We like pretending to be someone else but the truth we just want to be ourselves.
Ann Marie Aguilar
#84. ... a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian
Renata Adler
#85. Just make sure your intentions are not pretensions.
Emil Ludwig
#87. Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.
Criss Jami
#88. Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment
Michel De Montaigne
#89. Humanity's favorite pasttime: pretending to know what it doesn't know.
Marty Rubin
#90. Then there's the business of standardized tests. Henry refused to take the SATs - he'd probably score off the charts if he did, but he's got some kind of aesthetic objection to them.
Donna Tartt
#91. Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did - unprepared though we were - that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!
Edith Wharton
#93. 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
#94. 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.
#95. What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?
Denis Norden
#96. Don't you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it? Such was the high opinion it had of its talents.
Zhuangzi
#97. One who preserves all the exterior decencies of ignorance.
Samuel Foote
