Top 100 Sordid Quotes
#2. Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.
Marcus Aurelius
#3. What the world stigmatises as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.
Anne Bronte
#4. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#5. Once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
#6. The timid man calls himself cautious, the sordid man thrifty.
Publilius Syrus
#7. It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!
Luigi Pirandello
#8. Despite the sometimes sordid turns his life took, Michael Jackson always held my fascination, like he did for most of us.
Shawn Amos
#9. I'm sick of hearing, thinking and talking about Woody Allen. Nonetheless, the allegations against him continue to capture our national attention because so much of the story is strange and sordid.
Roxane Gay
#10. I wished Dean and Carlo were there - then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The
Jack Kerouac
#11. Race preservation is a myth ... a myth that you all have lived by - a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him - so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race.
Clifford D. Simak
#12. He seemed to see his fellow creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with them because they were grotesque; life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.
W. Somerset Maugham
#14. Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.
Robert Walser
#15. War is honorable
In those who do their native rights maintain;
In those whose swords an iron barrier are
Between the lawless spoiler and the weak;
But is, in those who draw th' offensive blade
For added power or gain, sordid and despicable
As meanest office of the worldly churl.
Joanna Baillie
#16. As the leaves of trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy.
Washington Irving
#17. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.
Aleister Crowley
#18. In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. For hearts that are kindly, with virtue and peace, and not seeking blindly a hoard to increase; for those who are grieving o'er life's sordid plan; for souls still believing in heaven and man; for homes that are lowly with love at the board; for things th
Walter Mason Camp
#20. Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.
Rudolf Rocker
#21. Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#22. When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?
Adam Smith
#23. There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God.
John Calvin
#24. If we should cease to be generous and charitable because another is sordid and ungrateful, it would be much in the power of vice to extinguish Christian virtues.
Roger L'Estrange
#25. It will never belong in a Hallmark card, but I drove a car into a house and killed a man for you. You chained me up for days and I still wanted to come back and talk over our darkly sordid, slightly kinky, and a lot warped relationship. Face it, you're stuck with me.
Kylie Scott
#26. One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find ... this.
Joe Abercrombie
#27. I am ashamed of a human race that can continue to allow the sordid ambitions of politicized groups who genuinely feel that right is on their side, and can therefore instigate such atrocities in the name of their own sense of right and wrong.
Ralph Steadman
#28. In this world is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
Vincent Starrett
#30. No Task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God's sight.
John Calvin
#32. As for myself, my course is clear. A British subject I was born - a British subject I will die. With my utmost effort, with my latest breath, will I oppose the 'veiled treason' which attempts by sordid means and mercenary proffers to lure our people from their allegiance.
John A. Macdonald
#33. If one thinks only of winning, a sordid victory will be worse than a defeat. For the most part, it becomes a squalid defeat.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
#34. The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
Thomas Merton
#35. Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#36. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
#38. The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion - to close a door in one's own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering - and cause it - and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.
Laini Taylor
#39. Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.
Theodore Roosevelt
#40. Emilio was certainly within his rights not to reveal the sordid details of his childhood even to his friends. Or perhaps especially to his friends, whose good opinion of him, he might feel, would not survive the revelations.
Mary Doria Russell
#41. I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it ... .By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you ... .Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
#42. The to-dos were sordid rather than exciting, perhaps because nearly everybody was approaching middle age.
James Purdy
#43. I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.
Osamu Dazai
#44. In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.
Bill Bryson
#45. At bottom the character of M. Bonacieux was one of profound selfishness mixed with sordid avarice, the whole seasoned with extreme cowardice.
Alexandre Dumas
#46. Foras Road has a sordid reputation ( ... ) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
Tahir Shah
#47. She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with.
Nella Larsen
#48. It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#49. In fact, I think you're a genius, Quinn. And I think I'm a genius for picking you." "Revisionist history. You didn't pick me. I inserted myself into your sordid plan." Lori grinned. "Right again. You are a genius at inserting yourself, Quinn Jennings.
Victoria Dahl
#50. As far as the media's concerned, Mrs. Obama deserves this. Look at the sordid past. Look at our slave past, look at the discriminatory past. It's only fair that people of color get their taste of the wealth of America too.
Rush Limbaugh
#51. In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties.
Albert Einstein
#52. The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.
Oscar Wilde
#54. I've watched a never-ending line of relationships crumple around me, with each sordid detail publicized to the world. I couldn't stand to hurt you that way.
Eden Summers
#55. Look into the world
how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man's affliction, taking shelterbehind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.
Laurence Sterne
#56. I didn't blame him. God, I wouldn't have blamed Bones if he'd duct-taped a vibrator to me and just took care of the whole sordid nightmare that way
Jeaniene Frost
#57. My brother went on to have a long and sordid career.
Darrell Issa
#58. Slovenliness is a lazy and beastly negligence of a man's own person, whereby he becomes so sordid as to be offensive to those about him.
Theophrastus
#59. the sordid necessity of living for others."9
Satyajit Das
#60. Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.
Tom Lehrer
#61. Gynaecologists are very smooth indeed. Because they have to listen to woeful and sordid symptoms they develop an expression of refinement and sympathy.
Richard Asher
#62. My faith in humanity leads me to believe that people are looking for something more elevating than the sordid details of the intimate aspects of one's personal life.
Ginger Rogers
#63. Understanding the long, sordid history of gun control in America is key to understanding the dangers of disarming.
Niger Innis
#64. Sordid selfishness doth contract and narrow our benevolence, and cause us, like serpents, to infold ourselves within ourselves, and to turn out our stings to the entire world besides.
Walter Scott
#65. If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.
Theodore Roosevelt
#66. In other words, art is a realm entirely separated from the interests of real life-a refuge for detached and gifted souls from sordid political and economic struggles.
DeWitt Henry Parker
#67. A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs
Bruce Sterling
#68. You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?
Peter De Vries
#69. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]
Siri Hustvedt
#70. One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect.
Christopher Hitchens
#71. I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.
Charles Dickens
#72. In Alabama can't - ?" I was indignant. "I do. I guess it's to protect our frail ladies from sordid cases like Tom's. Besides," Atticus grinned, "I doubt if we'd ever get a complete case tried - the
Harper Lee
#73. If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience, it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations.
Oscar W. Firkins
#74. Run. Flee. Fuck off. Vanish from my presence and take the foul stench of your sordid secret with you.
St John Morris
#75. On a piece of wasteland in Leeds I once saw a used condom in the grass. A dead and sordid thing. And yet to my thirteen-year-old mind the whole mystery of life seemed to stream through it. Nothing I've seen since has been so eloquent of the thrilling and terrifying mysteries of life.
Glenn Haybittle
#76. Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#77. All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.
Stephen Leacock
#78. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.
Oscar Wilde
#79. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.
Jack Kerouac
#80. Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;
Anthony Powell
#81. I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Robert Graves
#82. It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
Oscar Wilde
#83. What if in Scotland's wilds we viel'd our head, Where tempests whistle round the sordid bed; Where the rug's two-fold use we might display, By night a blanket, and a plaid by day.
Oliver Goldsmith
#84. My main interest ... is the love of truth, whether pleasant or not. Truth is self-sufficient, and there is nothing to which it can be subordinated without loss. When truth is made subservient to anything else, however great (say religion), it becomes impure and sordid.
George Sarton
#85. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view.
Edith Hamilton
#86. You fear the world too much," she answered gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?
Charles Dickens
#87. He who confers a favor should at once forget it, if he is not to show a sordid ungenerous spirit. To remind a man of a kindness conferred and to talk of it, is little different from reproach.
Demosthenes
#88. Ryan shrugged. "You're adorable. With your angry glitter." And Gary blushed. His whole face. Never before in the strange and sordid history of our super-best friendship had I ever seen him blush.
T.J. Klune
#89. Do not quarrel ... with your lot in life. Do not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with.
William Henry Drummond
#90. It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#91. The way to get things done is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel.
Charles R. Schwab
#93. Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue. Fly! wherefore dost thou linger? Fly, cast not one look behind thee; nor let even thy thought return to the accursed evil for a moment.
Francois Fenelon
#94. Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.
Moliere
#95. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and find that we are ... this.
Joe Abercrombie
#96. Gambling houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent. A card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#97. Oh yes," said Nanny Piggins. "I can regale people with anecdotes from my sordid past and think at the same time.
R.A. Spratt
#98. As soon as we are stripped of the sordid garb of avarice, we shall be clothed with the royal and imperial vest of the opposite virtue, liberality.
Philip Neri
#99. So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#100. Old Mr. Rarx was not a pleasant man to look at, nor yet to talk to, or to be with, for no one could help seeing that he was a sordid and selfish character, and that he had warped further and further out of the straight with time.
Charles Dickens
