“ To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. ”
- William James- Copy
- 66
“ That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty. ”
- Marcus Annaeus Seneca- Copy
- 1K
“ That which is given with pride and ostentation is rather an ambition than a bounty. ”
- Seneca- Copy
- 2.8K
“ Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings. ”
- Cary Grant- Copy
- 3.7K
“ Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part. ”
- William Hazlitt- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends. ”
- Johann Kaspar Lavater- Copy
- 2.2K
“ The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny. ”
- Mark Twain- Copy
- 2.6K
“ Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. ”
- Eric Hoffer- Copy
- 1.9K
“ All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense. ”
- Henry Fuseli- Copy
- 2.5K
“ I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive. ”
- E. M. Forster- Copy
- 1.4K
“ True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can any feigned thing be lasting. ”
- Cicero- Copy
- 932
“ The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. ”
- Ambrose Bierce- Copy
- 66
“ The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody. ”
- Booth Tarkington- Copy
- 1.7K
“ Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself. ”
- Hosea Ballou- Copy
- 2.1K
“ Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people. ”
- Jean Guehenno- Copy
- 193
“ Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches. ”
- John Locke- Copy
- 274
“ In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many. ”
- Adam Ferguson- Copy
- 1.3K
“ He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice. ”
- Anatole France- Copy
- 3.2K
“ To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem… ridiculous. ”
- William Hazlitt- Copy
- 1.7K
“ The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour. ”
- Frederic Raphael- Copy
- 2.5K
“ Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. ”
- Freda Adler- Copy
- 62
“ In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability. ”
- John Kenneth Galbraith- Copy
- 2.1K
“ How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention! ”
- John Greenleaf Whittier- Copy
- 1.9K
“ I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. ”
- Daniel J. Boorstin- Copy
- 425
“ 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. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon… ”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson- Copy
- 488
- 1