Quotes About Ostentation

The art of making much show with little substance.

Hood an ass with reverend purple. So you can hide his two ambitious ears, and he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.

Some people make spectacles of themselves with a couple of glasses.

The tulip is, among flowers, what the peacock is among birds. A tulip lacks scent, a peacock has an unpleasant voice. The one takes pride in its garb, the other in its tail.

People don't want to hear about me having leather walls or gold toilets.

There are some, however, that know the prejudice of mankind in favour of modest sincerity. The vendor of the beautifying fluid sells a lotion that repels pimples, washes away freckles, smooths the skin, and plumps the flesh; and yet, with a generous abhorrence of ostentation, confesses, that it will not restore the bloom of fifteen to a lady of fifty.

I don't do marriage. I think it's incredibly naff. And I don't like vulgar displays of ostentation.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

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.

There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.

The breakfast-service on the table was equally costly and equally plain; the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour.

El saber no es como la moneda, que se mantiene físicamente intacta incluso a través de los intercambios más infames; se parece más bien a un traje de gran hermosura, que el uso y la ostentación van desgastando.

Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn our through use and ostentation.

Dinâmica dos excessos e amplificações, redobramento dos artifícios, preciosidade ostentatória, o vestuário de moda da testemunho de que já se está na era moderna da sedução, da estética da personalidade e da sensualidade.

What is there to be found of that gravity, humility, meekness, piety or charity requisite to so glorious a pretence?... But a perpetual eructation there is of humane passions, a vain ostentation of mistaken learning, and a causeless picking of controversie.

There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.

He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.

And who among the company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!

I was not simply tired of the world's iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.

That sounds self-indulgent and gratifying without vulgar ostentation," says I; "and I don't see how money could be better invested. Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner's Self-Instructor for the Banjo, and I'll join you.

My shoes are made of Spanish leather, My socks are made of silk; I wear a ring on every finger, I wash myself in milk.

To me all palaces are preposterous, a tasteless, dreary expression of ostentation.

The score belongs on the society pages. To preserve the spirit of the occasion, the teams should have played in tuxes or swallowtail coats and corsages. It's not an athletic event anymore, it's a carnival. Mardi Gras with first downs.

All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich.