Quotes About Pretension

My family is vital to me - just the sense of being surrounded by no pretension.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

I am without any doubt whatever a NON-actor. For a start, the gushing pretension of would-be actors puts me off. Ergo ego. I watch them preening in front of the rehearsal mirrors in the drama hall. Just waiting for applause. All they want is to be liked. Plus admired, adored, idolized, flattered, etc. And they're more like groupy than glue. If they're on their own for more than five minutes they get withdrawal symptoms and go walkabout, looking for kindred lost souls to coagulate with.

'The Big Lebowski' gave me my first false sense of intellectual superiority.

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.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Sus pretensiones, pues, son infundadas, porque el esfuerzo realizado no nos hace más competentes, sino menos; la ejecución, en términos generales, será deficiente, propensa al error y requerirá más tiempo del que hubieran exigido las tareas por separado.

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.

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.

I'm just drawn to the odd guy, the man who is full of it, the guy who has limited talent but is pretending he's a genius.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and his pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant.

Borrowing something from one art form and relocating it in another always has a whiff of pretension about it, like in books if, instead of 'Chapter One,' you have 'First Movement.'

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.

Rock n' roll doesn't change. All the idiocies and pretension continue.

I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension. I think the word 'pretension' has become like the word 'ironic' - just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment.

Described by his biographer as an "overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate," he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

Or there's Alex Crowley , tiresomely attempting to persuade his school-chums to refer to him as Shelley's Alastor , like some self-conscious Goth from Nottingham called Dave insisting that his vampire name is Armand .