Quotes About Pretensions

When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, [German Chancellor] Bismarck said to an aide, "His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne," writes George Valliant. "Humor can be marvelously therapeutic," adds another observer. "It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.

Pretensions to moral superiority are devastatingly destructive.

There are all kinds of pretensions about art, but I'm just a guy who sings for his supper.

Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

Nothing is more important than honesty in prayer. There are no pretensions in prayer, so the best place to begin is wherever you are.

Artistic prejudices are always the most difficult to root out. Critics - whose duty should be to see beyond the pretensions of artists and the public's passing fancies - often allow themselves to be persuaded by the way authors present their work, by what they say they have achieved, or else are guided by whatever has been a wild success - usually in order to take the opposing view - and which had been damningly labelled 'popular.

Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

I always liked to write and had fun writing, but I didn't have any pretensions about being a writer. I liked to read and liked to putz around and write little stories or poems, but my thing was sports.

they who make pretensions to philosophy are often less wise and reasonable than others who never applied themselves to the study

Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.

On a personal level, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will die. And yet today no aspect of human existence, not even the ending of it, is immune to the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic thought. Not only the intellectual poverty, but also the emotional poverty, of what it has to say about death give us little reason to believe that it will be able to face up to the fact of its own mortality. 4.

I have strengths, and I have weaknesses. I don't pretend to be able to write a great thesis or doctorate - I have no pretensions in that direction.

Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.

Humor can be marvelously therapeutic," adds another observer. "It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.

His Majesty displays the pretensions and naïve selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.

Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.

What pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.

This is how one ought to see, I repeated yet again. And I might have added, These are the sort of things one ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God.

Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other. The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists.