Contemptible quotes:

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None of God's Creatures absolutely consider'd are in their own Nature Contemptible; the meanest Fly, the poorest Insect has its Use and Vertue. -- Mary Astell
In politics nothing is contemptible. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Only the contemptible fear contempt. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries. -- George Eliot
I've always been that contemptible thing, a luxury communist. -- Bruce Robinson
What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W. Clement Stone
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore. -- Samuel Butler
Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth. -- Arthur Murphy
How can a Man respect his Wife when he has a contemptible Opinion of her and her Sex? -- Mary Astell
There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman. -- Henry Fielding
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible. -- Arthur Machen
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. -- Edmund Burke
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. -- Bertrand Russell
A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible. -- Woodrow Wilson
For among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible; which is one of those disgraceful things which a prince must guard against. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man. -- Diogenes
Whatsoever is done out of pure love, be it ever so little or contemptible in the sight of men, is wholly fruitful; for God measures more with how much love one worketh, than the amount he doeth. -- Ellen G. White
The two most precious things this side of the grave are our reputation and our life. But it is to be lamented that the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, and the weakest weapon of the other. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes. -- George Mason
Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that? -- Martin Amis
In politics, nothing is contemptible. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
Contemptuous people are sure to be contemptible. -- Nicolas Chamfort
The French, for example, are a contemptible nation. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
None but the contemptible are apprehensive of contempt. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible. -- Samuel Johnson
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge. -- George Santayana
War, like children's fights, are meaningless, pitiless, and contemptible. -- Rumi
Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob. -- Seneca the Younger
Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws. -- Simone de Beauvoir
An old man at school is a contemptible and ridiculous object. -- Seneca the Younger
The unarmed man is not just defenseless - he is also contemptible. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true. -- William Blake
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There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair. -- Martial
Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth. -- Arthur Murphy
The trite objects of human efforts-possessions, superficial success, luxury-have always seemed contemptible to me. -- Albert Einstein
Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible. -- Joseph Addison
Nothing is so contemptible as that affectation of wisdom, which some display, by universal incredulity. -- Oliver Goldsmith
Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches. -- Abraham Verghese
There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding. -- John Locke
The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant -- John Steinbeck
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. -- Lawrence Durrell
Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed! -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Personally, I feel that it is the most contemptible thing for a politician to seek personal gains from politics. -- Khem Veasna
To my eye Rubens' colouring is most contemptible. His shadows are a filthy brown somewhat the colour of excrement. -- William Blake
There are some vile and contemptible men who, allowing themselves to be conquered by misfortune, seek a refuge in death. -- Agathon
If a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man that despises them is no contemptible one. -- William Cowper
A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian! -- Michel de Montaigne
For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly? -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible. -- Samuel Johnson
People like Mr Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly and completely contemptible. -- George Galloway
Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency. -- Joseph Addison
Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it. -- Joseph Addison
The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a But. -- Henry Ward Beecher
We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man.. -- Edgar Allan Poe
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books. -- W. H. Auden
Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life. -- Sigmund Freud
An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all. -- Lord Chesterfield
Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends. -- William Jennings Bryan
Whoever imposes severe punishment becomes repulsive to the people; while he who awards mild punishment becomes contemptible. But whoever imposes punishment as deserved becomes respectable. -- Chanakya
I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids. -- C. S. Lewis
Remember that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible. -- Samuel Johnson
Get to live; Then live, and use it; else, it is not true That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone Makes money not a contemptible stone. -- George Herbert
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new? -- Georg C. Lichtenberg
the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. -- Thornton Wilder
There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure. -- Jonathan Swift
Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Of all the vulgar arts of government, that of solving every difficulty that might arise by thrusting the hand into the public purse is the most illusory and contemptible. -- Robert Peel
Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in the cause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument is to be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cook mushrooms. -- Mary Virginia Terhune
Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil. -- Christian Nestell Bovee
There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man - if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on. -- Wyndham Lewis
With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief. -- Washington Irving
In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead. -- Mary Hunter Austin
[F]or contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation... -- Nikolai Gogol
Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions. -- Josiah Bartlett
A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free. -- David Foster Wallace
Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life -- Walt Whitman
... those, who from an immoderate and false self-love, study to keep their humanity under, always take care, for their own sakes, to represent poverty to themselves, as something ridiculous, mean, and contemptible. -- Mary Collyer
I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo. -- Wyndham Lewis
I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible. -- Edmund Burke
Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind. -- Albert Einstein
It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible. -- Allen W. Wood

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