Pretension quotes:

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Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself. -- Hosea Ballou
Pretension is nothing; power is everything. -- Edwin Percy Whipple
Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course. -- Sreesha Divakaran
In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. -- Margot Fonteyn
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny. -- J. K. Rowling
Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning. -- Virat Kohli
Who makes the fairest show means most deceit. -- Pericles
One who preserves all the exterior decencies of ignorance. -- Samuel Foote
The world is his who can see through its pretension. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. -- E. T. Bell
Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends. -- Johann Kaspar Lavater
The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some pretences daunt and discourage us, while others raise us to a brisk assurance. -- Joseph Glanvill
All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up. -- Maxim Gorky
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. -- William James
A Senate vote on gay marriage is a destructive pretension against the plan of God -- Pope Francis
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. -- Jane Austen
You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. -- Jane Austen
The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody. -- Booth Tarkington
True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can any feigned thing be lasting. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else. -- Billy Collins
It is no disgrace not to be able to do everything; but to undertake, or pretend to do, what you are not made for, is not only shameful, but extremely troublesome and vexatious. -- Plutarch
It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for to-morrow. -- Samuel Johnson
Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways. -- Malcolm X
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let's not be naive, we're not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God. -- Pope Francis
I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension. -- Herb Kelleher
What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs. -- David Duchovny
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. -- E. T. Bell
Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. -- Margot Fonteyn
Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am. -- Tom Bodett
In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many. -- Adam Ferguson
I have to say that my husband and my children are so tough, there really is no space for pretension. -- Miuccia Prada
I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting. -- Tom Bodett
I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant. -- Daniel Boulud
Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them. -- Jim Crace
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English. -- Alfred Nobel
I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension. -- Stephen Mangan
I don't think couture will die. But it should have no pretension that it will conquer the world. It's not something that will disappear because all you need is a thread and a needle to start making something couture. -- Olivier Theyskens
It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates. -- Arthur Smith
I love everything about Philadelphia, and its food is like the city itself: real-deal, hearty, and without pretension. We've always had an underdog vibe as a city, but that just makes us try harder, and I love our scrappiness and scruffiness. -- Lisa Scottoline
We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny. -- J. K. Rowling
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. -- Guy Laliberte
The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch. -- Jon Landau
Faith begins where religious pretension ends -- Austin Farrer
Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension! -- Isaac Asimov
When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretension -- Henry Rollins
Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language. -- George Carlin
In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension. -- Horatio Greenough
The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross. -- D. A. Carson
I would define boastfulness to be the pretension to good which the boaster does not possess. -- Theophrastus
Be thorough in all you do; and remember that although ignorance often may be innocent, pretension is always despicable. -- William E. Gladstone
He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice. -- Anatole France
For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation? -- John Campbell Shairp
I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously. I'm fighting the war against pretension. -- Kesha
No Swaraj government with any pretension to being a popular government can possibly be organised and maintained on a war-footing. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Elegance must be the right combination of distinction, naturalness, care and simplicity. Outside this, believe me, there is no elegance. Only pretension. -- Christian Dior
I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly. -- William James
Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light. -- Ken Macrorie
To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says. -- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light. -- Robert Charles Wilson
General Otis is proclaimed American Military Governor of the Philippines and I protest a thousand times and with all the force in my soul against such pretension. -- Emilio Aguinaldo
The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture....He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher. -- Mark Twain
News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned. -- Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for. -- William Hazlitt
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. -- Victor Hugo
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned - to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension. -- Marcus Aurelius
I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise. -- Jean-Georges Noverre
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. -- Walter Brueggemann

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