Fastidiousness Quotes & Sayings

A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer ... He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors. — Anton Chekhov

For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of Your Life, Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but himself for his child's actions:
It isn't up to the teachers in the schools, nor the Federal Radio Commissioners, nor anyone else on earth. It's up to us - it's our job! Our job to teach them right from wrong, honesty from dishonesty, a clean and intelligent attitude toward sex, a healthful fastidiousness about their own bodies. We can teach these things because we have the daily opportunity of knowing our children and their reactions. — Judith C. Waller

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. — Edith Wharton

But if Abram bore his continual wanderings patiently, our fastidiousness is utterly inexcusable, when we murmur against God, if he does not grant us a quiet nest. — John Calvin

My plans often went awry. Much like my thoughts. Hold the phones. Maybe Saan had ADD, too. It would explain a lot. — Darynda Jones

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers! — Lorrie Moore

A pilgrimage is an admirable remedy for over-fastidiousness and sickly refinement. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Intelligence is predatory, but full of fastidiousness and frights. — Mason Cooley

I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won't part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn't sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn't any monopoly ... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he'd do well to spend more time analyzing what's the matter with his work, and less time figuring what's the matter with the public. — Berton Braley

Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream's gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human's education is to know those duties and how to perform them. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking. — James Russell Lowell

I was afraid of other people's houses. After school sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren't me. I didn't know how to respond, the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles jutting from the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman's stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child's slipper in the bathtub. It made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody's socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who are these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there. — Don DeLillo

We must avoid fastidiousness; neatness, when it is moderate, is a virtue; but when it is carried to an extreme, it narrows the mind. — Francois Fenelon

But there was a flip side to his fastidiousness. He saw that now. It was a nose-in-the-air way of moving through the world. In every smoothed wrinkle, every perfected motion, there was an air of moral judgment, though he didn't intend it. There were people, he implied, who lived sloppy lives, and then there were people like him.
~Gilley — Lee Martin

Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable. — Alice Meynell

To speak for others is to first silence those in whose name we speak — Michel Callon

As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. — William Strunk Jr.

What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun
which is to say, preserving the human spirit. — Tom Robbins

Fastidiousness is the envelope of indelicacy. — Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James. — Vladimir Nabokov