No Pretensions Quotes & Sayings

Most cats don't like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running. — Seanan McGuire

I just know that he's Robbie Williams - he's massive, that's all I know! He nailed it. Working in the studio with him was cool. I got there at about six in the afternoon and then stayed until six in the morning. We only worked for like two hours, the rest of the time we were just chilling out the back. The way Robbie handles everything ... he's a star, but there were never any pretensions, no ego. He put effort in. — Dizzee Rascal

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. — Jean-Pierre Dupuy

But as the clerical pretensions are more exacting than all others, being put forward with an assertion that no answer is possible without breach of duty and sin, so are they more galling. — Anthony Trollope

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. — Bob Ainsworth

Semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense — Alfred Tarski

Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind. — Thomas Nagel

I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714. — George Saunders

Franco-American relations have been, and always will be, both conflictual and excellent. The U.S. finds France unbearable with its pretensions; we find the U.S. unbearable with its hegenomism. But deep down, we remember that the 'boys' - came to help us two times, just as the Americans remember that the French helped them with their independence. So there will be sparks but no fire, because a real bond exists. — Jacques Chirac

The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation. — Samuel Johnson

The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied. For, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They therefore generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. — Samuel Johnson

Why do you have to make everyone hate you? (Talon)
What? You want to be my friend now, Celt? If I clean up my act, will you be my buddy? (Zarek)
You're such an asshole. (Talon)
Yeah, but at least I know what I am. I have no pretensions. You don't know if you're a Druid, a Dark-Hunter, or a playboy. You lost yourself a long time ago in the dark hole where you buried the parts of you that once made you human. (Zarek)
You are lecturing me on humanity? (Talon)
Ironic as hell, isn't it? (Zarek) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense end knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it
a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind. — Laurence Sterne

Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental position of choice in modern life. "I have chosen you," Jesus said, "you have not chosen me." We are not our own; we have been bought with a price. We have no rights, only responsibilities. Following Christ is not our initiative, merely our response, in obedience. Nothing works better to debunk the pretensions of choice than a conviction of calling. Once we have been called, we literally "have no choice. — Os Guinness

Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies - and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God, — Friedrich Nietzsche

A canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting. — Irving Stone

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself. — Ada Lovelace

I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary. — Francis Galton

All the pretensions you make of attachment to your Master, and all the devout actions which you may perform, are no recompense for disobedience. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess). — Frederic Chopin

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

{Letter from the commissioners, John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, to John Jay, 28 March 1786} — Thomas Jefferson

When you speak of the favour of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage. But when we come to your notion about the — Thucydides

I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. — Jane Austen

I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce. — Hazel Henderson

A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions. — Henry A. Kissinger

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied. — Samuel Johnson

A man who cannot control his temper is not very likely to control his passions, and no matter what his pretensions in religion, he moves in daily life very close to the animal plane. — David O. McKay

Need I point out that, despite the old saw about uneasy heads and crowns, it is nevertheless safer to be publicly a king than it is to be a pretender in hiding? A king can usually abdicate to save his neck; a pretender may renounce his pretensions but it makes his neck no safer - less so, in fact; it leaves him naked to his enemies. — Robert A. Heinlein

When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees. — Tom Stoppard

Then his singing paused, and he stood for a
moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: 'Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,' in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.

The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought
Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

We were at the White House a couple of weeks ago," the man says, "they had a state dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla. Listen, those royals are just the finest people, no pretensions to them whatsoever. You can talk to Prince Charles about anything."
Billy nods. There's a silence. Just in time he asks, "What did you talk about?"
"Hunting," the man answers. — Ben Fountain

The proper way is lost to me; my compass spins. I therefore give my entire attention to those works that seem to me most incorruptible: the application of heat, the proportion of seasoning, the arrangement of a plate. When robbed of all pretensions and aspirations, with no proper home nor any knowledge of what discord tomorrow brings, I still may have a pocketful of dignity. The Roman pomp and raiment have fallen away, and I see at last the glory of washed feet and shared bread. — Eli Brown

When we are aware of our inner-growth potential yet have no pretensions about ourselves, when we are vulnerable, then we can change. — Amit Goswami

No pretensions of goodness, of trying to do the right thing. We'd both wanted to embrace this fucked-up thing between us. — Leah Raeder

I recollected that [the rattlesnake's] eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids. She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal. Conscious of this, she never wounds 'till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her. — Benjamin Franklin

They're innocent movies, and they're fun movies and there were no pretensions about 'em. — Alex Winter

I will, from today, cease trying to impress others as being someone other than who I am or what I am. I will, from today try to express myself as I really am; no pretensions, no misrepresentations and no real concerns for what I think others expect of me. I'm just going to be me! I am going to forgive myself for all my human foibles and frailties, to date, and accept my many past indiscretions as natural and normal in a personal growth process. Oh what a relief - I'll just be the best me I can be and do the best I can. If I do the best I can - what more can any one want of me. — Melvin Hassan

These are no ordinary claims; and it seems hardly possible for a rational being to regard them with even a subdued interest; much less to treat them with mere indifference and contempt. If not true they are little else than the pretensions of a bold imposture, which not satisfied with having already enslaved millions of the human race, seeks to continue its encroachments upon human liberty, until all nations be subjected under its iron rule. — Simon Greenleaf

On differing perspectives:

"At birth, we're yanked from a warm, safe place and thrust into a world we have no way of comprehending. Childhood is a constant routine of punishment and confusion. Hell we're depressed and misunderstood as teenagers, then frightened and unprepared as we become adults. In midlife, we watch as our youth slowly slips away; our dreams for greatness becoming pathetic memories. Old age brings loneliness, infirmity, and the constant fear of death."

"At birth, we're rescued from a dark, silent place and ushered into a world full of wonder. Childhood is a magical time, free from responsibility. We're curious and filled with energy as teenagers, and then challenged to reach our full potential as we become adults. In mid-life, we watch as our pretensions slowly slip away, our dreams for happiness finally becoming realized. Old age brings wisdom, wonderful memories, and a passionate love of life. — Rick Reynolds

There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy. — Charles Caleb Colton

Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. — Pat Conroy

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

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. — Yuval Noah Harari

I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds. — David S.Goyer

He sighed deeply: to fall in love at first sight with this malodorous sleeping girl, with, as far as he could see, no pretensions to beauty or even good looks, was something he had not expected. But falling in love, he had always understood, was unpredictable, and, as far as he was concerned, irrevocable That they hadn't exchanged a word, nor spoken, made no difference. He, heart whole until that minute, and with no intention of marrying until it suited him, had lost that same heart. — Betty Neels

Explaining temptation by saying "God is testing me" or "Satan is attacking me" positions "me" either as the victim, if I am defeated, or the hero, if I prevail. But confessing that "My heart is desperately wicked" provides no such comforts. It heads off all attempts to shift blame, and cuts down all the pretensions of spiritual pride. — Colin S. Smith

With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split. — Howard Thompson