Quotes & Sayings About Not Showing Off

Much to popular disbelief, horses walking around during the elections with their tails straight up in the air are not showing off their Bush/Quale buttons. — Dan Quayle

Not only are the poorest people the most generous but they don't expect anything in return, least of all recognition from others by means of showing off or posting a humble brag like so many from average society do and you can identify these people through the abundance of photos they post, literally with their hands in the air, showing off what they've done for the "less fortunate." I guess they missed the part where God said to be humble and to do good works in private. — Donna Lynn Hope

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said, 'Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan't be ashamed if they're not. — Catherynne M Valente

People with talent are not interested in showing off behind another person. They're more interested in the music. [Charlie Parker] was playing with me. That's the difference between the kind of musician I like to work with and singing with a musician who thinks he has to accompany me. That is so annoying I cannot tell you. — Helen Merrill

A horse perceives eye contact as provocative, as if it and its status in the herd are not being respected. If it cannot avoid eye contact, it will react in a different way, by rebelling for example. In dressage you don't get anywhere by not showing respect, however superior your species might be. Any animal trainer can tell you that. In the mountains in Argentina there's a wild horse which will jump off the nearest precipice if any human tries to ride it. — Jo Nesbo

I'm not the 'look at me' kind of a person. I do not like showing off in public or written about. — Imtiaz Ali

I don't know where you get off telling everyone what to do. Did I miss the part where you were crowned top turd? I don't want to play the wicked consort of Eric the Evil. Last time I looked, there wasn't a wicked consort clause in my contract." Donna turned to Eric as he stopped by her side. "I can't believe he thinks he can harass me like he does the rest of the poor wretches who work here." She glared at Holgarth. "Why not rent a wig and you can be the wicked consort?"
As one of the castle's poor wretches, Eric didn't offer anything to the conversation because he was too busy picturing Holgarth in a wig. And from there, he went on to imagine Donna in her wicked consort costume - short on cloth with lots of bare skin showing. Things were looking up. — Nina Bangs

I prefer to make my annotations 'hot on the heels', as it were, when the fortunes of battle, the worries, hopes and disappointments are still sufficiently fresh in my mind. Much as I would like to, I cannot say this about these few games which will be given below. In fact, if the annotator should begin to use phrases of the type: 'in reply to...I had worked out the following variation...', the reader will rightly say 'Grandmaster, you are showing off', since the 'oldest' of these games is now more than 25 years old, and even the 'newest' more than 20. Therefore, I would ask you not to regard the following 'stylised' annotations too severely. — Mikhail Tal

Pain is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know. Reach for heights that you never thought possible. Go to places you have deemed off limits. This is the time to take off the shell of your past and step into the rich possibilities of your future. God does not give us dreams that we cannot fulfill. If you want to do something great with your life-whether it's to fall madly in love, become a teacher, be a great parent-if you aspire to do something beyond what you are doing now, this is the time to begin. Trust yourself. — Debbie Ford

I'm a sucker for punishment," Joslyn answered cheerfully. "There's something about him - " "Raw sexual magnetism, maybe?" Kendra prompted, beginning to perk up as the caffeine hit her bloodstream. "You noticed," Joslyn joked. "It's hard not to," Kendra replied. "I think God was showing off a little when He decided to throw Slade Barlow together." "Amen," agreed Joslyn. — Linda Lael Miller

Never let people see what you want, because they will not let you have it. Never let anybody see what you feel, because it gives them too much power. You're probably better off not showing weakness whenever you can avoid it, because they'll go for you. — Mike Nichols

He's not pointing to anybody, he's showing off how high he can count! — Bobby Heenan

The trouble with the world is, Frankie, that there are too many ideals and too little horse sense . . . Human beings don't like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else . . . they're not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who'll give 'em half a chance. — Philip Hoare

I try to look at most of my solos as a musical piece within the song, not, say, showing off. — Richie Sambora

Now, I've always known that there were bullies in the world. We've seen a lot of it in politics lately as well as in daily life. You see it where people who may be stronger, or bigger, or better with verbiage than other folks ... show off. To me, that's what bullying is, showing off. It's saying, I'm better than you, I can take you down. Not just physically, but emotionally. — Whoopi Goldberg

Up there on Huckleberry Mountain, I couldn't sleep ... As the sky broke light over the peaks of Glacier, I found myself deeply moved by the view from our elevation - off west the lights of Montana, Hungry Horse, and Columbia Falls, and farmsteads along the northern edge of Flathead Lake, and back in the direction of sunrise the soft and misted valleys of the parklands, not an electric light showing: little enough to preserve for the wanderings of a great and sacred animal who can teach us, if nothing else, by his power and his dilemma, a little common humility. — William Kittredge

'As a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles.' The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives. — Michel De Montaigne

A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl - the bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Mania starts off fun, not sleeping for days, keeping company with your brain, which has become a wonderful computer, showing 24 TV channels all about you. That goes horribly wrong after awhile. — Carrie Fisher

I'm glad they gave women the right to vote, but sometimes I'm sorry they have the right to smoke. Most women are messy about it, particularly about their lipstick. I don't mind wiping lipstick off myself, but I hate seeing it on cigarettes, napkins and coffee cups! I don't like women with all their beauty machinery showing-curlers, cold cream, mascara brushes. I'd even prefer to not see a woman touch up her lipstick, but I guess that's expecting too much. — Kirk Douglas

If you have made the good profession, if you claimed to have passed through the gate, if you have received baptism in a public declaration of your faith, and you begin to walk-it doesn't matter how long it appears you're walking in that path-if you step off that path and there's no discipline and you continue on that path, you can have no assurance whatsoever of your salvation. And it is not that you lost your salvation, it's that you're showing now that you never had it. If we would only preach these truths — Paul Washer

Bridges - a master of subtle brilliance - plays the hell out of it. Not by showing off, but by going bone-deep into a character who only thinks he's running on empty. Crazy Heart may finally win him the Oscar that's unfairly eluded him and it offers the pleasure of watching a great actor at the peak of his form. — Peter Travers

PS, I want a stripper for my birthday," GQ announces. "Just decided now. Get on it."

"I'll make a couple calls," Garrett promises, but the second his friend wanders off, he confides, "He's not getting a stripper. We all chipped in to get him a new iPod. He dropped his in the koi pond behind Hartford House."

When I snicker, Garrett pounces like a mountain lion. "Holy shit. Was that a laugh? I didn't think you were capable of showing amusement. Can you do it again and let me film it?"

"I laugh all the time." I pause. "Mostly at you, though."

He grabs his chest in mock pain as if I've shot him. "You're terrible for a guy's ego, y'know that? — Elle Kennedy

While they are busy showing off, digging other people's graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they're not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can't be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning's silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. — Toni Morrison

So these days, I'm on the lookout for grace, and I'm especially on the lookout for ways that I withhold grace from myself and from other people. At first, showing people grace makes you feel powerful, like scattering candy from a float in a parade - grace for you, grace for you. You become almost giddy, thinking of people in generous ways, allowing for their faults, absorbing minor irritations. You feel great, and then you start to feel just ever so slightly superior, because you're so incredibly evolved and gracious. But then inevitably something happens, and it usually involves you confronting one of your worst selves, often in public, and you realize that you're not throwing candy off a float to a nameless, dirty public, but rather that you are that nameless, dirty public, and that you are starving and on your knees, praying for a little piece of sweetness, just one mouthful of grace. — Shauna Niequist

That's a curious paradox that I don't think a lot of people out there know; that you get really scared before you go on. You come out in a nervous rash, and it's not like you actually love getting up there and showing off. — Jacqueline McKenzie

I'm lying in my room listening to the birds outside. I used to think they sang because they were happy. But then I learned on a nature show they're really showing off. Trying to lure in some other bird so they can mate with it. Or let the other birds know not to get too close to their turf. I wish I never watched that show, because now all I think about is what those pretty sounds mean. And how they're not pretty at all. — Jo Knowles

So many guys try to show off to a girl by boasting of their financial assets and flashing their cash around etc, but a girl who makes her own money and is building her own empire is not impressed by such things. -Show me the integrity not the money. — Miya Yamanouchi

Sword fighting is not a dance, not in battle. You save all that showing off for the duels if you want to. In battle, when you kill, kill quickly, and be ready for the next enemy to come at you. One strike should be all it takes. It's all you'll get — G.R. Matthews

I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off. — Albert J. Nock

The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's not showing off if you back it up. — Dolph Ziggler

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate. — Halton Arp

I'm not talking about cooking as performance, or entertaining as a complicated choreography of competition and showing off. I'm talking about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making your home a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day. — Shauna Niequist

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making. — Mark Twain

our mission does not consist in our appearance, a beautiful haircut or in showing off our body, decorations and clothes — Sunday Adelaja

Years ago, when still a substitute carrier, I noticed a warning sign on an open porch: Beware of Cat! I grinned at the snarling animal etched on the sign as I put mail in the box. Not until I turned to leave did I notice the huge feline watching me from a shadowed corner of the porch. With its back arched, the cat spat at me, showing off gleaming canines. I lunged for the steps, but he caught me halfway down. He clawed his way up my legs and latched onto my mail satchel as I ran for the next house. He finally let go, but then strutted along the perimeter of the yard to ensure I had no plans to return. — Vincent Wyckoff

When the worms are scarce, what does a hen do? Does she stop scratching? She does not. She scratches all the harder. A lot of businessmen have been showing less sense than a hen since orders became scarce. They have laid off salesmen; they have stopped or reduced their advertising; they have simply resigned themselves to inaction and, of course, to pessimism. If a hen knows enough to scratch all the harder when the worms are scarce, surely businessmen ... ought to have gumption enough to scratch all the harder for business. — B.C. Forbes

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think - " (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) " - yes, that's about the right distance - but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.) — Lewis Carroll

The pants come down. Most look shamefaced, but tha Arthur McBride is not the least bit shy about showing off his equipment, oh no, he isn't. He grins in my direction. 'Not all that impressive, boyo — L.A. Meyer

I switched the light out again. The room was totally dark, not even the starlight showing while my eyes adjusted. Perhaps I would ask for one of those LED alarm radios, though I'm very fond of my old brass alarm clock. Once I tied a wasp tot the striking-surface of each of the copper-coloured bells on top, where the little hammer would hit them in the morning when the alarm went off.
I always wake up before the alarm goes, so I got to watch. — Iain Banks

If you're a pitcher, and you're pitching and you strike me out and you start celebrating on the mound and showing me off, whenever I get a hit off you, I'm going to go and celebrate, and you shouldn't get mad. If you're a pitcher and strike me out and show me respect and you don't show me up, when I get a homer or a hit, I'm not going to show you up. That's what I believe. — Bengie Molina

so your father told you once
that you were his princess
you won't see the castle
you cannot find your prince
and now you've grown a lot
and your dress don't fit right
your daddy's not a hero
he stole your chariot

so here you are in pieces
trying to prove to us it's real
the softness of your smile
and the lies you want to feel
the scales beneath your skin
are showing off today
there's evil in your heart
and it wants out to play

there's evil in your heart
and it wants out to play
there's evil in your heart

and I have made a home here
for me
you'll burn it down with your fantasy — Hayley Williams

For me, the kitchen is the most special room in the house. It's a place for adventure - not drudgery, but discovery, sharing and showing off with friends, trying new ideas. — Ted Allen

Because knowledge is not for showing off. If I do good work, people should notice me. — Chetan Bhagat

the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was "showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going. "Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?" "Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, — Bram Stoker

I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. 'I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think--' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) '--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.) Presently she began again. 'I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there — Lewis Carroll

Experiencing grief and pain is like falling off a cliff. Everything has been turned upside down, and we are no longer in control. As we fall, we see one and only one tree that is growing out from the rock face. So we grab hold of it and cling to it with all our might. This tree is our holy God. He alone can keep us from falling headfirst to our doom. There simply aren't any other trees to grab. So we cling to this tree (the holy God) with all our might.
But what we didn't realize is that when we fell and grabbed the tree our arm actually became entangled in the branches, so that in reality, the tree is holding us. We hold on to keep from falling, but what we don't realize is that we can't fall because the tree has us. We are safe. God, in his holiness, is keeping us and showing mercy to us. We may not be aware of it, but it is true. He is with us even in the deepest and darkest pit. — Dustin Shramek

Officer Downing pulls into the driveway next to Mom's car. Of course she's home. I don't know why I even wasted hope that she wouldn't be. Maybe because I'm eighteen, which means they don't bother calling your parents to the scene. But even if I'm not a victim of the law, I'm a victim of the small-town grapevine. A victim of flashing blue lights, whispered scorn, and heads shaking in disapproval. And, boy, do I feel like a victim, because not only is she home, she's standing on the front porch, arms crossed. Waiting.
Officer Downing opens the back door to the low-budget cop car that smells like vinyl, BO, and humiliation. I step out. He hands me my backpack, which Rachel was so kind to bring out when we dropped Rayna off at Galen's house. She was also kind enough not to kill me for showing up at her house with a cop. — Anna Banks

Perry, I've wanted you since the moment I saw you. I'm not going to stop showing you off or rubbing it in to everyone I know, anytime soon ... You're mine. And you're mine alone. From now until the end of time. — Karina Halle

I'm not generally a big solo guy, because I'm not into showing off that way. — James Hetfield

Richard stood, running his fingers through his thick hair, getting it out of his face, and showing his chest off to good advantage. For the first time, I wondered if he'd done it on purpose. I searched his face for that edge of teasing that Jean-Claude had, that knowledge that even that simple movement touched me. There was nothing. Richard's face was guileless, handsome, empty of ulterior motives. I exchanged glances with Jean-Claude. He shrugged. "If you do not understand him, do not look to me. I am not in love with him." Richard looked puzzled. "Did I miss something? — Laurell K. Hamilton

Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. 'Look at him!' Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, 'That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he's done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!' Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. 'That's not fat,' he declared, punching himself in the stomach, 'that's good healthy meat!' He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks. — Christopher Isherwood

I climb out of the Jacuzzi, go to the edge of the pool, curl my toes around the border tiles, and do a standing flip, which I pretzel into a can opener, leaning back just far enough to truly propel a geyser but not so far as to hit my head.

Going under, I hear maximal vacuum suckage. Everything shudders. An aquatic bomb explodes. I surface to see that I have drenched half the banshees.

They stare at me in saucer-eyed wonderment, because I have just done in one dive what they have failed to do in a hundred- shellacked the ceiling, which is now dripping wet, especially around the central light fixture.

I'm kind of disguted with myself for showing off, but it's important to let them know that there are standards in the world. — Conrad Wesselhoeft

I am not trying to say that I am poor and that I don't like beautiful things. But I don't like luxury for luxury sake or in the sense of showing off luxury. — Vladimir Potanin

I am not showing off. I am just being expressive! — Nelson Jack

Good drawing is not copying the surface. It has to do with understanding and expression. We don't want to learn to draw just to end up being imprisoned in showing off our knowledge of joints and muscles. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can't get. We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model's character to make it more vivid. — Richard Williams

We had struck a pact: Better not to know anything about each other. And this pact is what holds families together for generations. We wore masks. Our faces no longer recognizable underneath, for our masks had grown onto us. It hurt to pull them off. It hurt so much that the pain of never meeting face to face was bearable, compared to the pain of showing your true face. — Milena Michiko Flasar

If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is. — Mark Twain

Because I've always been a runner I love to feel that my body is shining on the inside. I wear baggy clothes, so it's not as though I like showing it off. I just like to know I'm great on the inside. — Ellie Goulding

Understand that this art has been created by few soldiers in Vietnam to escape or reach: and this is the spirit I'd like parkour to keep. You have to make the difference between what is useful and what is not in emergency situations. Then you'll know what is parkour and what is not. So if you do acrobatics things on the street with no other goal than showing off, please don't say it's parkour. Acrobatics existed long time ago before parkour. — David Belle

The better you get, the less you run around showing off as a muscle guy. You know, you wear regular shirts-not always trying to show off what you have. You talk less about it. It's like you have a little BMW - you want to race the hell out of this car, because you know it's just going 110. But if you see guys driving a ferrari or a lamborghini, they slide around at 60 on the freeway because they know if they press on that accelerator they are going to go 170. These things are the same in every field. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window ... that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead. — Thomas Pynchon

Im not one for showing off. But I guess my guitar-playing sticks out. — Bert Jansch

I'm not a show-off by nature. — Kate Moss

Next thing you know she'll be on the bus and selling T-shirts in the parking lot, showing off her boobs to get in the stage door."
"At least she has boobs to show," Jess said.
"I have boobs," Chloe said, pointing to her chest. "Just because they're not weighing me down doesn't mean they're not substantial."
"Okay, B cup," Jess said, taking a sip of her drink.
"I have boobs!" Chloe said again, a bit too loudly
she'd already had a couple of minibottles at the Spot. "My boobs are great, goddammit. You know that? They're fantastic! My boobs are amazing. — Sarah Dessen

There definitely have been a few roles that involved showing some skin but I'm not afraid of showing some skin from time to time. I mean the truth is, when I come home I take all my clothes off anyway so I'm kind of used to being naked. — Nolan Gerard Funk

12. If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. [This extremely concise expression is intelligibly paraphrased by Chia Lin: "even though we have constructed neither wall nor ditch." Li Ch'uan says: "we puzzle him by strange and unusual dispositions;" and Tu Mu finally clinches the meaning by three illustrative anecdotes - one of Chu-ko Liang, who when occupying Yang-p'ing and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma I, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated. What Sun Tzu is advocating here, therefore, is nothing more nor less than the timely use of "bluff."] — Sun Tzu

I stretched out my hands as if to ward him off. "Not yet. I want to know what your end game is first."
Another flash of teeth, this time showing his fangs.
"To have you screaming my name within the hour. — Jeaniene Frost

I have a profound dislike for showing off one's material wealth. This is insensitive and it is not what human hearts are made for. But what I like about China and sometimes miss in Europe is the entrepreneurial spirit of our young people, their ambition and dynamism. — Zhang Xin

Again, there's no question that feedback may be one of the most difficult arenas to negotiate in our lives. We should remember, though, that victory is not getting good feedback, avoiding giving difficult feedback, or avoiding the need for feedback. Instead it's taking off the armor, showing up, and engaging. — Brene Brown

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more. — J.D. Salinger

(for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen — Anonymous

Miss Rasputin, what a delight to finally meet you," said the vamp, speaking with only the faintest hint of an accent.
"Let's hope you still feel that way in a few minutes, Mr. Delacroix."
"Pierre, please. And may I call you Evangaline?" Pierre smiled at her winsomely.
"No, you may not. My name is Ms. Rasputin to you."
Her answer took the vamp aback, but he recovered quickly and smiled again showing off his small pointed canines. Pierre's dark eyes flicked over to Ryker in his feline form and he raised an aristocratic brow. "My, what a big pussy you have."
"You know what they say, the bigger the better. — Eve Langlais

Curiously, Laura Warholic is one of those novels in which the characters actually read books.You don't often see this in contemporary fiction. People resent polysyllabic words, find it showing off, never look them up, refuse to play. Words are to a writer what paint is to an artist. I am amazed at how readers refuse to enjoy the out-of-the-way fact, the astonishing detail, the original thought. Style is taken as an affront by stupid and lazy people. Just say it, they say. Sure! Should I die or should I live basically sums up Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. Why didn't he just say so!? — Alexander Theroux

We're human beings we are - all of us - and that's what people are liable to forget. Human beings don't like peace and goodwill and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don't really because they're not made like that. Human beings love eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who'll give them half a chance. — George Bernard Shaw

[When asked if he had ever learned anything about his work from film criticism]
No. To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity. Yet very few critics ever see a film twice or write about films from a leisurely, thoughtful perspective. The reviews that distinguish most critics, unfortunately, are those slambang pans which are easy to write and fun to write and absolutely useless. There's not much in a critic showing off how clever he is at writing silly, supercilious gags about something he hates. — Stanley Kubrick

I have a 'glamour job' on the Hill. That is, I could not care less about gov or politics, but working for a Senator looks good on my resume. And these marble hallways are such great places for meeting boys and showing off my outfits. — Jessica Cutler

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world's richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

First of all, I don't think they have to go that high. That is not necessary, to be that high in the air. I think they're showing off, those pilots. I think we could just go really fast just a few feet off the ground. Just high enough to miss the animals. — Ellen DeGeneres

Love is not about sex, going on fancy dates, or showing off. It's about being with a person who makes you happy in a way nobody else can. — John Spence

Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin. — Catherynne M Valente

Writings by philosophers and psychologists on the differences between intelligence and wisdom might also encourage you to become a better listener. Intelligent people say lots of smart things and produce the right answers to questions more often than less intelligent people, but they are not necessarily good listeners. In contrast, wise people are better listeners and are better at formulating questions than people who aren't so wise.6 So, if you and your firm want to get smarter, the wise thing to do is to shut up, listen, and learn to ask smart questions - not to keep showing off how much you know and how fast you can think. — Robert I. Sutton