Quotes & Sayings About Ostentatious

For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings - the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline - and I thought, Why couldn't those cunts have flown into that building? — Joshua Ferris

Recognising that an ostentatious cult of heroism and state service served an important propaganda function for the British elite does not mean, of course, that we should dismiss it as artificial or insincere. All aristocracies have a strong military tradition, and for many British patricians the protracted warfare of the period was a godsend. It gave them a job, and, more important, a purpose, an opportunity to carry out what they had been trained to do since childhood: ride horses, fire guns, exercise their undoubted physical courage and tell other people what to do. — Linda Colley

Again the Prince found himself facing one of the enigmas of Sicily; in this secret island, where houses are barred and peasants refuse to admit they even know the way to their own village in clear view on a hillock within a few minutes' walk from here, in spite of the ostentatious show of mystery, reserve is a myth. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead, wear your hear matted, long, and ostentatious, but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God? — Kabir

Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life. — Harriet Martineau

I do not play games, but always just say what's on my mind. Ostentatious modesty - for fools. If a man afraid of your honesty, it means that he is not the one you need. — Mila Kunis

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue. — Albert Einstein

There are a lot of big spec houses now all across Connecticut, a lot of ostentatious showing of wealth. — Glenn Close

Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out. — Philip Roth

They've listed my name in the dictionary - 'Imeldific' is used to mean ostentatious extravagance ... But the truth will prevail. — Imelda Marcos

There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth ... namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge. — Roger Bacon

If it were but known that the combined might of the world was against aggression, the war-minded could only seek his salvation in peace, perceiving that further ostentatious preparations for war were idle. — Eden Phillpotts

I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious — Frank O'Hara

I don't like ostentatious galas and stuff like that, but if you get to the Oscars, you'd better get used to it and you'd better enjoy it. — Philippe Falardeau

Hypocrites act by virtue ... They frame many counterfeits of her, with which they make an ostentatious parade, in all public assemblies, and processions; but the original of what they counterfeit, and which may indeed be said to have fallen from heaven, they produce so seldom, that it is cankered by the rust of sloth, and useless from non-application. — Charles Caleb Colton

The artistic taste of the Catholic priests is appalling and I am most anxious to have a Catholic church in which everything is genuine and good, and not tawdry and ostentatious. — Giles Gilbert Scott

The people seemed nearly ostentatious about minding their own business. — Robert Jordan

Always run to the short way; and the short way is the natural: accordingly say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble, and warfare, and all artifice and ostentatious display. — Marcus Aurelius

Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace.
"Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically.
"It is a bit excessive, isn't it?"
"Who does it belong to?"
"My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth. — Liz Williams

Then Childermass related to Mr Norrell what he had discovered about Drawlight: how he belonged to a certain breed of gentlemen, only to be met with in London, whose main occupation is the wearing of expensive and fashionable clothes; how they pass their lives in ostentatious idleness, gambling and drinking to excess and spending months at a time in Brighton and other fashionable watering places; how in recent years this breed seemed to have reached a sort of perfection in Christopher Drawlight. Even his dearest friends would have admitted that he possessed not a single good quality. — Susanna Clarke

The afrit batted his eyelashes with a ostentatious lack of concern. "Indeed? Have you a name?"
"A name?" I cried. "I have MANY names! I am Bartimaeus! I am Sakhr al-Jinni! I am N'gorso the Mighty and the Serpent of Silver Plumes!"
I paused dramatically. The young man looked blank. "Nope never heard of you. Now if you'll just- — Jonathan Stroud

Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre — Samuel Johnson

Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen. — Joshua Reynolds

If it was indeed Nebuchadnezzar, it would be a more ostentatious move than even Kanye West could pull off. — Bianca Juarez Olthoff

Meanwhile, Blakeborough placed himself behind them like a guard. The investigator in Dom went to work analyzing the man's attire--expensive but not ostentatious, studied but not affected--and Blakeborough's wary stance, closed manner, and stiff expression. Was that just his usual response to strangers or a sign that he was bracing for trouble about his brother? Which could mean he was well aware of Barlow's scheme.
But the man in Dom noticed none of that. It just wanted to march over and punch bloody Blakeborough in his perfect, unscarred face for being too rich, too eligible, and too thoroughly engaged to Jane. The man in him wanted to throttle the earl for standing guard over Jane when she should be Dom's responsibility. Dom's to protect. Dom's to marry.
The man in him had to shut up, unfortunately. Or this investigation wouldn't progress very far. — Sabrina Jeffries

Moderation is an ostentatious proof of our strength of character ... — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The lifestyle of many of our colleagues has been very pompous. They conduct weddings and birthdays in such an ostentatious manner that it pains me a lot. It appears that they are making fun of our commitment to the poor. — Sonia Gandhi

Some people in the art world bemoan the hedge fund millionaires spending freely to acquire ostentatious displays of wealth and coolth for their giddily chic designer duplexes. Others bemoan art being treated as a commodity. But most of the bemoaning is because the art world is stuffed full of bemoaners, bemoaning about everything. — Charles Saatchi

Let's take down the gold leaf," Caldenia said. "Elegance is never ostentatious, and there is nothing more bourgeois than covering everything in gold. It screams that one has too much money and too little taste, and it infuriates peasants. A palace should convey a sense of power and grandeur. One should enter and be awestruck. I've found the awe tends to cut down on revolts. — Ilona Andrews

The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia. — Edward Gibbon

There isn't any one material that's mine. It all depends on the context. For example, I did a house that had the most exquisite marble applications. That sounds ostentatious, but it wasn't, given the context. The color white I subscribe to extensively. I love thinking about color, but I often go with white. — Annabelle Selldorf

I will. See you later, and thanks again." Before Carlisle had a chance to leave out of the window she leaned over and kissed him, nothing ostentatious, just sweet and sensitive.
He took no time in hesitating. He reached his arm out and pulled her body close to his. He pressed them together and let his mouth open hers, his tongue slipped inside, and he stole a few more moments of sweetness with her before slipping out of her window and walking down the street, into the distance and eventually out of sight. — Ashley Nemer

There is nothing so difficult to describe as happiness. Whether some feeling of envy enters into the mind upon hearing of it, or whether it is so calm, so unassuming, so little ostentatious in itself, that words give an imperfect idea of it, I know not. It is easier to enjoy it, than define it ... and is oftener found at home, when home has not been embittered by dissensions, suspicions and guilt, than any where else upon earth. Yes, it is in home and in those who watch there for us. — Lady Caroline Lamb

Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time. — George S. Patton

A lot of parts of L.A. are interchangeable with suburbs in Joburg. Very big, ostentatious houses with palm trees and lawns. Lawns are very important. Never underestimate lawns. — Neill Blomkamp

Critics are always complaining about the materialism of hip-hop and accusing the artists of living way above their means. But this ostentatious sort of spending isn't strictly the province of hip-hop. It's almost like a continuation of the American Dream. — Simon De Pury

The grandest discourse ever delivered is an ostentatious failure if the doctrine of the grace of God be absent from it. — Charles Spurgeon

Nathan kissed Madeline on the cheek and shook Ed's hand enthusiastically. He took an ostentatious relish in the civility of his dealings with his ex-wife and family. — Liane Moriarty

It's not against Lottery regulations to lose, obviously - somebody's got to - but it's against the Rules to be seen to lose. It's against the Rules to be seen to win. It's not just that you break the Rules by sitting there. It's that you put everyone else in the position of ostentatious Rulebreakers, manoeuvred into flashing their luck just by walking to work. — Helen DeWitt

Judge Ted Poe's critics - like the civil rights group the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and the Ku Klux Klan's America - it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed. — Jon Ronson

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation. — Adam Smith

You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.
Spoken by Abigail Adams — David McCullough

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth. — Steven Erikson

For me it's a dedication to your real interests. It's an ability to be open-minded. Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success. The great artists have been open-minded, even though they may seem, like Picasso, to be very directed, you can be directed and open-minded at the same time. I think you have to be really intensely serious about your work, but not so serious that you can't see the lightness that may also involve your life. You have to have that lightness too. You have to not be so heavy-handed and so ostentatious. It's very important not to be. — Martha Stewart

So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. — Mark Twain

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores. — Adam Gopnik

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person. — Joseph Addison

I am thinking of the dancing body's magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life's done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it's managed - this body, these bodies, that body - so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think? — Lorrie Moore

Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization. — William H. Prescott

For me to think in terms of employing security seems ostentatious. — Morrissey

The extravagant and ostentatious lifestyles that pass for charisma in a time when almost anybody talks about charisma but if you think about it there's precious little to be seen. — Lester Bangs

I know that many of you do wear such a cross of Christ, not in any ostentatious way, not in a way that might harm you at your work or recreation, but a simple indication that you value the role of Jesus Christ in the history of the world, that you are trying to live by Christ's standards in your own daily life. — Keith O'Brien

Nor have I any idea why Said should consider Orwell's life a 'comfortable' one. Having taken a bullet through the throat, and while suffering from a demoralising and ultimately lethal case of TB, he lived on an astonishingly low budget and tried whenever possible to grow his own food and even to make his own furniture. Indeed, if there was anything affected about him, it might be his indifference to bourgeois life, his almost ostentatious austerity. — Christopher Hitchens

How different is the ready hand, tearful eye, and soothing voice, from the ostentatious appearance which is called pity. — Jane Porter

Only small men parade their learning, talk over their audience and air their superior knowledge. Only brutal men throw their strength about, and vain rich men display their wealth in ostentatious useless luxuries. — John Myer

Chicago is the proverbial middle child of large U.S. cities. Some might consider this analogy only in reference to Chicago's geographic location in the middle of the country. However, the analogy is multifaceted; like most middle children and like books between elaborate bookends, Chicago can sometimes be easy to overlook. It is smart and genuine, but it is always compared, for better or for worse, to its older and younger siblings, New York and Los Angeles. It's the less notorious but smarter sister to New York; it's the less ostentatious but considerably more genuine sister to Los Angeles. — Penny Reid

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot. Or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. — Roger Deakins

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty ... the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty. — James Baldwin

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison. — Samuel Johnson

They were lounging, in fact, in an almost ostentatious manner, as if to say to passersby like myself, Look uponst my exquisite lounging, foolish mortal, and mourn that you will never lounge with such cosmopolitan savoir faire. — Kevin Hearne

We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing; it was not wise, or tasteful: it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility; and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish. — Kerry Greenwood

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf. — Mark Twain

Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. — Mark Twain

I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious. — Don Roff

The miserable consumption of the poor is partly the result of the ostentatious demands of the rich. There isn't enough for both, and the latter get far more than they need ... But could anything seriously be done about it? — John Kenneth Galbraith

After I made it my business to find out how much money people have been squandering on these frivolous and insanely ostentatious fireworks displays we've seen in every corner of Istanbul every night this summer, I had to ask myself if the people celebrating at those weddings might not have been happier - bearing in mind that we are now a city of ten million people - if the money had been spent on educating the children of the poor. Am I right or wrong [1997]? Especially — Orhan Pamuk

It's very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

If a young lady has that discretion and modesty without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more than on displaying what she has. — Hannah More

He belonged to a certain breed of gentlemen, only to be met with in London, whose main occupation is the wearing of expensive and fashionable clothes; how they pass their lives in ostentatious idleness, gambling and drinking to excess and spending months at a time in Brighton and other fashionable watering places; how in recent years this breed seemed to have reached a sort of perfection in Christopher Drawlight. Even his dearest friends would have admitted that he possessed not a single good quality.1 — Susanna Clarke

The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding
or wanting to admit
that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us. — Daniel Pennac

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. — Peter Sloterdijk

From heaven's standpoint, all spiritual victories are won not primarily in the pulpit, not primarily in the klieg light of publicity, nor yet through the ostentatious blaring of trumpets, but in the secret place of prayer. — Paul Billheimer

If we say that a person has style we may wish to imply that he is unnatural, affected, self-conscious or ostentatious. In the sixteenth century 'maniera' was generally a desirable attribute of a work of art, but this positive aspect was accompanied by the realization of the negative one that correspond to what we now call, derogatively, stylization. — John Shearman

I have a vernacular house on the seaside in Northumberland and an Edwardian semi in south Manchester. They're both exactly as big as they need to be. I can't be doing with an ostentatious, big house - you can only be in one room at a time. — Val McDermid