Ostentatiously Quotes & Sayings

When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened. — Joseph J. Ellis

He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, and after Elizabeth's taunt he cocked up a hind leg and carefully, ostentatiously, groomed his private parts, a habit which he often used with great effect to annoy his women folk. — Olaf Stapledon

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people. — Jean-Claude Izzo

An increasing number of people are growing uncomfortable with the gulf between the world's rich and the poor. Ostentatiously splashing your money around simply draws attention to that disparity, and to your own position on the lucky higher ground. It suggests a callousness, an inhumanity, a let's-just-rub-their-noses-in-it arrogance. — Kalle Lasn

Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon. — Susan Glaspell

For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly. — Rick Perlstein

Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, — David Foster Wallace

The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence. — Niklas Luhmann

No story shows more clearly Jesus' utter disregard of human privilege - disregard, not antipathy or distaste. He is swayed neither by Jairus's prominence nor by the woman's poverty, but by the faith and desperate need of each one. Jesus is not a strategic political calculator, currying favor with the local leaders; nor is he a revolutionary, ostentatiously undercutting the powerful. He is a restorer of daughters, known and unknown, socially central and socially marginal. And while he is indifferent to human power, he is so exquisitely aware of his own power to restore health (which is simply another way to say flourishing image bearing) that the slightest faithful brush with his cloak brings him to a halt, not content to have power flow anonymously and disconnectedly, searching out relationship with the ones who seek him. — Andy Crouch

They looked like children from three separate families, Alex the athlete, all shoulders and biceps, off into the wild blue yonder every other weekend, canoeing, mountain biking, Benjy a kind of boy-liquid which had been poured into whatever space he happened to be occupying, and Daisy ... Angela wondered if something dreadful had happened to her daughter over the past year, something that might explain the arrogant humility, the way she'd made herself so ostentatiously plain. — Mark Haddon

bent ostentatiously to her work. — Gregory Maguire

The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

Glanced ostentatiously at my bangle. Blood alcohol content .01%, heart rate leveling off at 72 beats per minute, time 11:42 p.m. — Elizabeth Bear

On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god. — Christopher Hitchens

Money is never to be squandered or spent ostentatiously. Some of the greatest people in history have lived lives of the greatest simplicity. Remember it's the you inside that counts. — Rose Kennedy

It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved. — George Bernard Shaw

LADY BRACKNELL
Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire? — Oscar Wilde

Why is it that Serge Lange's Linear Algebra, published by no less a Verlag than Springer, ostentatiously displays the sale of a few thousand copies over a period of fifteen years, while the same title by Seymour Lipschutz in the The Schaum's Outlines will be considered a failure unless it brings in a steady annual income from the sale of a few hundred thousand copies in twenty-six languages? — Gian-Carlo Rota

None mourn more ostentatiously than those who most rejoice at it [a death]. — Tacitus

The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment ... that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?
... I do not maintain that prohibition of sex is a ruse; but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch. — Michel Foucault

We took tea, by Boswell's desire; and I eat one bun, I think, that I might not be seen to fast ostentatiously. When I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try, because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try, in humble hope of the help of God. — Samuel Johnson

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Makery-ness in the U.S. comes as part of a complex of oppositional attitudes toward mainstream culture that is more about social signaling than unvarnished commitment to DIY. The Maker Movement involves ostentatiously DIY products, designed and assembled against a background of nostalgia for the old U.S. manufacturing industry, often produced in small batches for connoisseurs of the handmade, created as a form of conspicuous production. Meanwhile, — Clay Shirky

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved. — Hilary Mantel

None grieve so ostentatiously as those who rejoice most in heart.
[Lat., Nulla jactantius moerent quam qui maxime laetantur.] — Tacitus

Whole time. Partway through the night he began to keep so ostentatiously — Isobelle Carmody

No man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward. — Charles Baudelaire

He smiled ostentatiously to show himself reasonable and nice. "I'm not saying that to be cruel and insulting," he continued with cruel and insulting delight. — Joseph Heller

It is very possible to be proud of the spiritual gifts God has entrusted to us and to strut about ostentatiously, forgetting that we have nothing which we have not received, that grace is a gift, an undeserved favor. We can actually be filled with pride at the eloquence and brilliance of our sermon on humility. — J. Oswald Sanders

Both black and gleaming, ostentatiously so. I was acutely aware of our luggage piling up on the platform, matching and initialed and gleaming with comfortable wealth. I couldn't help but — Melanie Benjamin

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. — Herman Melville

The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults ... — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

But it does not require much effort to see that the dialogue in liberal democracy is of a peculiar kind because its aim is to maintain the domination of the mainstream and not to undermine it. A deliberation is believed to make sense only if the mainstream orthodoxy is sure to win politically. Today's 'dialogue' politics are a pure form of the right-is-might politics, cleverly concealed by the ostentatiously vacuous rhetoric of all-inclusiveness. — Ryszard Legutko

How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life. I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me. — Jon Ronson