Parvenu Quotes & Sayings

We forget the origin of a parvenu if he remembers it; we remember it if he forgets it. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Good God, is the man a heathen?'

'Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture. — Melanie Jackson

His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement. — Jane Gardam

My mother isn't mentioned, but what she taught me to say in place of ain't I? or aren't I? or ain't I? was am I not? Speed isn't everything. So I lose a micro-second here and there. The main thing is to be a graceful parvenu. — Kurt Vonnegut

In the narrow thread of sod between the shaved banks and the toppling fences grow the relics of what once was Illinois - the prairie.
No one in the bus sees these relics. A worried farmer, his fertilizer bill projecting from his shirt pocket, looks blankly at the lupines, lespedezas or Baptisias that originally pumped nitrogen out of the prairie air and into his black loamy acres. He does not distinguish them from the parvenu quack-grass in which they grow. Were I to ask him the name of that white spike of pea-like flowers hugging the fence, he would shake his head. A weed, likely. — Aldo Leopold