People Who Gossip Quotes & Sayings

Most of the time I paid it no mind. I kept to myself and everyone in my town of Henryetta liked it that way. While my grandma saw helpful information such as droughts and locust infestations, I was cursed with seeing useless and mundane things like Mrs. White's toilet overflow or the ear infection in Jenny Baxter's baby. None of that would be so bad if I kept what I saw to myself, but my visions didn't work that way. Without any volition of my own, whatever I saw just blurted right out of my mouth. Most of the people who knew me thought I was a snoop or a gossip, the only rational explanation to reason away my knowledge. But Momma had another opinion. She declared me demon-possessed. — Denise Grover Swank

I have been affected by gossip and I know people who have been, too. I've seen marriages destroyed by gossip. It is cruel. At the end of the day, all that matters is: Do you love what you see when you look in the mirror? That is it, baby. — Jada Pinkett Smith

I have heard it said that if you stay in one place long enough, the whole world would eventually pass by you. I'm not sure if I buy that, but if you have four miles to walk to a lake, while stuck behind a bunch of teenage girls, you will hear quite enough gossip about the place you are in, not to mention the people who reside there, to make that world quite interesting. I have already learned quite enough about Reed Wellington, my beautiful sophomore guide with a penchant for rudeness. — Amy A. Bartol

Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot ...
Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway?
Well, here's the thing. You too can find yourself shedding wisdom like cat hair if you only allow yourself the liberty of introspection.
Think about what you alone know that no one else does. That one neat wonderful profound insight. It is fully yours. No one else on this planet of about six billion people understands it like you do.
Now, see if you can share it with someone. Bestow it, a gift of yourself.
Wisdom is like gossip. Except it's the good kind. — Vera Nazarian

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide. — Honore De Balzac

I deserve this shrimp. Born to people who clearly shouldn't have reproduced, I date my best friend and turn him gay, date another man who doesn't know he's gay, almost have dinner with a third man who's more interested in his reflection than me, and land on a yeti who turns out to be a millionaire playboy.

"I lost the man I thought of as a father, had my thirtieth birthday party minus any family, and now I'm being dissed in the gossip rags. I am only human and I can take no more, so, yes, I have consumed my body weight in wine and I plan on eating this whole goddamn plate of shrimp. — L.A. Fiore

You don't have to concern yourself with other people's points of view. Once you can see that nothing others say or do is about you, it doesn't matter who gossips about you, who blames you, who rejects you, who disagree with your point of view. All the gossip doesn't affect you. You don't even bother to defend your point of view.
You let the dogs bark, and surely they will bark, and bark, and bark. So what? Whatever people say doesn't affect you because you are immune to their opinions and their emotional poison. — Janet Mills

Prayer Thank You, Lord, that You are a God of justice who longs to show mercy and grace to us. Thank You that You are our great Defender against the Enemy, other people, and unjust suffering. Thank You that You see all we are going through and that You have compassion and pity on us. Help us to have compassion and pity on others who are likewise going through a time of trial or suffering. We ask that You would help us to bless our enemies and that You would use times of frustration, suffering, and trials to make us more like Jesus. Forgive us when we hurt others, and forgive us when we fall into gossip or self-pity. Give us the strength and grace to trust in You, lean on You, and depend on You at all times and in all things for Your perfect judgment and grace. In Jesus' name, Amen. — Beth Redman

It's weird how people who are the least close to me or who've never even met me purport to be experts on the real me; and then, sadly, there are those who could be in touch with me but prefer to gossip with strangers about me instead. — Vanna Bonta

Gossip columnists patrol their mundane arena with the same sort of mysterious merit the advice-givers do. Plainly put, how does anyone become a gossip columnist? I can't simplify it down to a lower scale than that. Are there universities that offer courses in gossip writing? How about plain old Gossip 111? Are there that many literate people who could not write a gossip column? What then, qualifies the chosen few above the rest? — Donald Jeffries

Prefer spacious interactions with fewer people. And it means that, when you converse, you are more interested in sharing ideas than in talking about people and what they're doing. In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert's eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. This is not because the introvert is morally superior - he just doesn't get it. As we've discussed, introverts are energized and excited by ideas. Simply talking about people, what they do and who they know, is noise for the introvert. He'll be looking between the lines for some meaning, and this can be hard work! Before long, he'll be looking for a way out of the conversation. But when an introvert is hanging out — Laurie A. Helgoe

In a conversation with someone sharing gossip, the introvert's eyes glaze over and his brow furrows as he tries to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. This is not because the introvert is morally superior - he just doesn't get it. As we've discussed, introverts are energized and excited by ideas. Simply talking about people, what they do and who they know, is noise for the introvert. He'll be looking between the lines for some meaning, and this can be hard work! Before long, he'll be looking for a way out of the conversation. — Laurie A. Helgoe

To most of society being crazy is like a virus. If we're out and about in public people think they can catch the craziness from us or something. It's much easier for them to separate us and forget we ever existed. Almost like being quarantined. I used to see a psychiatrist before I was brought here. I remember the way my mother's friends used to gossip about it. They wouldn't let me play with their children. It's kind of like women who are divorced nowadays. Other women don't talk to them. They're usually shunned."
A dull ache throbs in my side and I clench my fists.
"It's like we're tossed out trash." Aurora smiles. "That's a great analogy, Adelaide. — Lauren Hammond

Stay away from people who gossip and spread rumors. They are choosing the path of emotional bullying and negativity. — Steve Maraboli

His lips twitched upward, and warmth spread through him as he said, "I can't dance."

"Dancing is for people who don't truly appreciate the buffet."

"I have nothing to wear."

"I'll find something for you."

"The nobility will gossip about you until the day you die," he said. One last attempt to talk sense into her even though he knew it was a lost cause.

"They need a new hobby anyway." She smiled at him. — C.J. Redwine

She is also my only friend - apart from Emily Pagett, who reminds me of Baba in The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien, Hutchinson, 1962), in that she often spreads lies about me - but which I tolerate, because she also tells me gossip about other people, which is fascinating. Even if it's also not true. I recognize that ultimately you have make your own amusement. — Caitlin Moran

Everyone likes to tell stories. And gossip is, of course, even more exciting, if you know the people. But if the gossip's about yourself, it's very weird. They once wrote about me that I had been clubbing with some guys. At the moment I'm a victim and that hurts because it's not me who does something like that. Such stories are just unfair. — Blake Lively

Would it have killed her to play along? To have told Pauline, Oh my! You're kidding! What a scandal! If gossip gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she'd nursed through cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of contacts with people - a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a bus driver - who did not meet her expectations. — Alice McDermott

The Christian should never have to put others down in order to feel good about himself. Instead, he can simply check out the media's insistent portrayal of Christianity and feel grateful that he isn't as deceived as the masses who really swallow the garbage. Ignorance is ultimately how people put themselves down, and the mere Christian who knows what entails the mere Christian is ultimately free from such. — Criss Jami

Don't indulge in gossip ... People who throw mudballs always manage to end up getting a little on themselves. — Ann Landers

Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts. If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the "dangerous Communists" of outer life, or the official plus the prosperous man with the "grasping capitalists." In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a "projection." Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships. — C. G. Jung

It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it. — Alexander McCall Smith

Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves
this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars. (p. 65) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Surgery has warped the faces of every woman over thirty; they don't look younger, just not quite human in a way society has decided to pretend not to see. Half of the people are talking more to the holograms from their rings or badges than they are to the people around them. What conversation I can hear is mostly gossip: who's shagging who, who's making money, who's losing it, who's not invited to the next party like this. Maybe the technology is different, but the shallowness of the scene is probably universal. So this is the life my father escaped when he chose to go into science, to leave Great Britain and join Mom in California. He was even smarter than I knew. — Claudia Gray

And in every one of us, there's a war going on. It's a civil war. I don't care who you are, I don't care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set out to be good, there's something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It's going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. There's a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us ... There's a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I've had our paper's gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. — Renata Adler

How do you untell something? You can't. You can't put words back in your mouth. What you can do, is spread false gossip ... so people think that everything that's been said is untrue. Include that Stanley is having an affair. It's like the end of Spartacus. I have seen the movie half a dozen times, and I still don't know who the real Spartacus is. And, that is what makes that movie a classic whodunnit. — Michael Scott

Beware some people are just talking to you to gain information to use against you. Be careful with what you say around others because it may not be understood the way you expected. There are those who are waiting for the opportunity to spread rumors. And, with only a few words your life has been turned into a soap opera. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

According to the Talmud, loshon hara kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is told. 'Kill' may strike the modern reader as a bit hyperbolic, but when you think of all the friendships lost, careers stunted, and opportunities thwarted as a result of gossip among women, violent language seems appropriate. We cause serious collateral damage to the advancement of our sex each time we perpetuate the stereotype that women can't get along. — Rachel Held Evans

Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip? — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

No one pries as effectively into other people's business as those whose business it most definitely is not ... What for? For nothing. For the sake of finding out, knowing, penetrating the mystery. Out of an itching need to be able to tell. And often, once these secrets are out, the mysteries broadcast, the enigmas exposed to the light of day, they lead to catastrophe, duels, bankruptcies, ruined families, shattered existences-to the great joy of those who "got to the bottom of it all" for no apparent reason and through sheer instinct. Sad. Some people are malicious out of a simple need to have something to say. Their conversation, parlour talk, antechamber gossip, is reminiscent of those fireplaces that swiftly go through the wood-they need a lot of fuel and the fuel is their neighbour. — Victor Hugo

Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher's deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher's basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein. — Christopher Isherwood

that people here see her as an eccentric, the actor's wife who inks mysterious cartoons that no one's ever laid eyes on - "My wife's very private about her work," Arthur says in interviews - and who doesn't drive and likes to go for long walks in a town where nobody walks anywhere and who has no friends except a Pomeranian, although does anyone really know this last part? She hopes not. Her friendlessness is never mentioned in gossip blogs, which she appreciates. She hopes she isn't as awkward to other people as she feels to herself. — Emily St. John Mandel

Did you know that the origin of the word gossip in English is "god-sibling"? It's the talk between people who are godparents to the same child, people who have a legitimate loving interest in the person they talk about. It's talk that weaves a net of support and connection beneath the people you want to protect. — Beth Gutcheon

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts. — Anna Godbersen

It's not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls "reverse dominance hierarchies" in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It's uncannily similar to Marx's dream of the "dictatorship of the proletariat.")34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It's a great example of how "innate" refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it's a mistake to look at today's hunter-gatherers and say, "See, that's what human nature really looks like! — Jonathan Haidt

Remember that I have been a legalist. We are the ones who throw stones. We are quick to judge without knowledge. We feed rumors and incline our heads to hear more. We label the messy people and gossip about the sinners and shake our heads in disgust. And when you have been a legalist in ministry, it's not pretty. And it's not ministry. And it couldn't possibly be what the Jesus had in mind when He said, "Go and teach them about me. — Angela Thomas

People who believed the world to be an undignified,
inglorious place, and who spent their evenings and nights
talking on and on about the mistakes others had made. They were
people whom solitude had made into the judges of the world,
whose verdicts were scattered to the four winds for whoever cared
to listen — Paulo Coelho

Remember, kiddo, gossip says a lot about people. But not the people who are talked about. Only the people who do the talking." — Charleigh Rose

'Shoot the wounded ... what we do to people who are the most vulnerable ... we 'shoot the wounded.' As if they haven't suffered enough, we add to it by gossiping and treating hurt people like outcasts." ... "I think we killed Ronnie's spirit ... Instead of coming alongside her and supporting her through this, I failed her ... — Lynn Dove

Gossip is not adopted by the bored. It is an art of discourse adopted by those who have experienced absolutely nothing thrilling in their lives; they have never really fallen in love or casually spoken to a complete stranger, and they never dreamt of doing anything extraordinary. They are a group of people with dull lives and souls. — Kanza Javed

Always be ready for criticism for there shall always be people who shall be ready always to criticize you. The positive lesson you learn from your critics, is the most important thing which matter and not just the matter! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction. — Fran Lebowitz

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that. — Oscar Wilde

I won't live in L.A. again, hell no, my friends tell me s**t when they come over I don't want to hear. I don't even know who got married and who got pregnant. You turn on the news in L.A. and it is all gossip about people. All the stuff that is going on in the world right now and this gossip is the news? ... I love the BBC. I haven't heard myself mentioned on TV since I have been here. That has been really weird for me, and great. — Lindsay Lohan

It's funny how the people who know the least about you, always have the most to say. — Auliq Ice

The way people appear in the gossip papers, as they're depicted as celebrities, it's not often much like who they are. The more people I meet, the more that's true. Sometimes, they're worse. — Casey Affleck

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. — Bill Keller

Certainly there are people who like me, but then there are those who don't know me who gossip about me. You can't believe the things I've heard. — Carrie Fisher

It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights. The family was too poor and too hardworked to make many acquaintances; in Packingtown, as a rule, people know only their near neighbors and shopmates, and so the place is like a myriad of little country villages. But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to travel and widen her horizon; and so each week there would be new personalities to talk about, - how so-and-so was dressed, and where she worked, and what she got, and whom she was in love with; and how this man had jilted his girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl, and what had passed between them; and how another man beat his wife, and spent all her earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes. Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to talk about what one knows. It — Upton Sinclair

I would just be constantly writing all these zingers - like, 'Burn. That would really get her.' And I know people are going to obsess over who it's about, because they think they have all my relationships mapped out. But there's a reason there are not any overt call-outs in that song. My intent was not to create some gossip-fest. I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives. — Taylor Swift

We live in a world, a medieval type of world, where someone can accuse you - through gossip and hearsay, and all of a sudden you're supposed to respond to specific charges from people you don't know, are not aware of who these people are, and you're supposed to respond to their specific allegations? — Rand Paul

You make the choice concerning who you associate with on a daily basis. Whenever there are people around you who continually gossip or nag, you have the option to entertain that nonsense or leave it alone. The choice is yours. Most of the time people you hang around are a reflection of yourself. We often times attract people with like-minded personalities. So, if you enjoy that type of company it says much about your character. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

sing the song and let people do the interpretation. It is your duty to sing the unsung songs and it is their duty to do the interpretation — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

A lot of people say about 'Gossip Girl,' 'Well, how do you feel about gossip?' Well, who really likes gossip? No one likes to be talked about if it's not flattering or a compliment. — Jessica Szohr