Quotes & Sayings About Pomposity

he talked until their food arrived, littering his chat with references to 'ninety k' and 'a quarter of a mill', and every sentence was angled, like a mirror, to show him in the best possible light: his cleverness, his quick thinking, his besting of slower, stupider yet more senior colleagues... — Robert Galbraith

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. — Marilynne Robinson

Consider an achievement accidental if it is not coupled with modesty. Because if the achiever had endeavoured for it, it would certainly have killed their pride. — Raheel Farooq

So a while back I spent a night in jail. Now, as for exactly what landed me there, I'd be so delighted to never have to go into any of the details regarding that. Besides, other people's theories are so much more exotic and exciting than the reality. I've heard everything from 'attempted terrorism' to 'indecent public condescension. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

Of all human activities, education is the one most likely to give rise to cant, pomposity and fraudulent expertise. — John Rae

Detective Inspector Eccles sighed. He may ordinarily have met his sigh with the question of why the newly appointed Superintendent Dickinson was turning up to this late hour crime scene, he may also ordinarily question why his superior officer was dressed as Julius Caesar, in full tunic and green leafy wreath, yet ever since the new and youngest-ever-appointed superintendent had arrived at the Met it had been all too clear he was an officer who didn't quite do things by the eBook. — Tom Conrad

How true is the saying that the very highest in rank are always the most simple and kindly. It is from you half-and-half sort of people that you get pomposity and vulgarity — H. Rider Haggard

That's what's so great about the Internet. It allows pompous blow-hards to connect with other pompous blow-hards in a vast circle-jerk of pomposity. — Bill Maher

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage. — Noam Chomsky

Is that why you came?'
'No, I came because I simply can't get enough of people looking down their noses at me. The girls at school are getting frightfully lax about it.'
'Are they? How remiss of them. We're taught from the cradle how to look down our noses, you know, we rich sons of bitches. Perhaps Westcliffe's curriculum is a tad too liberal these days. — Shana Abe

I do not have it in for relativism. In many respects I find it a fascinating, even attractive, alternative. It engenders epistemological humility, defeats an arrogant pomposity in belief, even promotes a sort of democratic ideal in matters of knowledge. Perhaps its most comforting feature is that it requires no hard work at all in the matter of justifying beliefs. — David L. Wolfe

I find it incredibly tedious, hate that it murders itself with its own conservative pomposity. — Fiona Shaw

I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool. — Daryl Hall

Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not. — Edwin Newman

Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do. — Johnny Carson

I'm attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I'm sick of that. — Billy Corgan

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious. — Neal Stephenson

Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes. — Stephen Fry

In many college English courses the words "myth" and "symbol" are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain't no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that's how Melville did it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The very greatest satire, I came to think
the kind that lives forever
ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn't take yourself *that* seriously. You were part of it. All the Lilliputian preening and pomposity was, at bottom, one's own. — Terry Castle

Solemnity, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor. It somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. The self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat! And so, dishonestly, they pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial. — John Cleese

I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experience of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page. — Jonathan Franzen

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition. — Charles Caleb Colton

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)] — Edmund Burke

Those who run to long words are mainly the unskillful and tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, and bulk with force. — Henry Watson Fowler

The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value. — Paul Fussell

(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos', — Tom Service

There are things about some professional athletes that I cannot stand-the pretense, the egos, the pomposity, the greed. — Ted Simmons

All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world. — Stephen Hunt

People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music. — Elvis Costello

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; — Stewart Brand

You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience — Marilynne Robinson

But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to be triumphal. Harry Penn was certain that in his nearly one hundred years he had never encountered a soul more intensely marinated in self-satisfaction. Craig Binky's pomposity was often relieved, for others, by what Harry Penn generously termed Mr. Binky's somewhat inexact intelligence. — Mark Helprin

His pomposity is overshadowed only by his rank stupidity — Ann Coulter

Well, the film's not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it's pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies. I had never read anything like this until I was doing the film, but Mark [Joffe, the director] and people showed me stuff where, like a flood, it mattered where the water came from. If you're flooded from above, you get the money; if you're flooded from below, you don't. What's that about? — Billy Connolly

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses. — Terence McKenna

The dead," he had said once, "need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead." At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known. — Peter S. Beagle

It was clear that the house was run on a certain system, of either great pomposity or great denial - it was too early for her to make up her mind about which one it was. — Noorilhuda

I've always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in. — Charles Kimbrough

We are not actually in charge of life, yet behave as if we are the masters of our own destiny. The realization of this fact is quite a hard one. The ridiculousness of our pomposity and presumption can only result in anger or humor. — Billy Childish

I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I know the Muslim psychology. It is all pomposity and bravado. I give you my word that if Islam is ridiculed publicly and systematically, it will be defeated. Shame is a great motivator as well as deterrent. Do not underestimate the power of ridicule. This is serious stuff not a laughing matter. — Ali Sina

I'm not saying that all college students are subhuman - I'm just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts. — Lester Bangs

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself. — William Golding