Quotes & Sayings About Pretentiousness

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays ... — Stephen Fry

F. Franklin the Fourth has a job with a firm rich in heritage, money and pretentiousness, a firm vastly superior to Brodnax and Speer. His sidekicks at the moment are W. Harper Whittenson, an arrogant little snot who will, thankfully, leave Memphis and practice with a mega-firm in Dallas; J. Townsend Gross, who has accepted a position with another huge firm; and James Straybeck, a sometimes friendly sort who's suffered three years of law school without an initial to place before his name or numerals to stick after it. With such a short name, his future as a big-firm lawyer is in jeopardy. I doubt if he'll make it. — John Grisham

Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness. — Richard Mitchell

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful. — Criss Jami

Repetition for no reason is a sign of carelessness or pretentiousness, but there are plenty of good reasons to repeat words and phrases. — Steven Millhauser

Only assholes put a nickname on their business card. — Michael Crichton

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before. — Criss Jami

A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In my defense, I love the book in a postmodern kind of way where I've always sensed that it contains something that I relate to. I think it's the kind of book that echoes my beliefs and my sentiments and I've always related well to people who have read the book and I've written about the book. You know, I majored in comp lit and it's possible, it's very possible to read a book without reading it in the traditional straightforward manner. You can read about a book, Joe. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand? — Caroline Kepnes

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics ... For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew. — Polybius

I got into music, I was in a band, I was at art school. I was quite trendy, although I'd hate to meet myself. The over-preening, the pretentiousness, the arrogance of youth! I think, 'Oh, that guy was so full of himself.' — Peter Capaldi

Don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it. — Charles Bukowski

In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime. — Karl Popper

Pretentiousness repels but authenticity attracts, and vulnerability is the pathway to intimacy. — Rick Warren

I pick up the list of Benji's five favorite books because we've got work to do:

"Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. He's a pretentious fuck and a liar.

"Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He's a snob.

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. He's a spoiled passport-carrying fuck stunted in eighth grade.

"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace. Enough already.

"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane. He's got Mayflowers in his blood. — Caroline Kepnes

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing. — Brenda Ueland

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense. — Chuck Palahniuk

You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness. — Colin Meloy

I once heard that Quentin Tarantino, who I obviously love and think is a genius, says that there's no such thing as guilty pleasure, there's only pleasures. And I do love that idea, because I do think that there's a pretentiousness when people make a list of their favorite things. I like to live a life where I don't think of my pleasures as guilty pleasures. — Mindy Kaling

All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye? — Peter S. Beagle

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is the pretense of intelligent ignorance. The former is teachable; the latter is not. — Criss Jami

Short lives,

bouncing harmlessly as a cloth doll on grandma's lap.

Small helpless states,

pretentiousness garbed in the unintelligible,

makers of disposable art,

the zeal to make a scoop unstoppable,

pacified by fresh news,

of scrabbling sexy movements. — Brian D'Ambrosio

Even after all these years, she still said the word "gig" self-consciously, in the same way that she always said "croissant" with the proper French pronunciation, but with an apologetic, self-deprecating look to make up for her pretentiousness. — Liane Moriarty

Pretentiousness is a comedy vein filled with riches. — Torry Martin

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. — George Meredith

Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us. — Henry Miller

Never trust someone that claims they care nothing of what society thinks of them. Instead of conquering obstacles, they simply pretend they don't exist. — Tiffany Madison

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive. — Harry G. Frankfurt

The words of the Greeks are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts. — Marcus Porcius Cato

Pretentiousness is closely allied to stupidity and that simplicity has a subtle but agreeable flavour. — Marcel Proust

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will ; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Personally I don't spend much time thinking about being funny. For me it's always been just a way to get by, a way to be likable yet to remain removed. When I speak up, it's not because I have any particular answers; rather, I have a desire to puncture the pretentiousness of those who seem so certain they do. — Wendy Wasserstein

Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel. — Alexander McCall Smith

I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive. — E. M. Forster

These were wannabe elites who, once they popped on big-boy pants, would be infiltrating New York with their pretentiousness. — Alexandra Martin

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard

To be full of yourself is to make a fool of yourself. — Ashly Lorenzana

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. — Raymond Chandler

I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character. — Sergio Chejfec

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it — Marianne Moore

Like all the girls back then I knew that being too clever was much worse than being too tall. Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads of the fairy tale before I knew it. In any case, you could cultivate the wrong sort of silence - the sort that implied brooding self-absorption rather than attentiveness. — Lorna Sage

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart. — Criss Jami

There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments. — Glenway Wescott

I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man's Cellini or a road company Cosimo de' Medici ... the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist. — Lucius Beebe

He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he'd been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected. — Lev Grossman

Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist. — Cornel West

The vanity of intelligence is that the intelligent man is often more committed to 'one-upping' his opponent than being truthful. When the idea of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, becomes a staple, there is no wisdom in it. — Criss Jami

A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know. — Criss Jami

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred. — Aleksandar Hemon

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of the soul. — W. Somerset Maugham

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore. — Criss Jami

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question How do I look? — Haruki Murakami