Quotes & Sayings About Vulgarity

Luck often raises vulgarity to a high position, to create mirth for the beholders. — Juvenal

I think Australians like a bit of vulgarity. — Julian Clary

Havana was a woman who had once been renowned for her beauty until hard times had soured her. Her hand had gotten heavy with makeup application: her necklines had crept down; her beauty was tainted with vulgarity. But sometimes when she was alone, after she'd taken off her makeup, she danced in her garden, bare-faced and barefoot, to an old bolero, and the old elegance appeared, normal as a Tuesday evening. — Julia Cooke

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. — Oscar Wilde

To act well in this world, one must sacrifice all personal desires. The people who become missionaries of religious thought have no other Fatherland than this thought. Man is not on Earth merely to be happy, nor even simply to be honest. He is here to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility, and to surmount the vulgarity of nearly every individual. — Ernest Renan

One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity. — Kevin Smith

Nude paintings and sculptures are called "art" only in the museums..
Outside of the museums, It is "Absurdity" and "Vulgarity".
To respect your own creative talent and the prosperity of your "art", let only the Gurus critique, suggest and guide you; don't let your work be affected by others' choices and understandings. — Himmilicious

She possessed intelligence and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila's intelligence. — Elena Ferrante

Silence is the safest response for all the contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

If you think one thing is sacred but you cannot stand the other, if you love the Creator but hate the creation, that is vulgarity. — Jaggi Vasudev

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay. — Louis Kronenberger

[O]ne man's vulgarity is another's lyric. — John Marshall Harlan

What, she's taken the hairs off her honeypot?" he said, horrified into uncharacteristic vulgarity. — Diana Gabaldon

To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death. — Don DeLillo

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit. — Doris Day

Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed. — Mark Twain

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is a crime — Oscar Wilde

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. — Dinesh D'Souza

In this circle, one thought, married, and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity for ever trying to enter, just as the London fog tries to enter the pine-woods pouring through the gaps in the northern hills. But, — E. M. Forster

How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not. — John Keats

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art ... I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise. — Quentin Crisp

European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And then I remember this morning and I wonder if it really happened or if I dreamed it. It was nice. And weird. And tender. I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn't live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins. — Jennifer Donnelly

It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness. — Lawrence Durrell

The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene ... is the movie vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature. — Roger Ebert

I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity. — Octavio Paz

Vulgarity of manners defiles fine garments more than mud. — Plautus

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. — Vladimir Nabokov

It seems the door to permissiveness, the door to lewdness and vulgarity and obscenity swings only one way. It only opens farther and farther; it never seems to swing back. Individuals can choose to close it, but it is certain, historically speaking, that public appetite and public policy will not close it. No, in the moral realm the only real control you have is self-control. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Oscar Wilde said that "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime," and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads. — Mark Forsyth

They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. — Ray Bradbury

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. — Don DeLillo

Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust. — Matthew Woodring Stover

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken — William Hazlitt

The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But ... there's often a freshness that is missing in later works
for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way. — Kingsley Amis

I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it. — Coco Chanel

A travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity. — Erica Jong

To hold her, to keep her
just as she was
with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don't believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life
— Vladimir Nabokov

WARNING
This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank. If that sort of thing bothers you, then gentle reader pass by, for we endeavor only to entertain, not to offend. That said, if that's the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story! — Christopher Moore

Vulgarity has no nation. — Arthur Miller

The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth. — Stephane Mallarme

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation. — George Bernard Shaw

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms. — Georges Bataille

Is this not precisely how the universe should look if fantasied by a defiled overmind? Is this not exactly how the universe should be presented if shaped by the careful hand of pure but unforgivingly patient malevolence? Who but the immaculate embodiment of malice would design such a contemptible thing? Indeed, is not the vulgarity of scale proof of an Omnimalevolent Creator, greater even than the finely tuned universe itself? Only a thoroughly corrupted, wicked mind could conceive of such impossible proportions and be in possession of the boorish inclination needed to then dangle such an offense to all reasonableness in front of the eyes of a curious explorer - a tiny, living, thinking organic vessel whom through tuning and coercion the Creator had ensured would one day rise to stare out longingly from the shores of their home-world prison. — John Zande

I am truly grateful: for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love - for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence ... And I'm grateful to know it exists in me, and I'm able to share it with so many people. — Maya Angelou

She represents the beauty of the common people in all its vulgarity and provocativeness. — Alaa Al Aswany

I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them ... This has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit. — Thomas Jefferson

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? — Mary McCarthy

Only the vulgar reveal all. — Bryant McGill

In following the Way, the noble-minded treasure three things: a manner free of violence and arrogance, a countenance full of sincerity and trust, a voice free of vulgarity and impropriety. — Confucius

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion. — Louis Sullivan

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us. — Oscar Wilde

Shut the front door! — Jaci Burton

The vulgarity of an environment as bleakly desolate as the neon lights of the factory where the men go each morning, like sinners returning to hell ... — Muriel Barbery

Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity. — George Darley

The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity. — Guy Debord

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. — Evelyn Waugh

The nature and extent of profanity and vulgarity in our society is a measure of its deterioration. — Dallin H. Oaks

We need the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. — Maya Angelou

What conversations! What vulgarity and what dirt! And you have to associate with them, in the office, in the university, in the operating-theatre ... , in the world.
Ask them if they wouldn't mind stopping, and they laugh at you. Look annoyed, and they get worse. Leave them, and they continue.
This is the solution: first pray for them, and offer up some sacrifice; then face them like a man and make use of the 'strong language apostolate'. - The next time we meet I'll tell you - in a whisper - a few useful words. — Josemaria Escriva

There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close. — Barbara Stanwyck

Rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity. — Laura Riding

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. — James Joyce

I suspect, more than voyeurism, that it has something to do with control. Control is a food that Nathan seems to feed on, devouring it with a vulgarity that clashes with his smooth exterior. — Alessandra Torre

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn't respond in my head, but I knew he'd gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, "Don't tread on you?"
"More like 'don't metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,' but it's the same sentiment, really."
"Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn."
"Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?"
He sighed, but I didn't need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn't clear, he verbalized it. "You have always, always been a difficult child."
I smiled sweetly. "I try. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Some entertainers have tried to make art of coarseness, but in their public crudeness they have merely revealed their own vast senses of personal inferiority. When they heap mud upon themselves and allow their tongues to wag with vulgarity, they expose their belief that they are not worth loving and in fact are unlovable. When we as an audience indulge then in their profanity, we are like the audience at the Roman Colosseum being thrilled as the raging lions kill the unarmed Christians. We not only participate in the humiliation of the entertainers, but we are brought low by sharing in the obscenity. We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. Insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not qualities which we need to include in our daily conversations. — Maya Angelou

Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature, said Balph Eubank contemptuously. — Ayn Rand

I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit. — Mel Brooks

Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him. — Lawrence O'Donnell

I've never been given to casual use of vulgar language
unwarranted profanity implies mental laziness
but there's no other way to say this: a guy tries to fuck me ... well, fuck him. — James Carlos Blake

I darted like a minnow through passers-by, in a most ungraceful fashion, constantly giving way to generals. officers of the Horse Guards and the Hussars, and fine ladies; at those moments I felt a spasmodic pain in my heart and hot flushes down my spine at the thought of the wretched inadequacy of my costume and the mean vulgarity of my small figure darting about. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Mock jewelry on a woman is tangible vulgarity. — Bayard Taylor

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. — Pat Conroy

Does truth lie in the everyday events, the daily incidents, in the pettiness and vulgarity most people's lives are compounded of, or does the truth have its abode in the dream it is given us to dream to flee our sad human condition? — Jorge Amado

Vulgarity finds its antidote; old crudities become softened with time. Distinctions, both those that are useful and those that are burdensome, flourish and die, reflourish and die again. — Robert Burchfield

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt. — Raymond Chandler

One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric. — John Marshall Harlan II

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity. — Roland Barthes

First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant. — Celsus

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise. — Vladimir Nabokov

In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching! — Manohla Dargis

What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it. — Muriel Barbery

'Biutiful' is a tough film. It doesn't make concessions to the vulgarity of light entertainment. It's not the kind of film that you see every day in the Cineplex. But as an artist, it's the thing that I needed to do. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Women's marches are a clever progressive divide and conquer strategy that not only turns women against men, but also turns women against each other in the guise of peace and solidarity. It is a brilliant tactic to employ media propaganda to make privileged women feel oppressed and then program them to think that vulgarity, exhibitionism and emasculation is empowering. — Dawn Perlmutter

The most extravagant sinners of Jesus's day receive His most compassionate welcome. Grace is a divine vulgarity that stands caution on its head. It refuses to play it safe and lay it up. Grace is recklessly generous, uncomfortably promiscuous. — Preston Sprinkle

I don't object to the proliferation of the 'f-bomb' in screenplays because the adjective is vulgar but because it is unimaginative. — Ron Brackin

The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be. — Allan Bloom

It is precisely in that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like
even academicism. That's why most faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. Is your style frank and open ... does it have some understated agenda ... is it out to prove something it does not or cannot admit ... is it trying to impress ... show off ... is it kissing up ... groveling ... maybe just a tad passive-aggressive, with a mumbling half-audible voice that is unwilling to explain ... is it trying to convince ... overwhelm ... help ... seduce ... give pleasure ... inflict pain ... There is no area of the writer's work that is more responsive to the psychology of human connection than style. — Stephen Koch

When I write, I keep the family audience in mind. I ensure there's no vulgarity, as families are coming into the theatres, and there's no blood and gore because of the kids. There is a set of people who doesn't like my cinema, but there's a bigger group that likes the kind of movies I make. — Rohit Shetty

Now I ask you: could any muck-raker in a rage make up a list of titles more completely expressive of vulgarity, commercialism and general "bunk" than the above real ones? I — Upton Sinclair

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. — Evelyn Waugh

As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not. — Roger Ebert

Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence. — Noah Webster

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. — Werner Herzog

Luxury lies not in the richness of things, but in the absence of vulgarity — Coco Chanel

If you establish a relationship with it then you have relationship with mankind. You are responsible then for that tree and for the trees of the world. But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity, with human beings. We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound. This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life. — Cyril Connolly

The best everyday example of relativity, the finest symptom of human intelligence, is humor. ( ... ) Design without humor is not human. The word 'beautiful' does not mean anything. Only coherence counts. An object, design or not, is primarily an object that meets the parameters of human intelligence, which reconciles opposites. The lack of humor is the definition of vulgarity. — Philippe Starck