Embarrassment Quotes - Page 8

• Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment.

  Gail Sheehy

  Natural Talent, Suffering, Periods

  Gail Sheehy (2013). “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life”, p.349, Penguin

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• in extreme circumstances I think embarrassment is a luxury.

  Fred Vargas

  Thinking, Luxury, Circumstances

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• What is asserted by a man is an opinion; what is asserted by a woman is opinionated. A woman with ideas and the ability to express them is something of a social embarrassment, like an unhousebroken pet.

  Marya Mannes

  Men, Ideas, Pet

  Marya Mannes (1964). “But Will it Sell?”

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• Embarrassment has a lot to do with thinking too much. Let it go. Nobody cares as much as you think they do.

  Ryan Robbins

  Thinking, Let It Go, Care

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• Some people harbour an awkward clash of feelings - homosexual attraction on the one hand and shame or embarrassment about that attraction on the other. It is well known that the mind struggles to sustain conflicting views.

  Evan Davis

  Struggle, Views, Hands

  "Glad to be gay, glad to be Tory" by Evan Davis, www.theguardian.com. April 20, 2012.

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• There's nothing like undeserved credit to make you feel shabby.

  Charlene Weir

  Credit, Feels, Shabby

  Charlene Weir (1992). “The Winter Widow”, p.42, Macmillan

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• In all honesty, titles are an embarrassment to me.

  Edgar Meyer

  Honesty, Titles

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• Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this way, there can never be any such thing as social unease or shyness or embarrassment. All you need do is greet your fellow soul.

  Michel Faber

  Real, Yellow, Clothes

  Michel Faber (2014). “The Book of Strange New Things”, p.77, Canongate Books

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• When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment - and nor should they have done - about having a good time.

  David Nicholls

  Men, Actors, Done

  "David Nicholls, the man who made a nation cry" by Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. August 6, 2011.

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• After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.

  Philip Pullman

  Fall, Discovery, Clothes

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• Knapsack of the Metaphysicians.- Those who boast so mightily of the scientificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and in any event a whole tangled heap of 'wretched poor sinner' and Pharisee arrogance.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophy, Nice, Light

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• The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Black, Causes, Facts

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, Patrick Renshaw (1998). “Democracy in America”, p.140, Wordsworth Editions

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• The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment.

  Mark Shields

  Thinking, Scandal, Shame

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• To not be afraid in our world is the message that doesn't derive from reason, but maybe from this mysterious capacity given to humans which we call--not without a little embarrassment--faith.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Faith, Fear, Our World

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• Perhaps the most embarrassing experience is being caught at a lie by a simpleton who sneers at our asinine cleverness.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Lying, Embarrassing, Caught

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry.

  Woody Allen

  Running, Block, Talking

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• One encounters very capable fathers abashed by their piano-playing daughters. Three measures of Schumann make them red with embarrassment.

  Alfred Doblin

  Daughter, Father, Piano

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• We're often afraid of looking at our shadow because we want to avoid the shame or embarrassment that comes along with admitting mistakes.

  Marianne Williamson

  Mistake, Shadow, Admitting

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• What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that shall man be for the superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Laughing, Apes

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• The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Philosophy, Passion, Men

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Lapses, Answers, Tongue

  Charlotte Brontë “Jane Eyre”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be?

  Gene Weingarten

  Book, Feelings, Towns

  "Chatological Humor: The Big Fat Debate, Part 2". Live Q&A, www.washingtonpost.com. February 17, 2009.

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• I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.

  Peter Greenaway

  Stress, Latin, Moments

  Peter Greenaway (1999). “Eight and a half women”, Dis Voir Editions

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• It is not our failures that distress us so much as our idiocies.

  Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

  Idiocy, Distress

  Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay (1803). “What is Worth While?”, p.10

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