Imbeciles Quotes - Page 5

• Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

  Claude Debussy

  Impressionists

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• As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Practice, Asking, Cents

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• Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

  Henry James

  Dream, Strong, Believe

  Henry James (2016). “The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master”, p.4, University of Chicago Press

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• Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, ‘You can't do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Real, Broken, Passionate

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.2333, Delphi Classics

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• I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe.

  Henry Miller

  Mother, Stars, Lying

  Henry Miller (1966). “Tropic of Capricorn”

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• When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.

  Glen Duncan

  Children, Thinking, Hair

  Glen Duncan (2002). “I, Lucifer”, p.39, Simon and Schuster

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• By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.

  C.P. Snow

  Knowledge, Science, Men

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• An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Monday, Philosophy, Believe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

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• Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.

  Charles Bukowski

  Real, Two, People

  Charles Bukowski (1978). “Women”

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• The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.

  Alvin Toffler

  Running, People, Imagination

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• What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

  Henry Miller

  Hands, Earth, Want

  Henry Miller (2007). “Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I”, p.397, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.

  Georges Courteline

  Baby, Children, Two

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• Can it really be said that before the day of our pretentious science, humanity was composed solely of imbeciles and the superstitious?

  R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz

  Humanity, Pretentious, Said

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• Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.

  Spider Robinson

  Thinking, Littles, Spirit

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• Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

  Horace Greeley

  Country, Men, Idlers

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