Insipid Quotes - Page 2

• Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Beautiful, Style, Mind

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• I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

  Jane Austen

  Numbers, Enemy, Joining

  Jane Austen (2005). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.1089, Wordsworth Editions

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• Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.

  Muriel Spark

  Death, Life Is, Surprise

  Muriel Spark (2014). “Memento Mori”, p.94, New Directions Publishing

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• A state of temperance, sobriety and justice without devotion is a cold, lifeless, insipid condition of virtue, and is rather to be styled philosophy than religion.

  Joseph Addison

  Philosophy, Justice, Sobriety

  Joseph Addison (1839). “Essays, Moral and Humorous: Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.74

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• Simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid.

  William Hogarth

  Simplicity, Variety

  1753 The Analysis of Beauty

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• That which is repeated too often becomes insipid and tedious.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Boredom, Speech, Tedious

  "The Art of Poetry (Canto I)". Book by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, 1674.

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• Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all.

  Charles Lamb

  Eye, Men, Wife

  Charles Lamb, Mary Lamb (1913). “Miscellaneous prose (1798-1834)”

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• Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.

  James Russell Lowell

  Beautiful, Fashion, Art

  James Russell Lowell (1845). “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets”, p.178

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• I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Thinking, People, Musician

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The moral virtues, without religion are but cold, lifeless, and insipid; it is only religion which opens the mind to great conceptions, fills it with the most sublime ideas, and warms the soul with more than sensual pleasures.

  Joseph Addison

  Ideas, Soul, Sublime

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• The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes: insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution.

  Tobias Smollett

  Ashes, London, Taste

  Tobias Smollett (1808). “The expedition of Humphry Clinker. By the author of Roderic Random”, p.143

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• During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste.

  Ernst Gombrich

  Art, Abuse, Taste

  Ernst Hans Gombrich (2002). “The preference for the primitive: episodes in the history of Western taste and art”, Phaidon Press

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• Any media-brainwashed automaton can summon the insipid courage to peer into the horrifying abyss. But it takes a freaking genius with a fearless imagination to peer into the maw of happiness.

  Rob Brezsny

  Media, Imagination, Fearless

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• The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type - as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer - an insipid one or a clumsy one - but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years - as producers did - who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

  Ben Hecht

  Girl, Children, Eye

  "Elegy for Wonderland" by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959.

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• Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Hate, Joy, Matisse

  Peter Schjeldahl (2008). “Let's see: writings on art from the New Yorker”

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• Shabbat is a day of rest, of mental scrutiny and of balance. Without it the workdays are insipid.

  Hayim Nahman Bialik

  Balance, Scrutiny, Day Of Rest

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• Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

  William Congreve

  Expectations, Joy, Wish

  William. II Congreve William Wycherley (John Vanbrugh and Farquhar George), William. II Wycherley, William Congreve, George Farquhar, John Vanbrugh (1840). “Dramatic Works with Biographical and Critical Notices by Leigh Hunt. - London, Moxon 1840”, p.229

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• Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.

  Dorothy H Cohen

  Children, Order, Giving

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• There is no lasting pleasure but contemplation; all others grow flat and insipid upon frequent use; and when a man hath run through a set of vanities, in the declension of his age, he knows not what to do with himself, if he cannot think; he saunters about from one dull business to another, to wear out time; and hath no reason to value Life but because he is afraid of death.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Running, Men, Thinking

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• It is universally allowed that, though nothing can be more interesting in itself than the conversation of two lovers, yet nothing can be more insipid in detail - just as the heavenly fragrance of the rose becomes vapid and sickly under all the attempts made to retain and embody its exquisite odor.

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

  Two, Rose, Interesting

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1841). “The inheritance, by the author of Marriage. By the author of 'Marriage'. Revised by the author”, p.138

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• One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Determination, Adventure

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• The harp is an insipid instrument--no good for dancing, feasting, or marching, only for sitting primly in a parlor or on a cloud.

  Mason Cooley

  Music, Clouds, Dancing

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• A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Truth, Errors, Grace

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• I'll never make another Hardy picture . . . I'm fed up with these dopey, insipid parts. How long can a guy play a jerk kid? I'm 27 years old. I've been divorced once and separated from my second wife. I have two boys of my own. I spent almost two years in the army. It's time Judge Hardy went out and bought me a double-breasted suit.

  Mickey Rooney

  Kids, Army, Boys

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• Tis chiefly taste, or blunt, or gross, or fine,
  Makes life insipid, bestial, or divine.
  Better be born with taste to little rent
  Than the dull monarch of a continent;
  Without this bounty which the gods bestow,
  Can Fortune make one favorite happy?
  No.

  John Armstrong

  Dull, Littles, Taste

  John Armstrong, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The Poems of Armstrong and Johnson”, p.89

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