Insipid Quotes - Page 2

• Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

  George Santayana

  Men, Heaven, Ridiculous

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.319, Indiana University Press

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• Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the very end of this volume, in conjunction with her finding and marrying her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon. In this sense, it is half a memoir, the private background story to the public future. (...) The reader is forced to re-evaluate the spectacular weirdness of Weldon's fiction: having lived such a life any other kind would seem insipid.

  Joanna Murray-Smith

  Husband, Years, Creative

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• The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.

  Rudy Rucker

  Magic, Style, Sorcery

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• There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.

  Camille Paglia

  War, Class, Ivy

  "DRUDGE MATCH: Camille Paglia Gets Intimate With The Shady Wizard Of The Web". Interview with Matt Drudge, freerepublic.com. November 6, 2003.

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• Your own gown is most delicately suitable, both to the occasion and to yourself,' to be translated: Your gown is insipid and entirely forgettable. If you wear it on every other occasion this entire season, no one will notice or care.

  Anne Perry

  Gowns, Care, Forgettable

  Anne Perry (2010). “Belgrave Square: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel”, p.83, Ballantine Books

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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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• He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. . . . He was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. . . . He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating in to clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some occasion is presented to him.

  John Dryden

  Book, Men, Soul

  'An Essay of Dramatic Poesy' (1668) on Shakespeare

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• The weak and insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar.

  William Shenstone

  Wine, Power, White

  William Shenstone, Samuel Johnson, Robert Dodsley (1807). “Essays on men and manners; with aphorisms, criticisms, impromptus, fragments, etc”, p.124

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• Every instance in my life, I've felt like the exact opposite of Superman. Except this time, this moment right now. I don't care. I don't feel like a weak, insipid sissy. Because right now I know I would save the girl. I know that I would rather risk the planet than let harm befall Eliza Wishart. I would save her in a second. Because I can imagine her and me huddled safe together while the earth falls under evil designs, but I can't imagine the world without her in it.

  Craig Silvey

  Girl, Fall, Opposites

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• I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Forever, Missing, Literature

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1856). “Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha”, p.464

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• As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  California, Cold, Wasps

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.26, Pan Macmillan

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• It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

  Janet Fitch

  Creating, Skins, Monsters

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

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• To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.

  Georges Bataille

  Fear, Eye, People

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• All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Taken, Inspiration

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.4678, Delphi Classics

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• I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Book, Heart, Empty

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• We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

  George Eliot

  Self, Achievement, Looks

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.3538, ShandonPress

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• Grow up, Bailey." "That is precisely what I'm doing," Bailey says. "I don't care if you don't understand that. Staying here won't make me happy. It will make you happy because you're insipid and boring, and an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It's not enough for me. It will never be enough for me. So I'm leaving. Do me a favor and marry someone who will take decent care of the sheep.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Growing Up, Sheep, Leaving

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.290, Random House

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• The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Bored, Kind, Enchanting

  Vladimir Nabokov (1970). “Mary: A Novel”, Vintage Books

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• Water and oil, simply considered, are capable of giving some pleasure to the taste. Water, when simple, is insipid, inodorous, colorless, and smooth; it is found, when not cold, to be a great resolver of spasms, and lubricator of the fibres; this power it probably owes to its smoothness.

  Edmund Burke

  Water, Smooth, Colorless

  "Complete Works of Edmund Burke".

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• Pleasure that isn't paid for is as insipid as everything else that's free.

  Anita Loos

  Pleasure, Paid

  Anita Loos (1974). “Kiss Hollywood good-by”, Viking Adult

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• I see no greatness in my self...I'm a simple-minded, child-like, insipid sort of moronic and kind of akward feeling adolescent.

  Neal Cassady

  Children, Hipster, Simple

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• England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.

  Edward Abbey

  Country, Littles, Revolution

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.56, RosettaBooks

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• There si nothing upon the face of the earth so insipid as a medium. Give me love or hate! A friend that will go to jail for me, or an enemy that will run me through the body!

  Fanny Burney

  Running, Hate, Jail

  'Camilla' (1796) bk. 3, ch. 12

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• A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

  William James

  Family, Power, Men

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.67, Harvard University Press

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• If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Book, Reading, Writing

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2008). “The History of Pendennis (Volume 2 of 2 ) (EasyRead Edition)”, p.51, ReadHowYouWant.com

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