Pretension Quotes - Page 5

• With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split.

  Howard Thompson

  Art, Vegas, Ice Cream

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• In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.

  Ishmael Reed

  Country, Makeup, Taste

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• Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.

  Frederick Buechner

  Clothes, Storm, Reputation

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Aug 06, 2015

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• I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.

  David S. Goyer

  Book, Reading, Writing

  "David S. Goyer Explains His ‘Graphic Novel’ Approach to Renaissance Intrigue in ‘Da Vinci’s Demons’". Interview with lison Willmore, www.indiewire.com. April 9, 2013.

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• I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

  Hugo Chavez

  Country, Focus, Wish

  "Hugo Chávez grants rare interview to western media" by Stephen Sackur, www.theguardian.com. June 13, 2010.

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• I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

  William James

  Doubt, Lovers, Disorder

  "The William James Reader".

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• In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contadictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Running, Flower, Silly

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• Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

  Victor Hugo

  Men, Strange, Cosette

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1987). “Les misérables”, Dutton Adult

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• Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Animal, Past

  Jeanette Winterson (1995). “Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd”, Knopf

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• Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

  Ingmar Bergman

  Night, Feelings, Arrogance

  Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, 1971.

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• I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions.

  Anson Mount

  Guy, Tough, Know How

  "Anson Mount Hell on Wheels Interview". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. November 09, 2011.

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• I have not come to seek place, nor to interfere with the business and calling of those men who have borne the burden since the death of Joseph. I throw myself at your feet, and wish to be one of your number, and be a mere member of the Church, and my mere asking to be baptized is an end to all pretensions to authority.

  Oliver Cowdery

  Men, Feet, Numbers

  "Report to Presidents Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards and the Authorities of the Church", statement upon requesting rebaptism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 5, 1849.

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• Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Honesty, Successful, Reality

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.3

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• Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Power

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• Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits

  Frederick Crews

  Phrenology, Reason, Recruit

  Frederick C. Crews, Frederick Crews (1988). “Skeptical Engagements”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

  Dylan Thomas

  Men, Thinking, Here I Am

  Dylan Thomas (1968). “Quite Early One Morning”, p.113, New Directions Publishing

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• Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.

  William Hazlitt

  Real, Hypocrisy, Feelings

  William Hazlitt (1839). “Sketches and Essays”, p.44

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• After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Drawing, Hands, Play

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.

  Francis Galton

  Baby, Children, School

  Sir Francis Galton (1870). “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences”, p.14

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• I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

  Caio Fonseca

  Thinking, People, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Faith begins where religious pretension ends

  Austin Farrer

  Religious, Ends

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• Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

  Paul Harvey

  Rain, Men, Garden

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• For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?

  John Campbell Shairp

  Talking, Enlightenment, Generations

  John Campbell Shairp (1871). “Culture and Religion in Some of Their Relations”, p.140

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• ... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

  Irving Stone

  Painting, Canvas, Reason

  Irving Stone (1937). “Lust for Life: The Novel of Vincent Van Gogh”

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• What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?

  Denis Norden

  Cheese, Harps

  Frank Muir, Denis Norden (1984). “The utterly ultimate 'My word!' collection”, Methuen Pub Ltd

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