Pretension Quotes - Page 7

• The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Effort, Finals, Limits

  1941 The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol.1.

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• If fallacies come knocking at my door,I'd rather feed, and shelter full a score,Than hide behind the black portcullis, doubt,And run the risk of barring one Truth out.And if pretension for a time deceive,And prove me one too ready to believe,Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act,I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Running, Lying, Believe

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.1117, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. 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

  Men, Intellectual, Doubt

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.116, Xist Publishing

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• But as the clerical pretensions are more exacting than all others, being put forward with an assertion that no answer is possible without breach of duty and sin, so are they more galling.

  Anthony Trollope

  Answers, Sin, Duty

  Anthony Trollope (2016). “Anthony Trollope: The Chronicles of Barsetshire & The Palliser Novels (Unabridged): The Warden + The Barchester Towers + Doctor Thorne + Framley Parsonage + The Small House at Allington + The Last Chronicle of Barset + Can You Forgive Her? + The Prime Minister + Eustace Diamonds...”, p.4527, e-artnow (Open Publishing)

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• Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Believe, Mind, Doe

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.55, Lulu Press, Inc

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• It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Light, Appreciate, Silence

  Robert Charles Wilson (2014). “The Chronoliths”, p.272, Macmillan

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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 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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• Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Writing, Two

  Samuel Johnson (1811). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, L. L. D.: In Twelve Volumes”, p.301

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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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• 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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• Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.

  William Hazlitt

  Passion, Pride, Thinking

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1466, Delphi Classics

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• That politeness which we put on, in order to keep the assuming and the presumptuous at a proper distance will generally succeed. But it sometimes happens that these obtrusive characters are on such excellent terms with themselves that they put down this very politeness to the score of their own great merits and high pretensions, meeting the coldness of our reserve with a ridiculous condescension of familiarity, in order to set us at ease with ourselves.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Distance, Character, Order

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.79

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• It may be laid down as a general rule, that no woman who hath any great pretensions to admiration is ever well pleased in a company where she perceives herself to fill only the second place.

  Henry Fielding

  May, Admiration, Wells

  Henry Fielding (1811). “The History of Amelia”, p.113

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• The very essence of gravity was design, and, consequently, deceit; it was a taught trick to gain credit of the world for more sense end knowledge than a man was worth; and that with all its pretensions it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it--a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.

  Laurence Sterne

  Men, Essence, Long Ago

  Laurence Sterne (1834). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, in One Volume”, p.17

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• Society,--the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world's university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.

  Wendell Phillips

  Sex, Real, School

  Wendell Phillips (1864). “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters”, p.244

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• The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Groups, Privilege, Intention

  "Moral Man and Immoral Society". Book by Reinhold Niebuhr, pp.6-7, 1932.

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• I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.

  Hazel Henderson

  Ambition, Objectivity, Greed

  Hazel Henderson (1981). “The politics of the solar age: alternatives to economics”, Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press/Doubleday

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• There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Sex, Vanity, Rivals

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.110

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• The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation.

  Samuel Johnson

  Heart, Thinking, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson (1848). “The Wisdom of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler”, p.216

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• This is a new land - a land of pretension because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the only true aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term.

  Thomas D'Arcy McGee

  Class, Land, Aristocracy

  Legislative Assembly, February 9, 1865.

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• Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  College, Years, Gold

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, addresses, and lectures”, p.58, Harvard University Press

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• Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

  Arthur Miller

  Dream, Writing, People

  Arthur Miller (2016). “The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller”, p.421, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

  Tom Bodett

  Thinking, Self, Sufficient

  "Actually, Motel 6 Doesn't Leave the Light on for You". Interview with Kimberly D. Williams, adage.com. August 30, 2007.

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