Vulgar Quotes - Page 10

• Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

  Stendhal

  Careers, Painful, Divine

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• With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Nice, Eye, Skills

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• My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.

  Ian Mcewan

  Believe, Fall, Character

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• Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Stupid, Taken, Thinking

  "Scarborough Country" with Joe Scarborough, www.nbcnews.com. May 18, 2004.

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• I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster. I'm not.

  Elizabeth Taylor

  House, Monsters, Pants

  "Fictional character: Martha". "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", www.imdb.com. 1966.

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• A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

  Isaac Newton

  Errors, Practice, Able

  Sir Isaac Newton, Roger Cotes (1850). “Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes: Including Letters of Other Eminent Men Now First Published from the Originals in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge; Together with an Appendix, Containing Other Unpublished Letters and Papers by Newton; with Notes, Synoptical View of the Philosopher's Life, and a Variety of Details Illustrative of His History”, p.284

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• ...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

  Stendhal

  Mind, Genius, Ruts

  Stendhal (1969). “Red and black: a new translation, backgrounds and sources, criticism”

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• If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Hate, Mean, Matter

  Charlotte Bronte (2009). “Shirley: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.31, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Of all the vulgar arts of government, that of solving every difficulty that might arise by thrusting the hand into the public purse is the most illusory and contemptible.

  Robert Peel

  Art, Government, Hands

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• The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

  Robert Venturi

  Children, Italian, Naked

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• Madame Bovary is the sexiest book imaginable. The woman's virtually a nyphomaniac but you won't find a vulgar word in the entire thing.

  Noel Coward

  Book, Sexiest

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• The wretched beings depicted by Millet touch us profoundly because he loved them profoundly. They have nothing in common with vulgar ugliness. Beauty will always remain the highest aim of art.

  Jules Breton

  Beauty, Art, Common

  Jules Breton (1891). “The Life of an Artist: Art and Nature”

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• What I very much admire about the Versace maison, and what I am still trying to learn to do myself as I am still young, is that from day one until today, Versace is the peak of sexy but never crosses that red line into the vulgar.

  Riccardo Tisci

  Sexy, Trying, Today

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A gentleman is calm and spacious: the vulgar are always fretting.

  Confucius

  Gentleman, Calm, Fretting

  Confucius (1909). “The Sayings of Confucius”

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• I certainly do not lament the decadence of knight errantry, nor wish to exchange the protection of the laws for that of the doughtiest champion who ever set lance in rest; but I do, in truth, believe that this knightly sensitiveness of honorable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of every-day life, and that the total want of it is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue called probity.

  Frances Trollope

  Believe, Knights, Race

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• And what the people but a herd confus'd,
  A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
  Things vulgar, and, well weigh'd, scarce worth the praise?
  They praise, and they admire, they know not what;
  And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
  And what delight to be by such extoll'd,
  To live upon their tongues, and be their talk,
  Of whom to be disprais'd were no small praise?

  John Milton

  People, Tongue, Delight

  John Milton (1831). “Milton's Poetical Works”, p.40

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• I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It's like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design, because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.

  Kanye West

  Believe, Thinking, Opposites

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• It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

  Oscar Wilde

  Errors, America

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.433, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Mind, Pay, Talent

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.311

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• Prejudices of all kinds have their strongest holds in the minds of the vulgar and the ignorant.

  Lydia M. Child

  Ignorant, Mind, Prejudice

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• Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.

  Samuel Johnson

  Expectations, Gold, Scarcity

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.235

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• The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler (or crook) of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent eveil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represent a more saddening phenomenon ("phénomène", Fr.) than an unfortune illiterate fellow having commited an offence.

  African Spir

  Men, Intelligent, Abuse

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 48), 1937.

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• The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].

  Arthur Miller

  Country, Art, Laughter

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• The hedges are spruting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched or as the vulgar says clacked.

  Marjorie Fleming

  Eggs, Chicks

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• Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Needs, Emotion

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