Vulgar Quotes - Page 16

• Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.

  Iain Pears

  Dream, Powerful, Plato

  Iain Pears (2003). “Dream of Scipio”, p.18, Penguin

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• I regard posterity as vulgar as success. I don't trust posterity. I don't think what's good is necessarily recognized in the long run. Too many good writers have disappeared.

  Peter Biskind

  Running, Thinking, Long

  Peter Biskind (2013). “My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles”, p.270, Macmillan

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• Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life.

  Carol Muske-Dukes

  Book, Passion, Past

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• Semi-Tough pokes fun in rambling fashion, but it is vulgar in intelligent ways and almost always amusing in its perceptions of befuddled people who are perfectly healthy but often convinced they're not.

  Vincent Canby

  Fashion, Fun, Intelligent

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• We have within us, from the start, that which will distinguish us from the vulgar herd.

  Jean-Henri Fabre

  Herds

  Jean-Henri Fabre (1998). “The Passionate Observer: Writings from the World of Nature”, Chronicle Books Llc

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• It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

  Oscar Wilde

  Business, Party, People

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• The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.

  Hugh Laurie

  Use, Commodity, Good Things

  Hugh Laurie (1998). “The Gun Seller”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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• But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stars, Men, Rays

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.30, Harvard University Press

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• Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Data, Imagination, Needs

  "Jonathan Franzen on fiction, fame and Freedom". Interview with John Barber, www.theglobeandmail.com. August 27, 2010.

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• He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

  Thomas Mann

  Passion, Would Be, Taste

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• He (Intellectuals) claims that label to compensate for his own inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Humble, Intellectual, Experts

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• There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Exercise

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

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• For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Taken, Mean, Credit

  Niccolo Machiavelli (2010). “The Prince”, p.73, FastPencil Inc

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• To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Class, Easy

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.191, Courier Corporation

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• So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

  William H. Gass

  Plato, Giving Up, Writing

  William H. Gass (2014). “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p.89, New York Review of Books

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• He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Stupid, Romance, Heartless

  W. Somerset Maugham (2016). “Of Human Bondage (Diversion Classics)”, p.471, Diversion Books

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• Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment - a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism.

  Camille Paglia

  Wise, Men, White Man

  "Obama’s Hit — and Big Miss". Salon Column, www.salon.com. June 10, 2009.

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• Vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs.

  Carroll O'Connor

  Running, Business, People

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• They said that Etta James is still vulgar. I said, Oh, how dare them say I'm still vulgar. I'm vulgar because I dance in the chair. What would they want me to do? Want me to just be still or something like that? I've got to do something.

  Etta James

  Dance, Want, They Said

  Interview with Daryn Kagan, www.cnn.com. September 21, 2002.

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• Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.

  William Ralph Inge

  Average, Tyrants, Public Opinion

  Outspoken Essays Our Present Discontents (p. 9)

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• Unfortunately, there's a lot of confusion today over what is sexy and what is vulgar. It's horrifying. They say, 'Oh, that girl is so sexy,' and she turns around and the dress is four sizes too small. Or she's wearing so much stuff, you wonder how long it took her to get ready.

  Carolina Herrera

  Girl, Sexy, Confusion

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• You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Being Happy, Children, Book

  Interview With Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2010.

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• All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits; for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it; and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.

  Jonathan Swift

  Wise, Science, Astrology

  Jonathan Swift, John Hawkesworth (1766). “The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift: Accurately Revised in Twelve Volumes, Adorned with Copper-plates, with Some Account of the Author's Life, and Notes Historical and Explanatory”, p.194

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• Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Kings, Power, Dust

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1874). “The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.10

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• A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

  Leo Strauss

  Men, Effort, Conservative

  Leo Strauss (2012). “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought”, p.414, SUNY Press

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