Vulgar Quotes - Page 20

• Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
  There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Beauty, Art, Eye

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• Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.

  Horace Walpole

  Age, Genius, Might

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• Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

  Robert Graves

  Hands, Poetry, Trying

  "Ten key things about... poetry" by Dorota Nosowicz, www.theguardian.com. October 1, 2000.

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• You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

  Harold MacMillan

  People, Greek, Virtue

  "Will Trump's presidency finally kill the myth of the special relationship?" by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2017.

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• The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Ants, Generations, Holes

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• The Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen--he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.

  Susanna Moodie

  Country, Native American, Men

  Susanna Moodie (1852). “Roughing it in the Bush: Or, Life in Canada”, p.11, London : R. Bentley

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• I look upon the vulgar observation, 'That the devil often deserts his friends, and leaves them in the lurch,' to be a great abuse on that gentleman's character. Perhaps he may sometimes desert those who are only his cup acquaintance; or who, at most, are but half his; but he generally stands by those who are thoroughly his servants, and helps them off in all extremities, till their bargain expires.

  Henry Fielding

  Character, Gentleman, Abuse

  Henry Fielding (1975). “The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling”, p.933, Wesleyan University Press

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• So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Believe, Thinking, America

  Source: www.npr.org

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• In the early forties and fifties almost everybody "had about enough to live on," and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.

  M. E. W. Sherwood

  Daughter, Mother, Fashion

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• You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

  Brenda Ueland

  Honesty, Believe, Writing

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• Corporations never actually mention 'money'; that would be vulgar. They prefer such words as 'turnover,' 'profit,' 'salary,' 'revenue,' 'budget,' 'premium,' and 'savings,' all much more refined.

  Corinne Maier

  Business, Salary, Would Be

  Corinne Maier (2007). “Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay”, p.19, Vintage

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• No one is shallow and vulgar forever; sooner or later the whole species likes to be profound.

  Carol Bly

  Profound, Forever, Likes

  Carol Bly (2000). “My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories”, p.51, Milkweed Editions

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• But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.

  Giambattista Vico

  Art, Writing, Numbers

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• As with companions so with books. We may choose those which will make us better, more intelligent, more appreciative of the good and the beautiful in the world, or we may choose the trashy, the vulgar, the obscene, which will make us feel as though we've been 'wallowing in the mire.

  David O. McKay

  Beautiful, Book, Intelligent

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• Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Order

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• How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

  David Mitchell

  Writing, Winter, Would Be

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man! But I assure you, my music is not.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Men, Forgive Me, Forgiving

  "Fictional character: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart". "Amadeus", www.imdb.com. 1984.

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• Common and vulgar people ascribe all ills that they feel to others; people of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one.

  Epictetus

  Adversity, People, Littles

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• The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.

  Cheikh Anta Diop

  Determination, Past, Men

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• No music is vulgar, unless it is played in a way that makes it so.

  Herbert von Karajan

  Way, Music Is

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• This is my only and permanent complaint, that vulgar people, empty of the Spirit of God, want to judge solely by their human thinking what they listen to or read in the Bible, which has been pronounced and written by the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit.

  Meister Eckhart

  Thinking, People, Judging

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• Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Artist, Advice

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• Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.

  Henry Beston

  Religious, Travel, Adventure

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• When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

  Julian Barnes

  Mind, Admitting, Way

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• I know I'm vulgar, but would you have me any other way?

  Elizabeth Taylor

  Way, Knows

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