Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions.

— Pierre-Jean de Beranger

... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.

— Anonymous

I have not come to seek place, nor to interfere with the business and calling of those men who have borne the burden since…

— Oliver Cowdery

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…

— Caio Fonseca

I love everything about Philadelphia, and its food is like the city itself: real-deal, hearty, and without pretension. We've always had an underdog vibe…

— Lisa Scottoline

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art,…

— Anton Chekhov

... semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases…

— Alfred Tarski

“A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse…

— Samuel Johnson

The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.

— Booth Tarkington

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.…

— Carl Sagan

Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

— Moliere

It is worth noticing that those who assume an imposing demeanor and seek to pass themselves off for something beyond what they are, are…

— Richard Whately

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different…

— Rokia Traore