Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need…

It is good to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even…

— Hermann Hesse

“Keep on acquiring a taste for what is naturally repugnant; this is an unfailing source of pleasure.”

— Aleister Crowley

We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Beware of luxury and too much comfort, John. Avoid crowds and their approval. These things corrupt character. Doing makes a man, not display.”

— Anonymous

“Joseph said, ‘Beware of luxury and too much comfort, John. Avoid crowds and their approval. These things corrupt character. Doing makes a man, not…

— Brett Williams

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing…

— Paul Gauguin

I wrote a study about this question, The Lessons of October, which served as a pretext for my elimination from the government.

— Leon Trotsky

War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

— Guy Sajer

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the…

— Benjamin Disraeli

When observers look back 50 years from now, the arguments supporting Florida's ban on same-sex marriage, though just as sincerely held [as views of…

— Robert Lewis Hinkle

[Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear…

— Ernest Jones

Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out…

— Richard Whately

“He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in…

— Victor Hugo

Treacherous assassins, enemies of the people, and worthy of everyone's ridicule are those who, under the pretext of guiding future generations, teach them an…

— Jose Marti

We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If…

— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky