Pretension Quotes

I hate pretension.

— David Essex

I forgive all personal weaknesses except egomania and pretension.

— Herb Kelleher

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

— William James

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

— Edwin Percy Whipple

I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

— David Bowie

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

— Angela Carter

I don't know how to put on any tough guy pretensions.

— Anson Mount

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.

— William James

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man.

— Washington Irving

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

— D. A. Carson

To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing…

— Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it…

— William James

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.

— John Locke

The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Your worst and most dangerous enemy is the person that injures you under the pretensions of friendship.

— Norm MacDonald

What encouragement the apostle holds out to us. O my friends, that we might leave all our pretensions, and come to the…

— Elias Hicks

When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretension

— Henry Rollins

Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising,…

— Ken Macrorie

Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of…

— Paul Harvey

Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always…

— Joan Fontcuberta

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at…

— Stephen Mangan

What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things"…

— Richard A. Falk

“Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that…

— Edith Wharton

Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned - to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be…

— Marcus Aurelius

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by…

— Samuel Johnson

Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back.…

— Rajneesh

The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the…

— Jon Landau

It is vain to try and hide a bad spirit from the eyes of them who are spiritual, for it will show…

— Joseph Smith, Jr

We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states…

— Octavio Paz

Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in…

— David Wong

[T]he 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if…

— Sydney Smith

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You…

— Rajneesh

There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant…

— Ottessa Moshfegh

The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

Faith begins where religious pretension ends

— Austin Farrer

The mark of a man of the world is absence of pretension.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

— Margot Fonteyn

The world is his who can see through its pretension.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pretending is a virtue. If you cant pretend, you can't be king.

— Luigi Pirandello