Pretension Quotes

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Buy a gift for a dog, and you'll be amazed at the way it will dance and swerve its tail, but if don't have anything to offer to it, it won't even recognize your arrival; such are the attributes of fake friends.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Why do you pretend, when you can make it real? We like pretending to be someone else but the truth we just want to be ourselves.”
― Ann Marie Aguilar

“The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.”
― Oscar Wilde, Reviews

“Don't you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it? Such was the high opinion it had of its talents.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“I pick up the list of Benji's five favorite books because we've got work to do:

"Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. He's a pretentious fuck and a liar.

"Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He's a snob.

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. He's a spoiled passport-carrying fuck stunted in eighth grade.

"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace. Enough already.

"The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane. He's got Mayflowers in his blood.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You

“In my defense, I love the book in a postmodern kind of way where I've always sensed that it contains something that I relate to. I think it's the kind of book that echoes my beliefs and my sentiments and I've always related well to people who have read the book and I've written about the book. You know, I majored in comp lit and it's possible, it's very possible to read a book without reading it in the traditional straightforward manner. You can read about a book, Joe. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand?”
― Caroline Kepnes, You

“Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents' manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome & Selected Stories

“A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.”
― Samuel Johnson

“What is the end of Fame? 't is but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their 'midnight taper,'
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of god.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“She was so scared that she forgot to be a contralto.”
― Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle

“Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course.”
― Sreesha Divakaran, Wine, Fire, Satin, Dew

“Pretentious quotations [are] the surest road to tedium.”
― Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

“In walking, far from any vehicle or machine, from any mediation, I am replaying the earthly human condition, embodying once again man’s inborn, essential destitution. That is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's King
Cheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other rummaging,
Burglariously broke his coffin's lid:
Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“If a person defraud you and you pretended as if you have not been cheated,you have put that person in a hot soup and his conscience will judge.”
― S.B. Oyekunle

“Perhaps it is only when we realize and celebrate the intrinsic value of every human life that celebrity - true celebrity - shines most brightly. On our deathbeds, none of us will speak of the jobs we’ve held or the stuff we’ve acquired in our lifetimes; here bull markets and Nielsen ratings are irrelevant. A life-threatening illness jettisons pretension in no time flat. Death is the great equalizer. Death dares us to define what really matters.”
― Nancy Cobb, In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living

“When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“A poster of a woman in tights heralded the Christmas pantomime, and little red devils, who had come in again that year, were prevalent upon the Christmas-cards. Margaret was no morbid idealist. She did not wish this spate of business and self-advertisement checked. It was only the occasion of it that struck her with amazement annually. How many of these vacillating shoppers and tired shop-assistants realised that it was a divine event that drew them together? She realised it, though standing outside in the matter. She was not a Christian in the accepted sense; she did not believe that God had ever worked among us as a young artisan. These people, or most of them, believed it, and if pressed, would affirm it in words. But the visible signs of their belief were Regent Street or Drury Lane, a little mud displaced, a little money spent, a little food cooked, eaten, and forgotten. Inadequate. But in public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“There is no sense in refusing honours. That is in fact to do them too much honour. The only strategy is to act so that they never weigh upon you.

Your delicious (and malicious) certainty that you are a beautiful woman only subjugates yourself. How is one to approach her to be subjugated oneself?

It seems difficult to meet the woman of your life when you have several (lives). In fact, as soon as you have a double life . . .

Popular fame is what we should aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher's who has seen you on television.

With their feet caught in the ice like the pink flamingos, they still thought they were God's gift to mankind.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“And Dorothy was of an unusually independent mind, impatient with the pretensions that sometimes accompanied the upwardly mobile members of the race.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
three-piled hyperboles, spruce affection,
figures pedantical--these summer flies
have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”
― William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

“A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.”
― E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books

“I was going to stop pretending that just because we were in ministry we were perfect. I was tired of wearing the mask of ministry, and knew that I needed to start living the life.”
― Anna Aquino

“Arrogance is just another form of selfishness.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman