Pretentiousness Quotes

“I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“Never trust someone that claims they care nothing of what society thinks of them. Instead of conquering obstacles, they simply pretend they don't exist.”
― Tiffany Madison

“Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is the pretense of intelligent ignorance. The former is teachable; the latter is not.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.”
― Michael Crichton, Next

“The words of the Greeks are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.”
― Cato

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“She was named Jocaminca fforkes, with two small 'f's - as if having two 'f's wasn't pretentious enough”
― Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit

“Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Samantha Heather Mackey thinks her stories are so fucking great! Samantha Heather Mackey doesn't say it but she thinks she's too good for the whole fucking world! Samantha Heather Mackey acts poor but why then does she behave like a princess? Samantha Heather Mackey slept with her professor! Sucked him off! For preferential treatment! There is no way in hell that Samantha Heather Mackey can be that tall, she wears stilts! Samantha Heather wears stilts so she can look down on us! Oh, ho, ho, ho she loves fucking second of that!! Samantha Heather Mackey thinks we have everything under the sun, that we sleep on a bed of gold, and meanwhile she sleeps on a bed of dirt. That she has nothing, nothing, and she thinks this makes her deep. It doesn't make you deep, Samantha Heather Mackey, it just makes you rumpled and it makes you smell of old potatoes. Samantha Heather Mackey thinks she understands everything, but she fails to understand the depths of the human heart. She fails to understand the depths of our heart. Our hearts our heart our heart! We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“The hope is indeed that some will experience and believe: The purpose of a number of spiritual gurus is to demonstrate to God-fearing men faux spirituality.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“One should never go by what people say.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage

“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

“It’s better than anything either Laxness or Thórberger Thordarson write. We might be talking about a new Nobel Prize winner, Hekla.”
“Has he had anything published?”
“Not yet.”
― Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Miss Iceland

“If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.’ Wittgenstein."

"I don't think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!”
― Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

“We'd already had sex enough times for my body to feel like his and his mine, really nothing new there, but we both had low self-esteem, regularly felt suicidal compulsions, were bullied as kids, and pretentiously enjoyed arty films and books while hating basic crap like Haruki Murakami, Hong Sangsoo, French literature, and Audis, all of which made us end up thinking we were something special as a pair.”
― Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City

“His arrogance is going to bury whatever parts of him which survived the death of his pretentiousness.”
― Niedria Dionne Kenny, Love, Lust and Regrets: While the lights were off

“Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can
exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you
cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against
your choosing, been turned into a parasite and fraud.”
― David Graeber , Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodolocigal’ pretentions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

“For it did seem to be the case, she reflected, that the owners of art galleries were very frequently men who were unable to use ordinary language with any precision and who walked about in a horrible blizzard of peculiar superlatives and meaningless coinages from which they tried to shelter themselves by a wild flailing of their hands.”
― Rose Tremain, Islands of Mercy

“The audience was highly pretentious and somewhat vain at gazing deeply into what was fundamentally shallow; so in this vein with thoughts flowing, and past that vane with minds blowing, it completely missed the point.”
― Criss Jami

“The work of a genius must be opposite himself in that it must retain some capacity of being understood.”
― Criss Jami

“As for politicians who demand you follow the science, if in the opposite direction you also follow the money, you might find about nine times out of ten that the two paths are conjoined at the end.”
― Criss Jami

“On an early morning scouting trip in the foothills north of Los Angeles, two van-loads of crew people fan out over an area that the production designer wants to make into a guerrilla army encampment. I stay close to the vans, keeping an overview of the area and waiting for the director to emerge. It’s a warm sunny day. Most of the crew is wearing shorts and running shoes.

The director is another story. He climbs out of his van wearing a location-specific hunter-outdoorsman khaki outfit complete with an impressive pair of lug-sole hiking boots and walks off in the general direction the crew has taken, thumbing through some script notes.

A few seconds later he steps squarely into a pile of dog-doo that everyone else has successfully navigated. I watch, transfixed, as he leaps back in horror and freezes. He does not spot me as he quickly looks around to see if anyone has noticed his predicament. No one else has. He hurriedly examines the bottom of his now-disgusting hiking boot.
I take a deep breath and step from beside the van, pretending I am deeply involved in a conversation on my walkie-talkie. As I walk toward him, I pull a little folding penknife from my pocket and flip the blade open. I hand it to him without a word as I pass and continue on toward the location, still pretending to be talking into the radio. I round the corner of a building and find a vantage point.

The director is hopping up and down on one foot, hurriedly scraping the bottom of his boot with the tiny knife. He finishes the messy job, pulls himself together, and strides purposefully around the building and toward a clearing where the crew has gathered, waiting for his comments. I quickly take my place as the director approaches. He walks briskly past me and without looking, hands the little knife back to me with the dog-doo-covered blade still open. He continues on to the front of the group and with complete authority runs through his ideas for the scene. Over the next few months of filming, neither of us ever mentions the incident.”
― David McGiffert, Best Seat in the House - An Assistant Director Behind the Scenes of Feature Films