Home > Topic > ostentatious
1 " So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. "
― Mark Twain , Roughing It, Part 1.
2 " Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge. "
― Roger Bacon ,
3 " It’s very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves. "
― Mehmet Murat ildan , Galileo Galilei
4 " Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding-- or wanting to admit-- that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us. "
― Daniel Pennac , Comme un roman
5 " Ainsi dans le faste ostenstatoire d'une dernière cérémonie, le bourgeois, laissant à ses fils un héritage plus riche que celui qu'il a reçu de son père, quite ce monde où il a conu au moins deux grands sources de joie, la fortune et la vanité...Thus in the ostentatious pomp of a last ceremony, the bourgeois, leaving his sons a richer heritage than he has received from his own father, departs from this world where he has known at least two great sources of joy, the fortune and the vanity... "
― , La Vie Quotidienne sous Louis XIV
6 " If it were but known that the combined might of the world was against aggression, the war-minded could only seek his salvation in peace, perceiving that further ostentatious preparations for war were idle. "
― Eden Phillpotts , Saurus (Classics of Science Fiction)
7 " Man looks very coward and extremely primitive with an ostentatious big sword and he looks very brave and tremendously sophisticated with a humble olive branch! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan
8 " I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever.As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are.One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages.Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it.(" The Tower" ) "
9 " Only small men parade their learning, talk over their audience and air their superior knowledge. Only brutal men throw their strength about, and vain rich men display their wealth in ostentatious useless luxuries. "
― John Myer , John Myer: A Collection of his Sermons and Writing, #1
10 " The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation. "
― Adam Smith , The Theory of Moral Sentiments
11 " People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth. "
― Steven Erikson , Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2)
12 " That was the main thing wrong with Mrs. Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren't being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed's potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn't being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn't have a 'proper job' and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an 'impossible city,' to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked. "
― John Lanchester , Capital
13 " That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’('Left from Dhakeshwari') "
― Kunal Sen
14 " Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
15 " We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan , William Shakespeare
16 " I am an urchin, standing in the cold, elbowed aside by the glossy rich visitors in their fur coats and ostentatious jewellery, being fussed into the hotel by pompous-looking doormen. 'No problem. I'd better get home, actually Mr – Gustav. A drink is very tempting, but maybe not such a good idea after all.' I pat my pockets. 'And I'm skint.' 'Pavements not paved with gold yet, eh?' He moves on along the facade of the grand hotel to the corner, and waits. He's staring not back at me but down St James Street. I wage a little war with myself. He's a stranger, remember. The newspaper headlines, exaggerated by the time they reach the office of Jake's local rag: Country girl from the sticks raped and murdered in London by suave conman. Even Poppy would be wagging her metaphorical finger at me by now. Blaming herself for not being there, looking out for me. But we're out in public here. Lots of people around us. He's charming. He's incredibly attractive. He's got a lovely deep, well spoken voice. And he's an entrepreneur who must be bloody rich if he owns more than one house. What the hell else am I going to do with myself when everyone else is out having fun? One thing I won't tell him is that my pockets might be empty, but my bank account is full. 'One drink. Then I must get back.' He doesn't answer or protest, but with a courtly bow he crooks his elbow and escorts me down St James. We turn right and into the far more subtle splendour of Dukes Hotel. 'Dress code?' I ask nervously, wiping my feet obediently on the huge but welcoming doormat and drifting ahead of him into the smart interior where domed and glassed corridors lead here and there. The foyer smells of mulled wine and candles and entices you to succumb to its perfumed embrace. "
― Primula Bond
17 " Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace." Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically." It is a bit excessive, isn't it?" " Who does it belong to?" " My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth. "
18 " Moderation is an ostentatious proof of our strength of character. "
19 " I explained to him I had simple tastes and didn't want anything ostentatious no matter what it costs. "
20 " Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time. "
― George S. Patton Jr.
