Imbecility Quotes

1. "She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband's booted foot, and even if he brought home cabfuls of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depths). Or, drunk to a frenzy, raped the kitchen-maid before the morning assembly of servants and children and her black silk-dressed self (gathered for prayers). Or forced her to stitch, on shirts, her fingers to rags to pay his gambling debts.Husbands were a force of nature or an act of God; like an earthquake or the dreaded consumption, to be borne with, to be meekly acquiesced to, to be impregnated by as frequently as Nature would allow. It took the mindless persistence, the dogged imbecility of the grey tides, to love a husband."
Author: Angela Carter

2. "When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility."
Author: C.S. Lewis

3. "The pristine virtue is nothing but absolute absurdity, utter obscurity and sheer imbecility."
Author: Chandrashekar

4. "You've got to burnstraight up and downand then maybe sidewisefor a whileand have your gutsscrambled by abullyand the demonicladies,you've got to runalong the edge of madnessteetering,you've got to starvelike a winteralleycat,you've go to livewith the imbecilityof at least a dozencities,then maybemaybemaybeyou might knowwhere you arefor a tinyblinkingmoment."
Author: Charles Bukowski

5. "To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)"
Author: Charlotte Brontë

6. "I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

7. "If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

8. "Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man. But on the whole the history of science is fair, and this is particularly true in mathematics. No other subject has such clear-cut or unanimously accepted standards, and the men who are remembered are almost always the men who merit it. Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments."
Author: G.H. Hardy

9. "What exasperated her was that Charles seemed to have no notion of her torment. His conviction that he was making her happy struck her as impudent imbecility, his uxorious complacency as ingratitude."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

10. "A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray."
Author: Havelock Ellis

11. "An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight."
Author: Hilaire Belloc

12. "If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure by way of a variety—"
Author: Honoré De Balzac

13. "The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance."
Author: Jane Austen

14. "Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility."
Author: José Ortega Y Gasset

15. "The tendency to late marriages may reflect nothing more than the growth of sense," Lewis Durant said, "At 21, a man seldom knows what he is doing, or where his best interests lie.""I am glad you say a man, Mr. Durant, and exempt woman from this youthful imbecility," Lidia said."I do: a woman's imbecility is not dependent on youth: it flourishes at all ages."
Author: Jude Morgan

16. "I do not take advice or listen to the words of hypocrites or beings that are not self-realized. It's nothing personal. I am simply no fan of beings that try to sound wise, while trying to mask their imbecility."
Author: Lionel Suggs

17. "So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct."
Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

18. "Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

19. "He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe."
Author: Remy De Gourmont

20. "It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any."
Author: Wallace Stegner

Imbecility Quotes Pictures