Buffoonery Quotes

Noble starets, tell me, are my high spirits offensive to you or not? Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly exclaimed, gripping the arms of his chair with both hands and appearing ready to leap out of it, depending on the reply. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even serene in its passion. - Regions of pure Poetry. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I point out. It was the most foolish, jape-fisted bit of buffoonery I have ever seen, and I am impressed in spite of that. ~ Robin LaFevers

I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face - no, that's not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk. ~ Osamu Dazai

I went to Paris for a year in 1986 to study theatre; there was a lot of clowning around, buffoonery and fencing. It was then that my own style kind of blossomed. ~ Orla Brady

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart ! ~ Alex Morritt

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have .. the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality .. which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory. ~ Luigi Pirandello

Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor
of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded
Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery and
blasphemy; just as their prototypes, the sad and high-minded Stoics of
old Rome, did mistake the Christian joyousness for buffoonery and
blasphemy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

People are stupid, but oh can they talk. And when idiots talk, others will come from miles away in order that they may listen. This is the preferred method of reproduction for idiots. One idiot says something stupid, and someone else hears it. The thing that is said to them is utterly ludicrous buffoonery, but still they listen. After a while, it makes that person stupid as well, and he can't wait to go tell everyone how stupid he is now. ~ M.D. Thalmann

Make yourself a simpleton and follow the saint: You will find salvation only by being a simpleton. Hence, oh father, that king of men, the Prophet said, 'Most of the people of Paradise are simpletons.' Since cleverness is your pride, become a simpleton so that your heart may remain healthy. Not a simpleton warped by buffoonery, but one distraught and bewildered in God ~ Rumi

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There are people who feel deeply but are somehow beaten down. Their buffoonery is something like a spiteful irony against those to whom they dare not speak the truth directly because of a long-standing, humiliating timidity before them. Believe me, Krasotkin, such buffoonery is sometimes extremely tragic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have never been able to
meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful
smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. ~ Osamu Dazai

It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope! ~ Stanislaw Lem

A travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding. ~ John Jay Chapman

[H]e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel. ~ Iain M. Banks

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. A burst of laughter starts from a scene of emotion. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious enters. Impulses depend on a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suffices to open the door to the unexpected. They are conferences with sharp turns, where the perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversations. ~ Victor Hugo

Some [jests] are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people. ~ Aristotle.

The Dance can, with the aid of music, rise to the heights of poetry. On the other hand, through an excess of gymnastics it can also degenerate into buffoonery. So-called "difficult" feats can be executed by countless adepts, but the appearance of ease is achieved only by the chosen few. ~ August Bournonville