Scorns Quotes

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death - that is heroism. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Beauty

Void lay the world, in nothingness concealed,
Without a trace of light or life revealed,
Save one existence which second knew-
Unknown the pleasant words of We and You.
Then Beauty shone, from stranger glances free,
Seen of herself, with naught beside to see,
With garments pure of stain, the fairest flower
Of virgin loveliness in bridal bower.
No combing hand had smoothed a flowing tress,
No mirror shown her eyes their loveliness
No surma dust those cloudless orbs had known,
To the bright rose her cheek no bulbul flown.
No heightening hand had decked the rose with green,
No patch or spot upon that cheek was seen.
No zephyr from her brow had fliched a hair,
No eye in thought had seen the splendour there.
Her witching snares in solitude she laid,
And love's sweet game without a partner played.
But when bright Beauty reigns and knows her power
She springs indignant from her curtained bower.
She scorns seclusion and eludes the guard,
And from the window looks if doors be barred.
See how the tulip on the mountain grown
Soon as the breath of genial Spring has blown,
Bursts from the rock, impatient to display
Her nascent beauty to the eye of day.
When sudden to thy soul reflection brings
The precious meaning of mysterious things,
Thou canst not drive the thought from out thy brain;
Speak, hear thou must, for silence is suc ~ Nūr Ad-Dīn 'Abd Ar-Rahmān Jāmī

The religious man fears, the man of honor scorns, to do an ill action. ~ Joseph Addison

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. ~ Marquis De Sade

Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book... ~ Milan Kundera

Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the best model for all humans? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust." God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. He lets the weeds grow with the wheat until the time of harvest. If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us. This is why Jesus says also, "Ask, and it will be given to you ... " When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions. ~ Rene Girard

If one swain scorns you, you will soon find another. ~ Virgil

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him. ~ Honore De Balzac

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide. ~ Samuel Butler

The highest good is a mind that scorns the happenings of chance, and rejoices only in virtue. ~ Seneca.

Courage, the highest gift, that scorns to bend To mean devices for a sordid end. Courage
an independent spark from Heaven's bright throne, By which the soul stands raised, triumphant high, alone. Great in itself, not praises of the crowd, Above all vice, it stoops not to be proud. Courage, the mighty attribute of powers above, By which those great in war, are great in love. The spring of all brave acts is seated here, As falsehoods draw their sordid birth from fear. ~ George Farquhar

What one approves , another scorns, And thus his nature each discloses: You find the rosebush full of thorns, I find the thornbush full of roses. ~ Arthur Guiterman

We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it. ~ Woodrow Wilson

A sullen pier-glass, cracked from side to side,
Scorns to present the face (as do new mirrors)
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.

- The Pier-Glass ~ Robert Graves

What a mouse he is made by conversation,' " Ezri recited. " 'Scorns gods, dares battle, and flinches from a maid's rebuke! Merest laugh from merest girl is like a dagger felt, and like a dagger, makes a lodging of his breast. Turns blood to milkwater and courage to faint memory.' ~ Scott Lynch

Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other. ~ T.F. Hodge

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. ~ Jean-Henri Fabre

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

God scorns and mocks the devil, in setting under his very nose a poor, weak, human creature, mere dust and ashes, yet endowed with the firstfruits of the Spirit, against whom the devil can do nothing. ~ Martin Luther

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol. ~ Robertson Davies

In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided what what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But if the eminent Juggularius himself ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of that superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath, - then is the truest book in the world a lie. ~ Herman Melville

I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes forward will become this very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. This blackness stayed next to me, probably because of my fear: this fear was not the fear people know about, it did not break me, it did not pay any attention to me, but wandered around the room the way human things do. A great deal of patience is required if thought, when it has been driven down into the depths of the horrible, is to rise little by little and recognize us and look at us. But I still dreaded that look. A look is very different from what one might think, it has neither light nor expression nor force nor movement, it is silent, but from the heart of the strangeness its silence crosses worlds and the person who hears that silence is changed. ~ Maurice Blanchot

For by nature human beings are afraid of death and of the dissolution of the body. But this is most amazing, that one who has put on the faith of the cross scorns even things according to nature, and is not afraid of death because of Christ. ~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet. ~ Donella Meadows

My thoughts hold mortal strife, I do detest my life, And with lamenting cries, Peace to my soul to bring, Oft calls that prince which here doth monarchize; But he, grim-grinning king, Who caitiffs scorns and doth the blest surprise, Late having deck'd with beauty's rose his tomb, Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come. ~ William Drummond

Whoever infringes upon individual 'charity' infringes upon man's nature and scorns his personal dignity ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. ~ John W. Gardner

No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls. ~ Robert Southwell

The sort of individualism that scorns and fears connections with other people as threats to the self's integrity, and the sort of collectivism that seeks to submerge the self in a social role, may be more appealing than the Marxian synthesis, because they are intellectually and emotionally so much easier. ~ Marshall Berman

Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A mind that is conscious of its integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform. ~ Robert Burns

If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. ~ Emil Cioran

Her (Jane Austen) moral message is infused with ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution. She never scorns love, but balances it often . . . with a firm advocacy of . . . the qualities of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practicality. ~ Andrew Sanders

Begat! What a satisfying word it is! It scorns. It despises. It spits. Summarily it dismisses all that bleating nonsense about love and romance, moonlight and motherhood. ~ Poile Sengupta

Patriotism can flourish only where racism and nationalism are given no quarter. We should never mistake patriotism for nationalism. A patriot is one who loves his homeland. A nationalist is one who scorns the homelands of others. ~ Johannes Rau

It has often been remarked of the Scottish character, that the stubbornness with which it is moulded shows most to advantage in adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills, which scorns to be biassed in its mode of growth even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather-side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended. ~ Walter Scott

True courage scorns to vent her prowess in a storm of words; and to the valiant action speaks alone. ~ Tobias Smollett

Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity. ~ Jonathan Swift

I festered with this duality of love and ego, where ego scorns the very love its seeking and then despairs in its absence. ~ Meghna Pant

He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: "men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators. ~ Will Durant

Towering genius disdains a beaten path ... It sees no distinction in adding story to story ... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it ... ~ Abraham Lincoln

Not he who scorns the Saviour's yoke Should wear his cross upon the heart. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Who scorns his own life is lord of yours. ~ Seneca.

What we take for high-mindedness is very often no other than ambition well disguised, that scorns means interests, only to pursuegreater. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope. ~ Bill Moyers

A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day; Like Hectors in at every petty fray. ~ John Dryden