Shamelessness Quotes

She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things. ~ Mary Renault

But Mom's shamelessness and weakness of will had led me to become the opposite: stubborn and proud. Too proud to ask for help, even when I needed it most. Especially when I needed it most. ~ Leah Raeder

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

On her [Thérèse's] part she seemed to revel in daring and shamelessness. Not a single moment of hesitation or fear possessed her. She threw herself into adultery with a kind of furious honesty, flouting danger, and as it were, taking pride in doing so. ~ Emile Zola

Shamelessness is not the same as honesty. ~ James Poniewozik

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people's rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itse ~ Karl Jaspers

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness. ~ Umberto Eco

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness. But it's lucky I never ran. In the years from [Joseph] McCarthy to now, I would have either been destroyed or reduced. ~ Peter Biskind

Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman's shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle flame, stared at for a few moments, would burn on behind closed eyelids. ~ Ken Follett

Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized his camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone's little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness - there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded. ~ Salman Rushdie

She would grace his home with her charm and beauty and she would make his bed joyous, all without ever having to shame his hearth with another man's memory of her shamelessness. ~ Dorothy West

Shamelessness is a wonderful part of the character. ~ Stephen Colbert

Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right.
The "honesty" often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one's self; only "letting it all hang out," not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes "honesty" is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth. ~ Peter Kreeft

Honor cultures probably rely too much on shame, but our modern alternative is an epidemic of shamelessness. ~ Tamler Sommers

But even democracies like ours are rife with corruption. The founding fathers had the right idea. They never envisioned professional politicians. They wanted citizen legislators, leaving their farms for a few years to serve their fellow man. A civic responsibility like jury duty. But under our current system, you almost have to be a megalomaniac to have interest in entering the sewer that is politics. And success in this realm requires that backstabbing, shamelessness, lying, and manipulation become an art form. ~ Douglas E. Richards

As long as Rupert Murdoch has owned it, the 'New York Post' has been defined by its shamelessness and total lack of interest in taking responsibility for its worst errors and poor judgment. ~ Alex Pareene

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. ~ Roger Kimball

Meat-eating is condemned by the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Sravakas; if one devours meat out of shamelessness he will always be devoid of sense. ~ Gautama Buddha

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

A period of lewdness and shamelessness exists with the highest type of manic delirium. ~ Aretaeus Of Cappadocia

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either. ~ Robert Ardrey

Be wary of someone who has never failed, or seem to have no faults... Too good to be true usually is. Perfection hides something. ~ Henry Cloud

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity
self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness
are the least attractive in a friend. ~ Tonya Hurley

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages. ~ Lorrie Moore

The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit to his shamelessness. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ashamed to avow my sins,
A burden mine alone to bear,
Broken beyond repair,
Baptized in gold to fill the cracks,
Restless nights, Velour gowns turning to sacks
No amount of gold brings relief,
Debased by lies and deceit,
Beg for forgiveness,
And you shall be forgiven,
He, who knows all, saw underneath my veneer,
A pain, a woe played for deaf ears,
I beseech my lord to forgive my misdeeds abhorred,
Let my midnight scribble turn into beautiful word. ~ Khadidja Megaache

No use lamenting over it! I was now living in a blaze of unsatisfied desire, of suspenseful expectancy, that often made me wild and crazy. I often saw the image of my dream beloved before me with more than lifelike clarity, much more clearly than my own hand; I spoke to it, wept before it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears; I called it beloved and sensed its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss; I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderess. It lured me into the tenderest dreams of love and into acts of dissolute shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and vile. ~ Hermann Hesse

The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust. ~ Alice Munro

In all Thénardier's outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes, this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodgepodge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul -- in this eruption of all suffering and hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth. ~ Victor Hugo

It's so easy to be consumed by this shamelessness with him. The way he kisses, let alone the way he touches me, is so sharply present that it is impossible to think about anything other than the one single second in front of me. With Brian, maybe all that we have is this single second in front of us. ~ Mary Ann Rivers