Quaint Quotes

To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.

Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.

I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.

Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did."

Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we 'cling' to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual - we spend less money than we take in.

Holland seems like a quaint toy.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods Black men fashion out of rods

In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term 'newsweekly' seems almost quaint.

In my judgement, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.

The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.

Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.

The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.

All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original; he can only believe it on the report of others.

It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

A quaint conceit, don't you think?

The radio of my youth ... is now a quaint memory replaced by computer hard drives.

Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grandstyle." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon--and of all this he is conscious and proud.

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them.

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!

Seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes - some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world - some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.

As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As if some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--Only this and nothing more.

A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.

Avoid the politic, the factious fool, The busy, buzzing, talking harden'd knave; The quaint smooth rogue that sins against his reason, Calls saucy loud sedition public zeal, And mutiny the dictates of his spirit.

The days when the words Hollywood actor framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.

We live in a culture bound by sin like bands of iron. Moral stories, quaint maxims, and life lessons shared from the heart of a beloved pulpiteer or spiritual life coach have no real power against such darkness. We need preachers of the gospel of Jesus Christ who know the Scriptures, and by God's grace face any culture with the cry, 'Thus saith the Lord!'

Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.

My parents are really conservative. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is the most conservative woman you've ever met. They're very aristocratic in the most quaint suburban way.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.

The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old.

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is, to meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege I think.

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

From Man or Angel the great Architect Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge, His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought Rather admire. Or, if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the Heavens Hath left to their disputes - perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model Heaven And calculate the stars: how they will wield The mighty frame: how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances; how gird the Sphere With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb.