Pretention Quotes

“I might appear confident and chatty, but I spend most of my time laughing at jokes I don't find funny, saying things I don't really mean - because at the end of the day that's what we're all trying to do: fit in, one way or another, desperately trying to pretend we're all the same.”
― Tabitha Suzuma, Forbidden

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“When you know the inside stories, no matter how good looks the cover, you just cannot appreciate it...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,’ she said. ‘I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”
― Elif Batuman

“...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“We always need a sound reason to move on, and we always pretend to have it.”
― Junaid Raza

“... [T]he letters of the alphabet (two Cs, a large D; the combination of Y, S, and L) belong on an ophthalmologist's chart. For the Parisienne, luxury should never be spelled out.”
― Anne Berest, How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits

“When we need reasons to do something, we pretend to have it.”
― Junaid Raza

“Our vanity sets too much importance on the role that we play in the world. The Parisian bourgeois laughs at the small-town bourgeois; the nobleman at Court mocks the provincial noble; the well-known man mocks the unknown man, forgetting that time will do equal justice to their various pretensions, ant that they will all look equally ridiculous or trivial in the eyes of generations to come.”
― François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800