A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

W. Somerset Maugham

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Affectation Commonplace Conceal Mind

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W. Somerset Maugham
British - Novelist
January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

John Ruskin

Religion is the peculiarity of the growth of the Indian mind.

Swami Vivekananda

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.

William Hazlitt

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.

H. L. Mencken

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.

Remy de Gourmont

Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.

Samuel Johnson

O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The purpose of sealing the records was not to conceal them or to conceal the facts from the American people.

Louis Stokes

The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.

Carl Jung

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as 'good' and other sorts as 'bad' is fearful behavior.

Stephen King

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions.

Steven Pressfield

A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

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