“
Familiarity breeds contempt and children.
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Mark Twain
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Familiarity breeds contempt and predictability breeds boredom.
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Sherry Argov (Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl―A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship)
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Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the
government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it
invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
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Louis D. Brandeis
“
Familiarity seems to breed contempt
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Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
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Love is a fleeting emotion, to reach true nirvana one must know themselves and forsake love, for it breeds contempt.
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Gautama Buddha
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Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
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William Hazlitt
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With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.
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Steven Erikson (House of Chains (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #4))
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They fear us because we are different. Fear breeds contempt, then hate. It is a familiar story.
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Deborah Harkness (Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2))
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Familiarity breeds contempt, for others at first, but then inwardly, contempt towards ourselves.
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Oli Anderson (Synchronesia: A Depressing Existential Novel)
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If you follow the crowd, you will likely get no further than the crowd. If you walk alone, you're likely to end up in places no one has ever been before. Being an achiever is not
without its difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. The unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they'll simply say it was obvious to everyone all along. You have two choices in life. You can dissolve into the main stream, or you can choose to become an achiever and be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no else but you can be.
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Alan Ashley-Pitt
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Familiarity breeds contempt,’ I replied. ‘When we are overly familiar with people, we forget how important they are to us and the correct way to behave with them.
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Gaur Gopal Das (Life’s Amazing Secrets: How to Find Balance and Purpose in Your Life)
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Familiarity breeds contempt. By bringing them in close, they realize that you’re just as human as they are. That’s when the madness sets in. They can’t understand why you have more than they do when you’re just a regular human being the same as them. Then they hate you for it. (Leta)
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Upon the Midnight Clear (Dark-Hunter, #12; Dream-Hunter, #2))
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There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.
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Charles de Gaulle
“
The classic 'seven-year itch' may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.
”
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Kathleen Norris
“
But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover
the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we
must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,
contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of
imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man)
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I choose the irrational from a rational position. I’m positioning myself on Undo, undo even undoing. Un-think, because routines dull the mind, and you don’t see what’s in front of you. Familiarity breeds contempt, and also lack of in-sight and out-sight.
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Lynne Tillman (Men and Apparitions)
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Familiarity may breed contempt; but perhaps it would be more truthful to say that familiarity breeds blindness
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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
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Originality breeds contempt. People will be jealous (in other words, 'hate') and the first thing out of their mouth is 'they don't get it'. Only when time and market share expands and the rest of the world is doing the exact thing you came up with first, will you be perceived as being normal since everyone else is doing it. When in truth, time has finally caught up to you.
”
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Corey Aaron Burkes
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We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent.
”
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Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
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Like faith, marriage is a mystery. The person you’re committed to spending your life with is known and yet unknown, at the same time remarkably intimate and necessarily other. The classic seven-year itch may not be a case of familiarity breeding ennui and contempt, but the shock of having someone you thought you knew all too well suddenly seem a stranger. When that happens, you are compelled to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out. There are many such times in a marriage.
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Kathleen Norris (Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life)
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The statist view of redistribution ignores that forcibly taking resources from one person and giving to another breeds animosity and contempt in both parties.
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Robert E. Wright (Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding)
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Familiarity does breed contempt;—doesn’t it?
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Anthony Trollope (He Knew He Was Right)
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Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be.
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Gertrude Stein (Paris France)
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It is the leader’s job to model and enforce the values and behaviors that make up the company culture. “Model” the behaviors is key. “Do as I say” only breeds contempt from others.
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Beth Ramsay (#Networking is people looking for people looking for people)
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I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
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Daniel Barenboim
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They say familiarity breeds contempt. This may or may not be true, but it is clear that familiarity breeds comfort: do something scary often enough, and it not only ceases to be scary, it becomes automatic.
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William B. Irvine (The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient)
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If we are truly to learn the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, or the conflict in Northern Ireland, we must concede that discomfort breeds dislike, dislike breeds disdain, disdain breeds contempt, and contempt breeds hate.
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John Lewis (Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change)
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If familiarity breeds contempt, just imagine how familiar you can get with a person after a thousand or a million years. God forbid we should both go to heaven. Its endlessness would make us hate each other. Better for you to be in heaven and me in hell.
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Supervert (Necrophilia Variations)
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Free' is more of that 'familiarity breeds contempt' kind of thing. It's about saying 'Wait, I'm longing for something more than I have and I don't know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.' It has nothing to do with what I'm going through, personally.
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Jon Crosby
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The truth is, of course, that there is a danger of being unaware of those persons and things nearest and most accustomed to us. It is not necessarily true that familiarity breeds contempt, but it does tend to make the familiar something that is taken for granted.
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Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor Roosevelt's Book of Common Sense Etiquette)
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Now I know that strange things happen to your body when it meets the snow at 100 mph, no matter what the position. In the twinkling of hitting the snow I regained a proper respect for speed. If you are inattentive, as well as somewhat stupid, you may breed a contempt for big speeds, forgetting respect through the grace of being atop your skis each run. No one on his back at 100 mph will ever after have contempt for speed.
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Dick Dorworth (The Perfect Turn: and other tales of skiing and skiers)
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When we are conscious of our worthlessness, we naturally expect others to be finer and better than we are. If then we discover any similarity between them and us, we see it as irrefutable evidence of their worthlessness and inferiority. It is thus that with some people familiarity breeds contempt.
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Eric Hoffer (The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms)
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We prefer the regular photos of our friends, because that’s how we’re used to seeing them, but we like the inverted photos of ourselves, because that’s how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. “Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt,” says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. “It breeds comfort.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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There is a tendency for us to minimize the Word of the Lord. Maybe because of its familiarity. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” the saying goes. But it may be more accurate to say that “familiarity breeds indifference.” The more we hear some warnings, the less seriously we take them—like the tornado warnings in grade school we didn’t take seriously. The people of Nineveh heard God’s warning. God got their attention, and they were honest with themselves about themselves. One of the reasons we minimize our own sin and rebellion is that we don’t take God’s Word seriously. Maybe a strong pinch is needed to get us to sit up and pay attention.
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Kyle Idleman (AHA: The God Moment That Changes Everything)
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No matter our personal dedication to goodness and justice, we are all, in greater or lesser measure, complicit in the injustices of the society which we tolerate. Even if we tolerate it for the best of reasons, it is a constant struggle not to be consumed by the self-contempt that such accommodation threatens to breed in any person of conscience.
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Charles E. Gannon (1636: Calabar's War)
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I was smiling in appreciation because kindness should never be taken for granted,
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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Familiarity does not breed contempt. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to hide the secret conviction that they’re boring.
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Patrick Honovich (Thirst)
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Familiarity, and a few dozen cheap flyballs off the Monster, breed contempt.
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Thomas Boswell (Why Time Begins on Opening Day)
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Politicians are a strange breed of bird. They sing about their noble intentions and charitable hearts, and they roost with the most contemptible and corrupt of creatures.
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Anthony P. Mauro, Sr.
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But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, "You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or "You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, "Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, "What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" we are to say like the discontented cabman, "What's this?" or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, "Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?" Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair.
This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton)
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The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not. The difficulty today is to hear it at all. Genius, it is said, is the ability to scrutinize the obvious. Written everywhere, we may think, how could the invitation be subtle, or deep? It looks like the other graffiti and even shows up in the same places. But that is part of the divine conspiracy.
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Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
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Cultures have tried to teach a malign and apparently persuasive lie: that the most important metric of a good life is wealth and the luxury and power it brings. The rich think they live better when they are even richer. In America and many other places they use their wealth politically, to persuade the public to elect or accept leaders who will do that for them. They say that the justice we have imagined is socialism that threatens our freedom. Not everyone is gullible: many people lead contented lives without wealth. But many others are persuaded; they vote for low taxes to keep the jackpot full in case they too can win it, even though that is a lottery they are almost bound to lose. Nothing better illustrates the tragedy of an unexamined life: there are no winners in this macabre dance of greed and delusion. No respectable or even intelligible theory of value supposes that making and spending money has any value or importance in itself and almost everything people buy with that money lacks any importance as well. The ridiculous dream of a princely life is kept alive by ethical sleepwalkers. And they in turn keep injustice alive because their self-contempt breeds a politics of contempt for others. Dignity is indivisible.
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Ronald Dworkin (Justice for Hedgehogs)
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If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
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Philip Dormer Stanhope
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ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,
”
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
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This is a reassuring viewpoint and it would be even more so if the police shared it. Unfortunately, they don’t. Cops who know the Angels only from press accounts are sometimes afraid of them, but familiarity seems to breed contempt, and cops who know the Angels from experience usually dismiss
”
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Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)
“
I was never a child; I never had a childhood. I cannot count among my memories warm, golden days of childish intoxication, long joyous hours of innocence, or the thrill of discovering the universe anew each day. I learned of such things later on in life from books. Now I guess at their presence in the children I see. I was more than twenty when I first experienced something similar in my self, in chance moments of abandonment, when I was at peace with the world. Childhood is love; childhood is gaiety; childhood knows no cares. But I always remember myself, in the years that have gone by, as lonely, sad, and thoughtful.
Ever since I was a little boy I have felt tremendously alone―and "peculiar".
I don't know why.
It may have been because my family was poor or because I was not born the way other children are born; I cannot tell. I remember only that when I was six or seven years old a young aunt of mind called me vecchio―"old man," and the nickname was adopted by all my family. Most of the time I wore a long, frowning face. I talked very little, even with other children; compliments bored me; baby-talk angered me. Instead of the noisy play of the companions of my boyhood I preferred the solitude of the most secluded corners of our dark, cramped, poverty-stricken home. I was, in short, what ladies in hats and fur coats call a "bashful" or a "stubborn" child; and what our women with bare heads and shawls, with more directness, call a rospo―a "toad."
They were right.
I must have been, and I was, utterly unattractive to everybody. I remember, too, that I was well aware of the antipathy I aroused. It made me more "bashful," more "stubborn," more of a "toad" than ever. I did not care to join in the games played by other boys, but preferred to stand apart, watching them with jealous eyes, judging them, hating them. It wasn't envy I felt at such times: it was contempt; it was scorn. My warfare with men had begun even then and even there. I avoided people, and they neglected me. I did not love them, and they hated me. At play in the parks some of the boys would chase me; others would laugh at me and call me names. At school they pulled my curls or told the teachers tales about me. Even on my grandfather's farm in the country peasant brats threw stones at me without provocation, as if they felt instinctively that I belonged to some other breed.
”
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Giovanni Papini (Un uomo finito)
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The broad principle, which appears throughout this book, bears repeating. Healthy parenting can be boiled down to those two essential ingredients: love and control. They must operate in a system of checks and balances. Any concentration on love to the exclusion of control usually breeds disrespect and contempt. Conversely, an authoritarian and oppressive home atmosphere is deeply resented by the child who feels unloved or even hated. The objective for the toddler years is to strike a balance between mercy and justice, affection and authority, love and control.
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James C. Dobson (The New Strong-Willed Child)
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That this basic truth was understood long ago is nicely illustrated by another of Aesop’s fables, called “The Fox and the Lion.” One day a fox strolling through the woods spotted a lion—a creature she’d never seen before. She froze with terror but stopped to watch from a distance before slowly creeping away. The next day she went back to the same spot and saw the lion again, but she was able to get closer than before, hiding behind a bush for a while before making her escape. On the third day, the fox returned, but this time she found the courage to walk right up to the lion and say hello, and somehow the two became friends. The moral of the story is that familiarity breeds not contempt but indifference. We can expect anxiety to abate naturally with repeated exposure, under normal conditions.
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Donald J. Robertson (How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius)
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More surprising, perhaps, was that I began to understand something important about humans and trees at that moment. I began to understand our shared history. To look at the world from a tree, as I had done so often in those years, is a fundamentally different way of seeing. It is contemplative and detached and the objects one studies from that height are rendered, at the same time, both majestic and small. A generally commonplace item, in other words, may stir admiration and mystery when viewed from that vantage point. Or, at worst, it may breed jealousy, desire, and contempt. It all depends on the viewer. And so, I have to wonder, what kind of viewer was I? What was that, exactly, up in the oak trees of Woodland Hills? An animal? Some sort of Peeping Tom? A sensitive boy racked with love and guilt? Maybe.
”
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M.O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away)
“
These people lived insular, often deeply private lives focused on their work. Their voices were rarely heard, because they sought no audience. Their identities were constructed from things that couldn’t be bought in shops. They wore old clothes and only went shopping occasionally for essentials. They held “shop-bought” things in great contempt. They preferred cash to credit, and would mend anything that broke, piling up old things to use again someday, rather than throwing them away. They had hobbies and interests that cost nothing, turning their necessary tasks, like catching rats or foxes, into sport. Their friendships were built around their work, and the breeds of cattle and sheep they kept. They rarely took holidays or bought new cars. And it wasn’t all work—a lot of time was spent on farm-related activities that were communal and more relaxed, or in the simple enjoyment of wild things. My grandfather called this way of life “living quietly.
”
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James Rebanks (Pastoral Song)
“
Well, now, if we’d known we were going to have such…ah…gra…that is, illustrious company, we’d have-“
“Swept off the chairs?” Lucinda suggested acidly. “Shoveled off the floor?”
“Lucinda!” Elizabeth whispered desperately. “They didn’t know we were coming.”
“No respectable person would dwell in such a place even for a night,” she snapped, and Elizabeth watched in mingled distress and admiration as the redoubtable woman turned around and directed her attack on their unwilling host. “The responsibility for our being here is yours, whether it was a mistake or not! I shall expect you to rout your servants from their hiding places and have them bring clean linens up to us at once. I shall also expect them to have this squalor remedied by morning! It is obvious from your behavior that you are no gentleman; however, we are ladies, and we shall expect to be treated as such.”
From the corner of her eye Elizabeth had been watching Ian Thornton, who was listening to all of this, his jaw rigid, a muscle beginning to twitch dangerously in the side of his neck.
Lucinda, however, was either unaware of or unconcerned with his reaction, for, as she picked up her skirts and turned toward the stairs, she turned on Jake. “You may show us to our chambers. We wish to retire.”
“Retire!” cried Jake, thunderstruck. “But-but what about supper?” he sputtered.
“You may bring it up to us.”
Elizabeth saw the blank look on Jake’s face, and she endeavored to translate, politely, what the irate woman was saying to the startled red-haired man.
“What Miss Throckmorton-Jones means is that we’re rather exhausted from our trip and not very good company, sir, and so we prefer to dine in our rooms.”
“You will dine,” Ian Thornton said in an awful voice that made Elizabeth freeze, “on what you cook for yourself, madam. If you want clean linens, you’ll get them yourself from the cabinet. If you want clean rooms, clean them! Am I making myself clear?”
“Perfectly!” Elizabeth began furiously, but Lucinda interrupted in a voice shaking with ire: “Are you suggesting, sirrah, that we are to do the work of servants?”
Ian’s experience with the ton and with Elizabeth had given him a lively contempt for ambitious, shallow, self-indulgent young women whose single goal in life was to acquire as many gowns and jewels as possible with the least amount of effort, and he aimed his attack at Elizabeth. “I am suggesting that you look after yourself for the first time in your silly, aimless life. In return for that, I am willing to give you a roof over your head and to share our food with you until I can get you to the village. If that is too overwhelming a task for you, then my original invitation still stands: There’s the door. Use it!”
Elizabeth knew the man was irrational, and it wasn’t worth riling herself to reply to him, so she turned instead to Lucinda. “Lucinda,” she said with weary resignation, “do not upset yourself by trying to make Mr. Thornton understand that his mistake has inconvenienced us, not the other way around. You will only waste your time. A gentleman of breeding would be perfectly able to understand that he should be apologizing instead of ranting and raving. However, as I told you before we came here, Mr. Thornton is no gentleman. The simple fact is that he enjoys humiliating people, and he will continue trying to humiliate us for as long as we stand here.”
Elizabeth cast a look of well-bred disdain over Ian and said, “Good night, Mr. Thornton.” Turning, she softened her voice a little and said, “Good evening, Mr. Wiley.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Ye are stirring up a lot of trouble, arenae ye?” “Me? I just came to explore this building. She is the one stirring up trouble. She wants Cathal, I think.” “She does, e’en though his Outsider blood sickens her. Edmee would like to be the lady of Cambrun. She has ne’er been able to convince Cathal of that, however. It doesnae help her cause that she makes her contempt of his mother so verra clear. Cathal has ne’er intended to wed with a MacNachton, either. He wants bairns.” Bridget frowned at him. “There is a wee bit more to me than a womb, ye ken.” “Och, aye, a wee bit.” He laughed when she softly hissed in annoyance, then grew serious. “O’er the last few days ’tis evident neither of ye will suffer in the making of a bairn.” He only briefly smiled at her blushes. “Tis a blessing, that. And where is the insult in a mon thinking a woman a good choice as mother to his bairns?” None, she supposed, but she was not about to admit it. “There should be more.” “Ah, poor lass, so unsure of yourself.” He nimbly danced out of her reach when she tried to hit him. “The only thing I will say is that, compared to the rest of us, Cathal is nearly a monk. He isnae one to be caught in embraces with a lass round every corner. And, aye, mayhap he thinks too much on a bairn, but ’tisnae just an heir he seeks, is it? Tis the salvation of his people. Tis no small thing that. So, do ye cease teasing the fool and say aye?” Bridget sighed. “Tisnae an easy thing to decide. Tisnae just my fate, but that of my children I must consider and ye ask me to do it in but a week.” “We are but a wee bit different.” “Och, aye, ye are that.” “But, that shouldnae trouble a Callan, I think.” He sighed when she did not respond to that remark. “We arenae what ye think we are, lass. Nay exactly. I dinnae believe the soulless dead breed bairns.” He smiled gently at the look of consternation that briefly crossed her face. “We are but different. Cursed in some ways, blessed in others, but ’tis Cathal who must tell ye the tale.
”
”
Hannah Howell (The Eternal Highlander (McNachton Vampires, #1))
“
I was never a child; I never had a childhood. I cannot count among my memories warm, golden days of childish intoxication, long joyous hours of innocence, or the thrill of discovering the universe anew each day. I learned of such things later on in life from books. Now I guess at their presence in the children I see. I was more than twenty when I first experienced something similar in my self, in chance moments of abandonment, when I was at peace with the world. Childhood is love; childhood is gaiety; childhood knows no cares. But I always remember myself, in the years that have gone by, as lonely, sad, and thoughtful.
Ever since I was a little boy I have felt tremendously alone―and "peculiar".
I don't know why.
It may have been because my family was poor or because I was not born the way other children are born; I cannot tell. I remember only that when I was six or seven years old a young aunt of mind called me [i]vecchio[/i]―"old man," and the nickname was adopted by all my family. Most of the time I wore a long, frowning face. I talked very little, even with other children; compliments bored me; baby-talk angered me. Instead of the noisy play of the companions of my boyhood I preferred the solitude of the most secluded corners of our dark, cramped, poverty-stricken home. I was, in short, what ladies in hats and fur coats call a "bashful" or a "stubborn" child; and what our women with bare heads and shawls, with more directness, call a [i]rospo[/i]―a "toad."
They were right.
I must have been, and I was, utterly unattractive to everybody. I remember, too, that I was well aware of the antipathy I aroused. It made me more "bashful," more "stubborn," more of a "toad" than ever. I did not care to join in the games played by other boys, but preferred to stand apart, watching them with jealous eyes, judging them, hating them. It wasn't envy I felt at such times: it was contempt; it was scorn. My warfare with men had begun even then and even there. I avoided people, and they neglected me. I did not love them, and they hated me. At play in the parks some of the boys would chase me; others would laugh at me and call me names. At school they pulled my curls or told the teachers tales about me. Even on my grandfather's farm in the country peasant brats threw stones at me without provocation, as if they felt instinctively that I belonged to some other breed.
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Giovanni Papini (Un uomo finito)
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an immoral and unjust legal system would breed contempt for its laws and regulations.
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Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom)
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In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. . . . If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.
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Louis D. Brandeis
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... belum lagi kata orang 'tresno jalaraning kulino'
kita sayang karena terbiasa, tapi ada lagi pepatah
londo Inggris yang mengatakan 'familiarity breeds contempt' jadi keakraban penyebab pelecehan, terjemahannya kurang tepat, memang antar bahasa susah dicari kata padanannya.
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Toeti Heraty (Calon arang: Kisah perempuan korban patriarki : prosa lirik)
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But now, where the spirit of the Western civilisation prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood, to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means,—by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountain-head of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of the lives of men, who were our greatest and best. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. We can take anything else from the hands of science, but not this elixir of moral death. Never think for a moment, that the hurts you inflict upon other races will not infect you, and the enmities you sow around your homes will be a wall of protection to you for all time to come. To imbue the minds of a whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to perpetuate humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from war, and using these in schools in order to breed in children's minds contempt for others, is imitating the West where she has a festering sore, whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into its vitality.
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Rabindranath Tagore (The Spirit of Japan)
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When anger is repressed by reason of inability to do immediate harm, it retires into the heart in the form of malice and breeds these vices—envy, triumph over the enemy's ill, repulsion of friendly approaches, contempt, slander, derision, personal violence, and injustice. MURDER
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John Wortabet (Arabian Wisdom)
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Chapter 8 “The Road” “Our government… teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” -Louis D. Brandeis
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D.J. Cooper (Dystopia Complete Series: The Journey)
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Melody watched the pair of them together, seeing the beginnings of a friendship that would probably last them the rest of their lives. It gave her a sense of peace that out of all of the mess that was in her life, at least she’d been able to help one person. It was moments like this that made the other stuff easier. It also gave her something to fight for.
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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She was like a black hole, an irresistible force. No, that wasn’t right. For starters, black holes were terrifying, and there was no force involved. Melody was more like the sun. She brought light into their lives, showed hidden pitfalls, and filled them all with warmth. She nurtured and loved, despite experiencing so little of that in her own life.
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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Change came one heart at a time,
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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Sometimes, to heal, you have to hurt first,
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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What they had together was different. Separate from what she had, and yet she didn’t feel jealous. It was like a different strand of the ties that held them all together. They were family, and that meant more than all the men rotating around her like she was the sun to their planets. Everything was still evolving; they’d barely had time to get to know each other, but this? It was beautiful.
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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Stop hiding in the shadows and step out into the light. I promise, we’ll all be there with you, guiding and guarding until you’re strong enough to pull us behind you.
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Jade Thorn (Breeding Contempt (Of Magic and Contempt, #4))
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I came here prepared to fight an enemy,” he murmured, his voice rough with need. “I came here expecting to feel contempt for you, not this. Christ, anything but this.”
He lowered his head and kissed her, hot and hard and deep.
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Lara Adrian (King of Midnight (Midnight Breed, #18))
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it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton)
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There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt
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Charles de Gaulle
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But if familiarity breeds contempt, it also fosters a bond—
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James St. James (Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland)
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Mindfulness, hope and compassion are the three key elements for resonant leadership.’ Being present and being respected is the new ball game. The belief that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ is passé.
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Sibichen K. Mathew (When the Boss is Wrong: Making and Unmaking of the Leader Within You)
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Respect wears off, fear doesn’t. Familiarity breeds contempt. Terror is eternal. I don’t believe I just said that. I’ve clearly had too much to drink already.
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Patrick Meaney (Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews)
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Charity:
A self-inculcated delusion to attain a conscience with clarity
But all it could establish was your own familiarity
Intimacy breeds contempt but charity begins at home
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Dhanur Goyal
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Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.
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Amanda Craig
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Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt “best-practice” techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is sthe emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems, and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies.10 The very convergence of major institutions makes peoples all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess.
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Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
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The writing of contemporary history can be among the most treacherous of ambitions. Everybody knows we never appreciate what we have till it’s gone; that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; that familiarity breeds contempt; and so forth.
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Philip Mirowski
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[F]amiliarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed, not indeed contempt, but something which, for practical purposes,
is almost as bad - namely a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words.
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Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)
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Familiarity does not always breed contempt, Ariel was fond of saying.
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Fern Michaels (Wish List)
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Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
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George Santayana (The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1955-06-16) [Paperback])
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One could draw a line from Chesterton’s thoughts on dandelions to the way we tend to treat certain aspects of blue-collar work—whether through lower wages, longer working hours, or simply a societal nose sniff at the jobs that most need to be done. He continued: These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.
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Kyla Scanlon (In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work)
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It is an old aphorism that familiarity breeds contempt. Like most old aphorisms—which should be reexamined annually and then thrown out of court—it isn’t always true. Familiarity at worst breeds, as a rule, only familiarity; at best, it breeds something approaching adoration.
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Vincent Starrett (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes)
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We then project that onto God, as if we can come into His presence in a cavalier spirit of familiarity, the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt. It is true that we are given access to God by virtue of the work that Christ has accomplished for us, but our justification does not change God’s character. The fact that He has saved us and adopted us into His family does not mean that He has stopped being holy or eternal, or that He has stopped dwelling in light inapproachable. If anyone should understand the glorious majesty of God, it is the believer. We should not be cavalier or casual when we come to him. When we see the inapproachable light, we should react as Isaiah did.
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R.C. Sproul (Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith)
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Familiarity breeds contempt.
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Napoleon Hill (Law of Success in 15 Lessons (2020 edition))
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Availability breeds contempt. When you eliminated the individuals from your physical, emotional and intellectual support network who are impossible to elicit irratation, whoever remains, no matter how close the relationship, must be the erosive imbecile that caused your depression. The more omniscient you are, the bigger the target you become. The more omnipotent you are, the more aggressive the oppression.
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Et Imperatrix Noctem
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Availability breeds contempt. When you eliminated the individuals from your physical, emotional and intellectual support network who are impossible to elicit irritation, whoever remains, no matter how close the relationship, must be the erosive imbecile that caused your depression. The more omniscient you are, the bigger the target you become. The more omnipotent you are, the more aggressive the oppression.
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Et Imperatrix Noctem
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Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt,” says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. “It breeds comfort.” One explanation for this effect is that exposure increases the ease of processing. An unfamiliar idea requires more effort to understand. The more we see, hear, and touch it, the more comfortable we become with it, and the less threatening it is.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and exploits girls, women, and nonbinary people (and constricts and contorts boys and men) also wreaks destruction on the natural world. Dominance, supremacy, violence, extraction, egotism, greed, ruthless competition—these hallmarks of patriarchy fuel the climate crisis just as surely as they do inequality, colluding with racism along the way. Patriarchy silences, breeds contempt, fuels destructive capitalism, and plays a zero-sum game. Its harms are chronic, cumulative, and fundamentally planetary.
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
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We can understand this more clearly if we look at where holy fear breaks down in our interpersonal relations. When we examine our deepest resentments, we invariably find that at their roots lies the fact that someone has not respected us. Usually the violation is not blatant. Almost always it is subtle: someone has taken us for granted, has assumed that he understands us and our motives, has boxed us in with her own preconceived notions of who we are; has not respected our uniqueness, mystery, and complexity; or has taken as owed to them what we can only offer as gift. This is a picture of the illusion of familiarity, and it is what is expressed in the axiom "familiarity breeds contempt".
By extension, to live in fear of God means that we live before God and the rest of reality in such a way that there is never contempt within us. We take nothing for granted, everything as a gift. We have respect. We are always poised for surprise before the mystery of God, others, and ourselves. All boredom and contempt is an infallible sign that we have fallen out of a healthy fear of God.
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Ronald Rolheiser (The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God)
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If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
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Louis D. Brandeis (Brandeis on Democracy by Louis D. Brandeis (1995-01-18))
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Her favorite place was the Cave of Diamonds. She never grew tired of the cave, of the serenity it instilled in her, but she forced herself to ration the number of times she visited. She didn’t want over-familiarity to breed contempt.
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Darren Floyd (Oblivion Black)
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it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself … To declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.
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Jane Mayer (The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals)
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If government becomes a lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself.
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Sterling Seagrave (The Marcos Dynasty)
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Judgment breeds disconnection and contempt; curiosity breeds connection and understanding.
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Stephanie Meriaux (Navigating Divorce with a Peaceful Heart: A Practical Guide to Cultivating Inner Peace in the Midst of Chaos)
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they were on the sort of terms which admit of intimacy, affection, and a familiarity which may breed anything between contempt and love. In fact a very wide frame into which almost any picture could be fitted.
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Patricia Wentworth (Latter End (Miss Silver, #11))
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Complacency breeds contempt, it also breeds tragedy.
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Martin H. Samuel
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Like every great love, patriotism broadens one’s conscience. A true patriot loves the whole world. Having discovered the greatness of one’s native land, it is impossible to conceive hatred for the world. People devoid of love are poor patriots. The pseudo-patriotism of the fascists rests on contempt for other peoples; it narrows down the world to the limits of one language, one type of people, one breed.
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Ilya Ehrenburg (The Tempering of Russia)
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Familiarity breeds contempt, and we got so we couldn’t stand one another.
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Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare)
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That is the highest function of fantasy: truth, insight, understanding. Those who dislike Tolkien always dislike the genre itself, scorning its ‘escapism.’ They forget that Fantasy does not only help us escape from circumstances, but also from falsehoods, self-deceptions, and narrowness of vision; from the familiarity that breeds not only contempt but also boredom with ourselves and each other. It helps us to escape into wisdom.
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David Rowe (The Proverbs of Middle-earth)