False Profundity Quotes

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void.

There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.

The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.

Vague and mysterious forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound.

Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.

You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you.

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.