John Churton Collins Quotes

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.

We ask advice, but we mean approbation.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.

All flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.

It was better to fall among crows than among flatterers; for that crows only devour the dead, but the flatterers devour the living.

Among all the diseases of the mind there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.

A politician normally flatters you in your face and criticises you behind your back.

Flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not.

The love of admiration leads to fraud, much more than the love of commendation; but, on the other hand, the latter is much more likely to spoil our: good actions by the substitution of an inferior motive.

O that men's ears should be To counsel deaf but not to flattery!

Pope had been flattered till he thought himself one of the moving powers of the system of life. When he talked of laying down his pen, those who sat round him intreated and implored; and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they went away and laughed.

A man who flatters a woman hopes either to find her a fool or to make her one.

Flattery is a base coin which is current only through our vanity.

Some indeed there are who profess to despise all flattery, but even these are nevertheless to be flattered, by being told that they do despise it.

Flattery won't hurt you if you don't swallow it.

A flatterer never seems absurd: The flatter'd always takes his word.

Flattery makes fools of the best of us.

We sometimes imagine we hate flattery, but we only hate the way we are flattered.

It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.

Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.

The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing,--each his own interest.

He immediately started charming my mom until she was nothing but a gooey puddle in the middle of the foyer.He loved her new haircut.She got one?I guessed her hair did look different.Like she'd washed it or something.Daemon told her that the diamond earrings were beautiful.The rug below the steps was really nice.And that leftover scent of mystery dinner-because I still hadn't figured out what she fed me-smelled divine.He admired nurses worldwide,and by that point,I couldn't keep my eye rolls to a minimum.Daemon was ridiculous.

It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.