Excessive Flattery Quotes

Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt, not swallowed.

Compliments make me vain: and when I am vain, I am insolent and overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

I think there is a problem, though, with the media gushing over [Obama] too much. I don't think he thinks that he's all that, but the media does. I mean, the coverage after, that I was watching, from MSNBC, I mean these guys were ready to have sex with him.It's embarrassing.

Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.

Hunger is never delicate; they who are seldom gorged to the full with praise may be safely fed with gross compliments, for the appetite must be satisfied before it is disgusted.

You know when someone's over-flattering you in a way. You smile but you can't believe it.

Admiration spoils all from infancy.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

I don't like grand restaurants or kowtowing waiters. I don't need that kind of attention and I don't want it.

Approve not of him who commends all you say.

Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.

We lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people.

There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing!

The biggest bore of all is he who is overflowing with congratulations

An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.

You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do; but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.

Is it just me, or are the 49ers doing an awful lot of ass-patting today?

Flattery must be pretty thick before anybody objects to it.

We have been stuffed full of praise for mediocrity and had our foibles diagnosed away with hyphenated jargon and pop psychology.

As kings are begotten and born like other men, it is to be presumed that they are of the human species; and perhaps, had they thesame education, they might prove like other men. But, flattered from their cradles, their hearts are corrupted, and their heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species by themselves.... Flattery cannot be too strong for them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old drinkers, they require dreams.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

It is always esteemed the greatest mischief a man can do to those whom he loves, to raise men's expectations of them too high by undue and impertinent commendations.

No wonder, Sir, that he is vain; a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.