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Updated: May 4, 2025
When Descartes, after convincing himself of the hollow pretentiousness of most human knowledge, proceeded to dig away the accumulated drift and sand of ages in quest of any clay or rock there might be below, the first indubitable verity he came to was thought, about whose reality there could, as already explained, be no possibility of doubt, inasmuch as any doubt concerning it, being itself thought, would be but an additional proof of it.
I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. In some ways he was far simpler than I. He would talk, for instance, in such an ignorant way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But was not my blush far more unworthy than his freedom from all pretentiousness in matters of art? He never pretended.
From his earliest hour, the ambitious person is told that to make a road where none has walked before, to do easily what it is impossible for others to do at all, to create new forms of thought and expression, are the only recipes for genius; and in trying to escape on all sides from every resemblance to his predecessors, he adopts at once an air of eccentricity and pretentiousness.
To Brice's surprise, a few steps in that direction revealed a fair-sized cabin, with a slight pretentiousness about it of neatness, comfort, and picturesque effect, far superior to the Tarbox shanty. A few flowers were in boxes on the window signs, as Brice fancied, of feminine taste. When they reached the threshold, somewhat of this quality was also visible in the interior.
The architect who built it had introduced no innovations or pretentiousness, had built a Gothic church, and introduced no fancies of his own.
One took it up and asked time after time, "Why should there be this queer flavour of absurdity and pretentiousness about the thing?" Before the Humanitarian period I was entirely in agreement with the Humanitarian's cause.
The result is a work which, if not actually the ablest, is the most thorough and satisfactory, which the subject has yet called forth. It contrasts in all respects with the latest of its predecessors, Hutchinson's Two Years in Peru, a book of still greater size, but deficient in all the elements of critical and literary power, while replete with pretentiousness and dogmatism.
Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of "giving orders." A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster.
The more simple, childlike, and unpretentious we can be, the more easily we shall win our way through. Pretentiousness or arrogance in Man can never be anything but ridiculous, and a sense of humour should alone be sufficient to save us from such error. For the same reason it is impossible to regard human ceremonies with any respect or seriousness, for they are not childlike but childish.
It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. And a very gallant and hefty body of men they were. Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided. Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness.
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