Basest Quotes

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die' But if that flow'r with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today destroys the soul instead of uplifting it and instead of evoking the best in us, panders to our basest passions?

A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

National antipathy is the basest, because the most illiberal and illiterate of all prejudices.

Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?

The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: He trots the air;

the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

People sometimes ask: Is Putin a clever man? Yes, he's clever in his own way, when it comes to political intrigue, and he's got a good head for numbers. But as soon as he took office, the first thing he did was to institute a new anthem based on the old Soviet one; that was a very major step, not a petty issue. He began at once to appeal to people's basest instincts. It is true that people in Russia are used to obedience.

Donald Trump is appealing to the basest, the most selfish and the most literally un-American of instincts.

Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted-of the tears it has caused-of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renters God the basest and most cruel being in the universe. ... There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god.

Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.

It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

To abandon your shield is the basest of crimes;

nor may a man thus disgraced be present at the sacred rites, or enter their council; many, indeed, after escaping from battle, have ended their infamy with the halter.

It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.

Only man can stop being fully man. He can ascend above all degres of universal existence and by the same token fall below the level of the basest of creatures.

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before.

This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.