I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair. — John Quincy Adams
Dirty, stained, withered, broken things seem beautiful to me. — Yohji Yamamoto
Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman. — Coco Chanel
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick — William Butler Yeats
I've always been quite thrifty. I can't bear to spend hundreds of pounds on designer clothes. I shop in second-hand shops in Portobello Road and go to Sue Ryder. — Ashley Jensen
Life is an extravagant gown, riddled with lice. — Eileen Chang
It's rough to go through life with your contents looking as if they settled during shipping. — Milton Berle
Short Shabby Quotes
Familiarity is the thing-the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. — E. B. White
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. — Willa Cather
A boy and a girl, dressed in the T-shirts and denim that are the shabby uniform of this age. — Michael Scott
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien. — Edward Dahlberg
... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. — Alice Walker
It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to. — Edgar Friedenberg
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. — O. Henry
We stayed in some pretty shabby places in Europe. — Phil Collins
This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection. — Peter De Vries
It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to. — Edgar Z. Friedenberg
There is many a good man to be found under a shabby hat.
Shabby Look Quotes
The band broke up because I couldn't bear Rotten anymore because he was an embarrassment with his silly hats and his, like, shabby, dirty, nasty looking appearance. — Sid Vicious
I hadn't bargained for this. I didn't think it would be like this - shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you. ... I didn't think it would be like this — Jean Rhys
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. — George Eliot
It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust. — Alice Munro
He looked at their shabby clothes in puzzlement. “We were traveling anonymously for safety—” explained the magus. “But surely—” “—and then we were robbed on the road.” “Ah,” said the king, “the danger in being anonymous. — Megan Whalen Turner
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. — C. S. Lewis
He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter. — Margery Williams
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. — Margery Williams
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out. — Thomas Pynchon
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. — O. Henry
Houses without personality are a series of walled enclosures with furniture standing around in them. Other houses are filled with things of little intrinsic value, even with much that is shabby and yet they have that inviting atmosphere. — Emily Post
I... allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness. — Ruskin Bond
Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation. — Mikhail Bakunin
We are not cowed into timidity by death and life. Were we forced to rely on our own shabby resources we would be pitiful people in deed. But the awareness of Christ's present risenness persuades us that we are buoyed up and carried on by a life greater than our own. — Brennan Manning
If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies. — Albert Einstein
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes. — W. H. Auden
All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand. — Hermann Hesse
... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all. — Albion Fellows Bacon
There is no vice of which a man can be guilty, no meanness, no shabbiness, no unkindness, which excites so much indignation among his contemporaries, friends and neighbours, as his success. This is the one unpardonable crime, which reason cannot defend, nor humility mitigate. — Arthur Schopenhauer
The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand. — Murray Kempton
I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done? — Don McCullin
Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch. — Hunter S. Thompson
The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.” (Analects 4.9) — Confucius
You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has. — Jonathan Kozol
A knight whose heart is set upon the Way, but who is ashamed of wearing shabby clothes and eating coarse food, is not worth calling into counsel. — Confucius
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman. — Sinclair Lewis
A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human. — Carolyn See
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest. — Iris Murdoch
The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers. — Thorstein Veblen
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace. — Murray Kempton
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
It would be pretty shabby to appear flippant around a documentary that's about how much I love my fans. — Rick Springfield
Maybe the culture is [particularly] shabby now. Maybe it's because I'm over sixty, that I can feel that about everything. — Leonard Cohen
What if my trousers are shabby and worn, they cover a warm hearth. — Thomas Lansing Masson
What does one save for, anyhow? For a few tired hours at the end of life when one sits and counts dollars? Or do we save so that those last years will not be mentally barren or esthetically shabby? I try to save a few things to furnish my mind decently, on the theory that no auctioneer can get in there to sell off all the furniture. — Margaret Culkin Banning
I’m not interested in changing either my suit or my car or whatever with every change in fashion. That’s irrelevant. I don’t judge myself or my friends by their fashions. Of course, I don’t approve of people who are sloppy and unnecessarily shabby or dishevelled… But I’m not impressed by a US$5,000 or US$10,000 Armani suit. — Lee Kuan Yew
Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. — T. S. Eliot
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one. — Willa Cather
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of shabby quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about shabby to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of shabby quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
