(95 quotes found)
“Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
“Imitation is the sincerest flattery”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Baloney is the unvarnished lie laid on so thick you hate it. Blarney is flattery laid on so thin you love it.”
Fulton J. Sheen
“Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem”
Jonathan Swift
“Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.”
“The habitude of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional”
Walter Savage Landor
“I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean”
Oscar Wilde
“We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.”
Jean de la Bruyere
“The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”
Jorge Luis Borges
