Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Publius Syrus

Too much familiarity breeds contempt.

Character | Contempt | Familiarity |

Harold W Thompson

There be four good mothers who have four bad daughters: Truth hath Hatred, Prosperity hath Pride, Security hath Peril, and Familiarity hath Contempt.

Character | Contempt | Familiarity | Good | Peril | Pride | Prosperity | Security | Truth |

George Gissing, fully George Robert Gissing

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.

Children | Day | Experience | Familiarity | Life | Life | Time | Wisdom |

Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

Where nature is concerned, familiarity breeds love and knowledge, not contempt.

Contempt | Familiarity | Knowledge | Love | Nature | Wisdom |

Arthur Koestler

Growing familiarity has the deadly effect of enabling one to predict the other person's responses; and when that happens, the stimulating quality and creative tension of a relationship are finished.

Familiarity | Relationship |

Baltasar Gracián

Avoid familiarities in intercourse. Neither use them nor permit them. The stars keep their brilliance by not making themselves common. Every familiarity breeds contempt.

Contempt | Familiarity |

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the outer world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one’s own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one’s own mind and body.

Body | Capacity | Comfort | Familiarity | God | Mind | Understanding | Will | World |

William Hazlitt

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration; and the shining points of character are not those we chiefly wish to dwell upon.

Admiration | Character | Contempt | Familiarity |

William Hazlitt

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

Admiration | Contempt | Familiarity |

James Fenimore Cooper

What seems venerable by an accumulation of changes is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time.

Familiarity |

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

If familiarity can breed contempt, certainly Art–or what is currently taken for it–has been brought to its lowest stage of intimacy. The people have been harassed with Art in every guise, and vexed with many methods as to its endurance. They have been told how they shall love Art, and live with it. Their homes have been invaded, their walls covered with paper, their very dress taken to task–until, roused at last, bewildered and filled with the doubts and discomforts of senseless suggestion, they resent such intrustion, and cast forth the false prophets, who have brought the very name of the beautiful into disrepute, and derision upon themselves.

Art | Familiarity | Love | People | Art |

Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

It is a delightful thought that, during the familiarity of constant proximity, the heart gathers up in silence the nutriment of love, as the diamond, even beneath the water, imbibes the light it emits. Time, which deadens hatred, secretly strengthens love.

Familiarity | Heart | Light | Silence | Thought | Thought |

Laurence Steinberg

Adolescents sometimes say..."My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk." Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention.

Familiarity | Parents | Friends |

Madeleine L’Engle

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

Familiarity | Knowing | Longing |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt.

Familiarity |