contempt

Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.

In handling men, there are three feelings that a man must not possess - fear, dislike and contempt. If he is afraid of men he cannot handle them. Neither can he influence them in his favor if he dislikes or scorns them. He must neither cringe nor sneer. He must have both self-respect and respect for others.

Pride defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence into contempt.

The real test of nonviolence lies in its being brought in contact with those who have contempt for it.

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.

In Europe, the word peasant was a term of contempt used by the nobility, but the Chinese scholars used to fancy themselves rustics. Agriculture was viewed as a noble occupation; buying and selling, by contrast were considered nonproductive. One of the founders of the Chinese civilization was said to have been the venerable She Nung, the "Divine Farmer." A scholar often affected to be nothing more than an "old farmer" or a "simple fisherman" and referred to his elegant villa as "my thatched hut." This Rosseau-like feeling for the country life is an important undercurrent in the scholarly tradition.

Contempt is not a thing to be despised.

There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of [crazed prose]. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days. ... The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.