Poverty makes men ridiculous. [ Proverb ]
To whisper proclamations is ridiculous. [ Proverb ]
Nothing is more ridiculous than ridicule. [ Shaftesbury ]
Raised by fortune to a ridiculous visibility. [ Grattan ]
New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous.
Nay, let them be unmanly, yet are followed. [ William Shakespeare ]
Those things which now seem frivolous and slight.
Will be of serious consequence to you,
When they have made you once ridiculous. [ Roscommon ]
Many a man has been undone by a ridiculous nickname. [ J. H. Moore ]
Wise men may look ridiculous in the company of fools. [ Proverb ]
A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools. [ Proverb ]
To the man of thought almost nothing is really ridiculous. [ Goethe ]
Ridiculous modes, invented by ignorance and adopted by folly. [ Smollett ]
We are only vulnerable and ridiculous through our pretensions. [ Mme, d Girardin ]
It is inconceivable how much wit it requires to avoid being ridiculous. [ Chamfort ]
The greatest hardship of poverty is that it tends to make men ridiculous. [ Juvenal ]
Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive. [ Haliburton ]
One can not imagine how much cleverness is necessary not to be ridiculous. [ Chamfort ]
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, is wasteful and ridiculous excess. [ William Shakespeare ]
All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich. [ Lavater ]
We are never so ridiculous from the habits we have as from those we affect to have. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Aphorisms, except they be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of sciences. [ Lord Bacon ]
There is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Nothing is more estimable then politeness, and nothing more ridiculous or tiresome than ceremony. [ French ]
There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so. [ Colton ]
By nothing do men more show what they are than by their appreciation of what is and what is not ridiculous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Nothing makes old people who have been attractive more ridiculous than to forget that they are so no longer. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The most ridiculous of all animals is a proud priest; he cannot use his own tools without cutting his own fingers. [ Colton ]
To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous: or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant. [ Hazlitt ]
A lover is a man who endeavors to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be: this is the reason why almost all lovers are ridiculous. [ Chamfort ]
We always make our friend appear awkward and ridiculous by giving him a laced suit of tawdry qualifications, which nature never intended him to wear. [ Junius ]
A leveller has long ago been set down as a ridiculous and chimerical being, who, if he could finish his work today, would have to begin it again tomorrow. [ Colton ]
God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinction? [ Jeffrey ]
Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it; what custom hath civilized is become decent, till then ridiculous; where the eye is the jury thy apparel is the evidence. [ Quarles ]
The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again. [ Thomas Paine ]
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess. [ William Shakespeare ]
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint. [ Fielding ]
Living authors, therefore, are usually bad companions. If they have not gained character, they seek to do so by methods often ridiculous, always disgusting; and if they have established a character, they are silent for fear of losing by their tongue what they have acquired by their pen - for many authors converse much more foolishly than Goldsmith, who have never written half so well. [ Colton ]
Posture or Attitude? Each of these words has its appropriate place, and one should not be misapplied for the other. Posture is the mode of placing the body, and may be either natural or assumed. Attitude is always assumed, and is intended to display some grace of the body, or some affection or purpose of the mind. Postures, when natural, accommodate themselves to the convenience of the body; when assumed they may be either serious or ridiculous. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]