Great Throughts Treasury

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

Familiarity

"Too much familiarity breeds contempt." - Publius Syrus

"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." -

"Admiration and familiarity are strangers." -

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

"Familiarity breeds contentment." - George Ade

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

"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." - George Gissing, fully George Robert Gissing

"Familiarity in one's superiors causes bitterness, fir it may not be returned." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Nature I believe in. True art aims to represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal—partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me. " - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"Familiarity breeds contempt." - Publius Syrus

"Where nature is concerned, familiarity breeds love and knowledge, not contempt." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt." -

"Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity." - Honoré de Balzac

"Familiarity makes even the most terrible things easy of approach." - Aesop NULL

"Familiarity makes even the most terrible things easy of approach." -

"Familiarity makes even the most terrible things easy of approach." -

"Familiarity breeds acquiescence as well as contempt." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"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." - Arthur Koestler

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

"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." - Jon Kabat-Zinn

"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration." - 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." - William Hazlitt

"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." - James Abbott McNeill Whistler

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

"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." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

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

"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." -

"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." - Madeleine L’Engle

"I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Too much familiarity breeds contempt." - Portuguese Proverbs

"I think a great many marriages would be saved if people would behave toward one another with the same courtesy that they would extend to someone whom they really didn't know as well as a marriage necessarily implies. ... It's not very easy to do, but it is surely easier to do than to haggle and nag and fight and bitch and yelp at one another as you hear a lot of married people doing ... They seem to feel that the familiarity of affection permits anything, including insult." - Robertson Davies

"I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov