Familiarity

Quotes about familiarity.

Quotes

• "When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman."
  • Joseph Addison, The Spectator (May 24, 1711).

• I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Book III, Chapter VI.

• A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our ordinary world in an extraordinary way.
  • Sallie McFague Speaking in Parables (1975), p. 4.

• Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature , Understanding, sensibility, and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Preface, A. V. Miller translation (Oxford: 1977), § 31

• "Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness."
  • Ouida (pseudonym of Marie Louise De La Ramee), Princess Napraxine (1906) p. 19.

• "Familiar acts are beautiful through love."
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Prometheus Unbound" in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839) p. 123.

• "Familiarity is the thing -- the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness"
  • E.B. White, "Homecoming".

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 259-60.

• Nimia familiaritas parit contemptum.
  • Familiarity breeds contempt.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Ad Joannem fratrem Monitio; Syrus, Maxims, 640. Idea in Cicero, Pro Murena, Chapter IX. Livy, Book XXXV, Chapter X. Plutarch, C. Mar., Chapter XVI. Jean de La Fontaine, Fables IV. X.

• Quod crebro videt non miratur, etiamsi cur fiat nescit. Quod ante non vidit, id si evenerit, ostentum esse censet.
  • A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy.
  • Cicero, De Divinatione, II. 22.

• I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom.
  • Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells.

• Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act I, scene 3, line 61.

• And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
  • William Shakespeare, Sonnet CII.

• Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!
  • Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Stanza 38.