These incorrigible quotes will inspire you. Incorrigible (of a person or their behavior) not able to be changed or reformed.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging incorrigible quotes, incorrigible sayings, and incorrigible proverbs.
Best Incorrigible Quotes
- “It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.” ~ John Updike
- “The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do.” ~ Joe Satriani
- “Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.” ~ A. E. Housman
- “There may be some incorrigible human beings who cannot be changed except by God’s own mercy to that one person.” ~ Warren E. Burger
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“If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
- “Do not be inaccessible. None is so perfect that he does not need at times the advice of others. He is an incorrigible ass who will never listen to any one. Even the most surpassing intellect should find a place for friendly counsel. Sovereignty itself must learn to lean. There are some that are incorrigible simply because they are inaccessible: They fall to ruin because none dares to extricate them. The highest should have the door open for friendship; it may prove the gate of help. A friend must be free to advise, and even to upbraid, without feeling embarrassed.” ~ Baltasar Gracian
- “If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you’re on the right track.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
- “Early in my school career, I turned out to be an incorrigible disciplinary problem. I could understand what the teacher was saying as fast as she could say it, I found time hanging heavy, so I would occasionally talk to my neighbor. That was my great crime, I talked in school.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“Weakness is the only fault that is incorrigible.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- “A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
- “The greatest obstacle to progress is not man’s inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.” ~ William Ralph Inge
- “Children who have proven themselves to be incorrigible by the age of twelve should be quickly and quietly beheaded, lest they grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate the likeness of their being.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me.” ~ Joseph Epstein
- “The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.” ~ James A. Baldwin
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“As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Remember, Monsieur, that the downfall of most Communities comes from the cowardice of Superiors in not holding firm and in not purging them of the troublesome and incorrigible.” ~ Vincent de Paul
- “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience – a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.” ~ Lord Acton
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“That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
- “Some persons hold that, while it is proper for the lawgiver to encourage and exhort men to virtue on moral grounds, in the expectation that those who have had a virtuous moral upbringing will respond, yet he is bound to impose chastisement and penalties on the disobedient and ill-conditioned, and to banish the incorrigible out of the state altogether. For (they argue) although the virtuous man, who guides his life by moral ideals, will be obedient to reason, the base, whose desires are fixed on pleasure, must be chastised by pain, like a beast of burden.” ~ Aristotle
- “when these incorrigible talkers are compelled to be quiet, is it not evident that they are not silent because they are listening to what is said, but because they are thinking of what they themselves shall say when they can seize the first lucky interval, for which they are so narrowly watching?” ~ Hannah More
- “I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.” ~ William James
- “Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.” ~ Mary McCarthy
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“They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Tacitus appears to have been as great an enthusiast as Petrarch for the revival of the republic and universal empire. He has exerted the vengeance of history upon the emperors, but has veiled the conspiracies against them, and the incorrigible corruption of the people which probably provoked their most atrocious cruelties. Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people.” ~ John Adams
- “In a post 9/11 world, in which the uncritical essentializing of people from the “Third-World” has been legitimized; Iraq and Afghanistan have been dehumanized in an attempt to disseminate enlightenment in those “dark” regions; the discourse of “honor killings” is prevalent in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and has carved a niche in Western academic discourse as another instance of the incorrigible bestiality of the Orient.” ~ Nyla Ali Khan
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“But the gambling reasoner is incorrigible: if he would but take to squaring the circle, what a load of misery would be saved.” ~ Augustus De Morgan
- “The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “So what name would you rather I call you? she asked as she headed out of the parking lot. Ias or Alexion. He gave her a devilish grin that set fire to her hormones. I would rather you call me lover. He wagged his eyebrows playfully at her. Danger rolled her eyes. Like all men with a onetrack mind, he was incorrigible. Don’t blame me, Alexion said in an almost offended tone. I can’t help it. You should see the way you fight. It really turned me on. Could you tell me how to turn you off? -Danger and Alexion” ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon
- “I am a political recidivist. An incorrigible, repeat voter. A career lever-pusher. My electoral rap sheet is as long as your arm. Over the course of three decades, I have voted for presidents and school board members. I have voted in high hopes and high dudgeon. I have voted in favor of candidates and merely against their opponents. I have voted for propositions written with such complexity that I needed Noam Chomsky to deconstruct their meaning. I have been a single-issue voter and a marginal voter. I have even voted for people who ran unopposed. Hold an election and I’ll be there.” ~ Ellen Goodman
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“How come life in prison doesn’t mean life? Until it does, we’re not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of “punishment” for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers.” ~ Jesse Ventura
- “As a stick, when once it is dry and stiff you may break it, but you can never bend it into a straighter posture; so doth the man become incorrigible who is settled and stiffened into vice.” ~ Isaac Barrow
- “In Truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my Memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
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“I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “The attitude of Communists towards any person who has made mistakes in his work should be one of persuasion in order to help him change and start afresh and not one of exclusion, unless he is incorrigible.” ~ Mao Zedong
- “I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.” ~ Aaron Sanchez
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“If a child shows himself incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.” ~ Don Marquis
- “Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. But finding this difficult, and preferring not toadmit it, it invented a pariah state, a leper colony for the incorrigible whose very existence, when tolerated openly, was admonition to all. We queers keep everyone straight as whores keep matrons virtuous.” ~ Kate Millett
- “Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.” ~ George Santayana
- “My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.” ~ Michel de Montaigne
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“The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.” ~ Mary McCarthy
- “I am an incorrigible devotee to solitude, and am never so cheerful, I believe, or so unruffled by small difficulties as when I’m alone. There’s a sort of obligation to be polite and pleasant to yourself when nobody else is round.” ~ Susan Hale
- “The Shah’s regime was an incorrigible regime and after a while, when the revolution happened, the situation began to change, revolutionary conditions was created…we simply wanted to change the regime.” ~ Akbar Ganji
- “Some citizens are so good that nothing a leader can do will make them better. Others are so incorrigible that nothing can be done to improve them. But the great bulk of the people go with the moral tide of the moment. The leader must help create that tide. Some coaches pray for wisdom. I pray for 260-pound tackles. They’ll give me plenty of wisdom.” ~ Chuck Noll
- “There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.” ~ Albert Camus
