These quaint quotes will inspire you. Quaint attractively unusual or old-fashioned.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging quaint quotes, quaint sayings, and quaint proverbs.
Best Quaint Quotes
- “Man is a marvelous curiosity…he thinks he is the Creator’s pet…he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea?” ~ Mark Twain
- “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As if someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–Only this and nothing more.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “Seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes – some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world – some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.” ~ Jerome K. Jerome
- “It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when the flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.” ~ Gore Vidal
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“An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.” ~ Jonathan Franzen
- “Spake full well, in language quaint and olden, One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine, When he called the flowers, so blue and golden, Stars, that in earth’s firmament do shine.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we ‘cling’ to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.” ~ Mitch Daniels
- “If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, — then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.” ~ John Jay Chapman
- “Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is or help to half-a-crown.” ~ Thomas Hardy
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“A quaint conceit, don’t you think?” ~ Mercedes Lackey
- “Picturesque meant – he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word – that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown. Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, mean ‘idiot’.” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true,
Primrose, first born child of Ver,
Merry Springtime’s harbinger.” ~ Francis Beaumont - “The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.” ~ Andrew Marvell - “A precious, moldering pleasure ‘t is, to meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege I think.” ~ Emily Dickinson
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“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “Still others make gardens because it is part of a full life. To live happily they must invest their hours and aspirations in the activities of another world. And they draw the interest of delight and refreshment according to the measure of their investment. These are usually quaint folk, other-worldly in their manner, but capable of comprehending the idiosyncrasies of Nature as she displays them in a tree and bush and passing season, across the skyline, and in the infinite zenith. These, moreover, are the successful gardeners.” ~ Richardson Wright
- “To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was a tautology.” ~ Mark Twain
- “It’s all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies – fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.” ~ C. S. Lewis , Quaint quotes love
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“The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “The radio of my youth … is now a quaint memory replaced by computer hard drives.” ~ Phil Donahue
- “The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.” ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
- “Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the “grand style.” He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus, and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon–and of all this, he is conscious and proud.” ~ Richard Holt Hutton
- “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” ~ Alberto Gonzales
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“Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyper-paranoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.” ~ Cody Lundin
- “Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit yourself.” ~ Phyllis McGinley
- “As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.” ~ Michael Chabon
- “I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.” ~ J. M. Coetzee
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“Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.” ~ David Brin
- “Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.” ~ Ilana Mercer
- “The child who defines a lie as being a “naughty word” knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word “lie”.” ~ Jean Piaget
- “My words are little jars For you to take and put upon a shelf. Their shapes are quaint and beautiful, And they have many pleasant colors and lusters To recommend them. Also, the scent from them fills the room With the sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.” ~ Amy Lowell
- “I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees, I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.” ~ Margaret Atwood
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“I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!” ~ Kent Beck
- “Avoid the politic, the factious fool,
The busy, buzzing, talking hardened knave;
The quaint smooth rogue that sins against his reason,
Calls saucy loud sedition public zeal,
And mutiny the dictates of his spirit.” ~ Thomas Otway - “I don’t think that Women’s Liberation will change much though — not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.” ~ Doris Lessing
- “I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. … When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. Chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he ‘hopes’ to win tomorrow’s battle or that he’s ‘visualizing victory’.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
- “Then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honor turns to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place But none, I think, do there embrace.” ~ Moliere
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“Civility is perhaps a quaint notion but civility in Parliament is something we should always strive to uphold.” ~ Jay Weatherill
- “I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want? Even after you’ve done it you can’t say clearly if that was what you’d wanted or just something that happened to you, like the weather.” ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- “Many organic practices simply make sense, regardless of what overall agricultural system is used. Far from being a quaint throwback to an earlier time, organic agriculture is proving to be a serious contender in modern farming and a more environmentally sustainable system over the long term.” ~ David Suzuki
- “Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge… Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.” ~ Robertson Davies
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“In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term ‘newsweekly’ seems almost quaint.” ~ Graydon Carter
- “A precious, moldering pleasure ‘t is To meet an antique book In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old.” ~ Emily Dickinson
- “Let not young souls be smothered out
Before they do quaint deeds
And fully flaunt their pride.” ~ Vachel Lindsay - “While in a vintage restaurant…” the past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.” ~ Sarah Vowell
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“Poverty is considered quaint in the rural areas because it comes thatched.” ~ John Gummer
- “As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range, it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.” ~ James Gleick
- “From Man or Angel, the great Architect Did wisely conceal, and not divulge, His secrets, to be scanned by them who ought rather to admire. Or, if they list to try Conjecture, he his fabric of the Heavens Hath left to their disputes – perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model Heaven And calculate the stars: how they will wield The mighty frame: how to build, to unbuild, contrive To save appearances; how to gird the Sphere With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb.” ~ John Milton
- “History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.” ~ Jill Lepore
- “In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing, as well as your typesetting, will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.” ~ Robert Bringhurst
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“Old timidity has disappeared, and is replaced by silent, quaint fun, with which his face twinkles all over, as he listens.” ~ Thomas Hughes
- “To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self-image. Or maybe we’ll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.” ~ Anna Quindlen
- “Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied himself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.” ~ Gene Weingarten
- “If Jeff Mogil and Ron Melzack are right about genetics and pain, fifty years from now, generic Tylenol tablets will seem as quaint to us like a bottle of sarsaparilla tonic. Instead, we’ll take our genotype ID bracelet to the local genopharmacologist to order some bespoke pharmaceuticals. Or we may rise at four A.M. to meditate on the part of our nature that is painful and feel better for it. Along with social insurance, we’ll carry geno-cards that list our predispositions: photosensitivity, osteoporosis, and poor response to codeine.” ~ Marni Jackson
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“My parents are really conservative. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is the most conservative woman you’ve ever met. They’re very aristocratic in the most quaint suburban way.” ~ SZA
- “In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilization from the barbarians.” ~ Eric Corley
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“And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet, Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.” ~ Lord Byron
- “But at my back, I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honor turns to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.” ~ Andrew Marvell
- “For me, well-behaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity, and its shifting textures, that drives my work.” ~ Don DeLillo
