Scorn meaning

Noun: scorn

Pronunciation: (skorn)

Scorn meaning:

• Lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
• Open disrespect for a person or thing

Synonyms: contempt, disdain

Verb: scorn

Scorn meaning:

• Look down on with disdain
• Refuse with contempt

Synonyms: despise, contemn, disdain, spurn

Derived forms: scorned, scorns, scorning

Quotations: Diane Lavey – Can anyone picture God telling, taking, or enjoying a good joke? The idea is laughable. The Devil, on the other hand, laughs with demonic mirth, is possessed of a sardonic wit, and his eyes hold a glint of wicked bemusement. The farthest God, in his popular image, ever strays from sobriety is a beneficent smile. Satan sniggers with fiendish scorn at God, who sits in his ivory tower emitting nary a chuckle.

Dorothy Day – Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

Anne Sexton – And opening my eyes I am afraid of course to look this inward look that society scorns. Still I search in these woods and find nothing worse than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods loved him because men hated him.

Epictetus – If you set your heart upon philosophy, you must straightway prepare yourself to be laughed at and mocked by many who will say Behold a philosopher arisen among us! How came you by that brow of scorn? But do you cherish no scorn, but hold to those things which seem to you the best, as one set by God in that place. Remember too, that if you abide in those ways, those who first mocked you, the same shall afterwards reverence you; but if you yield to them, you will be laughed at twice as much as before.

John W. Gardner – The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Sample sentences:

1. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
2. Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.
3. One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars and the world will be better for this.
4. It cannot be too often repeated, that truth scorns the assistance of miracle.
5. I was thinking that times have changed. But actually they haven’t. Celebrity culture still thrives on this idea of the scorned woman and the evil seductress.
6. The religious man fears, the man of honor scorns, to do an ill action.
7. When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death – that is heroism.
8. Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.
9. Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead.
10. Irish poets learn your trade; sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
11. Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar’s smile from the scorn of free men.
12. A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.
13. A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
14. The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.
15. A pinch of praise is worth a pound of scorn. A dash of encouragement is more helpful than a dipper of pessimism. A cup of kindness is better than a cupboard of criticism.