Familiarity seems to breed contempt

Familiarity does breed contempt; — doesn’t it?

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

The truth is, of course, that there is a danger of being unaware of those persons and things nearest and most accustomed to us. It is not necessarily true that familiarity breeds contempt, but it does tend to make the familiar something that is taken for granted.

Familiarity destroys reverence.

When we are conscious of our worthlessness, we naturally expect others to be finer and better than we are. If then we discover any similarity between them and us, we see it as irrefutable evidence of their worthlessness and inferiority. It is thus that with some people familiarity breeds contempt.

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover
the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we
must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,
contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of
imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.

We all have contempt for whatever there's too many of. Out here it's sheep, but in the city it's people.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Familiarity breeds liking.

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.

They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.