Insouciance Quotes

• I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, were it not for making living, which is rather a nouciance.

  Ogden Nash

  Nonchalance, Leisure

  Ogden Nash (1931). “Hard lines”

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• I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Gambling, Soul, Nuisance

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• The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

  Julian Assange

  Summer, Men, Talking

  "Witnessing". Selected Correspondence, Julian Assange's old blog, IQ.org (via Archive.org), web.archive.org. January 3, 2007.

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• India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Pain, Passion, Maturity

  Jawaharlal Nehru (1961). “The Quintessence of Nehru”

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• I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Book, Men, Fullness Of Life

  D. H. Lawrence (2008). “Fantasia of the Unconscious”, p.143, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

  Walt Whitman

  Art, Animal, Perfect

  Walt Whitman (1949). “The poetry and prose”

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• Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.

  Barry Lopez

  Years, Giving, Sublime

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• A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap will put up with almost everything, which means he won't care about anything enough to get out of a chair.A country of public insouciance and private, grubby guilt, where you can believe anything as long as you don't believe it too fervently. A country where the highest aspiration is for a quiet life.

  A. A. Gill

  Country, Believe, Mean

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