Meaningless Quotes - Page 14

• An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

  May Sarton

  Sex, Despair, Treasure

  May Sarton (2014). “Recovering: A Journal”, p.95, Open Road Media

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• It's probably hard for anyone looking at my landscapes today to realize that I was once regarded as a rebel, a dangerous influence; that I've been told I was on the verge of insanity, that my painting was nothing but meaningless daubs. Lawren Harris, the man most responsible for drawing the Group of Seven together, was accused of something perilously close to treason - his paintings, said his severest critics, were discouraging immigration.

  A. Y. Jackson

  Men, Drawing, Insanity

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• But before Derby go, would they mind telling the rest of the Premier League - the league which it has debased with its pathetically-inadequate presence for the past 12 months - where the money has gone? You know, the £30m or so in prize money that every team, even the one at the bottom of the table from August to May, automatically receives by being in the Premier League... So what happened to that money? Or put another way, why was such a meaningless fraction of it spent on recruiting new players? It's one thing not to compete; it's quite another not to even attempt to do so.

  Pete Gill

  Soccer, Football, Team

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• There is no Christian Gospel if history simply unwinds into a meaningless puddle, if the cosmos simply escapes into a cataclysmic black hole, or if the universe finally dies of exhausted energy. Without belief in a biblical eschatology, there is no Christian hope. Without a sense of perfect moral judgment in the end, the human heart is homeless.

  Albert Mohler

  Christian, Heart, Biblical

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• Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Keys, Idealism, Pragmatism

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• Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'

  Leo Tolstoy

  Giving, Important, Answers

  "Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy". Book by Lynda Walsh, p. 90, 2013.

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• Random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality.

  Alexandra Robbins

  Groups, Versus, Mentality

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• Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.

  Susan McClary

  Feelings, Important, Desire

  "Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology". Book by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas, 1994.

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• While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.

  Rebecca Mead

  Fashion, Ideas, Clothes

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• The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.

  Tim Lebbon

  Past, Echoes, Space

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• What is art?... From a strictly logical point of view, a question with no clear answer comes under the suspicion of being meaningless. But a strictly logical point of view never shows us much about art.

  Carter Ratcliff

  Art, Views, Answers

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• Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk.

  Brian Sewell

  Art, Political, Criticism

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• When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless.But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

  Stanley Spencer

  Feelings, Special, Quality

  Sir Stanley Spencer, Fiona MacCarthy, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Centro Cultural / Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City) (1997). “Stanley Spencer: An English Vision”, Yale University Press

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• I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

  Charles Stross

  Fun, Crazy, Reflection

  Charles Stross (2006). “Glasshouse”, p.88, Penguin

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• Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

  Naomi Klein

  Freedom Of Speech, Cacophony, Free Speech

  Naomi Klein (2000). “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies”, Vintage Canada

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• I think, on both sides of the camera or the novel: Distraction. I'm obsessed with: Can I get this actress or my third act to work? I'm distracted. I'm interested in that so I don't sit home and think, "Gee, life is meaningless. We're all going to die. The universe is pulling apart at breakneck speed."

  Woody Allen

  Home, Thinking, Sides

  "Filmmaking Woody Allen's way". Interview, www.stuff.co.nz. June 25, 2012.

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• Sometimes when everything has totally apart, the meaningless preoccupations that so often dominate our lives simply fall away. And what is left is who we really are, and who we really are is compassionate and intelligent and wise.

  Marianne Williamson

  Wise, Fall, Intelligent

  "Marianne Williamson on Consciousness, Women and Politics". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 09, 2012.

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• The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

  Ken Kesey

  Airplane, Reality, Wind

  Ken Kesey (2006). “Sometimes a Great Notion”, p.160, Penguin

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• The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

  Rollo May

  Data, Order, Giving

  Rollo May (1998). “Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence”, p.237, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Dream, Arbitrary, Fantasy

  Letter to Carl Jung, June 16, 1948.

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• It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Mean, Giving, Cosmos

  Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in "Selected Letters III, 1929-1931" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 208), 1968.

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• Only while they are conforming their actions to the model of some archetypal hero do the Arunta feel that they are truly alive, for in those roles they are immortal. The occasions on which they slip from such molds are quite meaningless, for time immediately devours those occasions and reduces them to nothingness.

  Huston Smith

  Hero, Mold, Roles

  "The World's Religions". Book by Huston Smith, 1991.

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• When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self. Words that proceed from the Source of Truth have real meaning. But when men speakthese words as their own, the words become meaningless.

  Meher Baba

  Real, Ignorance, Men

  "The Everything and the Nothing". Book by Meher Baba, 1963.

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• Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Passion, Reality

  Aldous Huxley (2017). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals”, p.153, Routledge

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• I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless.

  George Perle

  Class, Rejection, Want

  George Perle (1990). “The Listening Composer”, p.67, Univ of California Press

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