Meaningless Quotes - Page 26

• The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation: The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer, I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.

  Walt Whitman

  Night, Sky, Sound

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman (Illustrated)”, p.42, Delphi Classics

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• Life is a process by which a few desperate longings morph into a thousand meaningless wants.

  Robert Breault

  Life, Want, Longing

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• We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  War, Tired, Simple

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• Without the resurrection, the cross is meaningless.

  Billy Graham

  Resurrection, Crosses

  Twitter post from Apr 02, 2015

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• In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Awards, Rocks

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• The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.

  John Steinbeck

  Wall, Philosophy, Lying

  John Steinbeck (1995). “The Log from the Sea of Cortez”, p.174, Penguin

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• It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

  Michel Foucault

  Names, Speak, Reason

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• She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they were meant to do.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Intelligent, Evil

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• When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendors of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Past, Compassion, Names

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955). “Insecurity of Freedom”, p.181, Macmillan

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• I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless.

  Hari Kunzru

  Writing, Good Day, Noble

  "'I'm the bloke who got the big advance'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2004.

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• Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers - and at some point the distinction should become meaningless.

  Nick Denton

  Collaboration, Should, Distinction

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• No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely predetermined or fated. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an articulate and improvisational field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.

  David Abram

  Ravens, Events, World

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• Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell from the state of grace, entered the realm of time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each other.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Pain, Grace, Mind

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.31, New World Library

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• In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia. They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism

  Gad Saad

  Exercise, Reality, Profound

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• How are my ribs? They're so meaningless it's hard to believe.

  Harry Reid

  Believe, Ribs, Hard

  "Reid: I'm recovering" by Manu Raju and Burgess Everett, www.politico.com. January 22, 2015.

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• The baseline is the same. Is Iran going to suspend enrichment activity? Is Iran going to return to the negotiations? Or is Iran going to continue, as we think they have, to stall and prevaricate and extend things in a meaningless way in order to avoid censure.

  Joseph Adam Ereli

  Thinking, Iran, Order

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• We should not view men with a cynical eye, seeing them only as meaningless products of chance, but, on the other hand, we should not go to the opposite extreme of seeing them romantically. To do either is to fail to understand who men really are--creatures made in the image of God but fallen.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Eye, Men, Views

  Francis August Schaeffer (1982). “The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian view of spirituality”

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• Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all the social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering.

  William Hurrell Mallock

  Dream, Expression, Evil

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• At least three time per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat.

  Tim Ferriss

  Inspirational, Cutting, Dedication

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• Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict it is usually both destructive and disruptive. The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line.

  Javier Perez de Cuellar

  Struggle, Essence, Perfect

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• Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Theory, Illogical

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• Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Giving, Effort, Events

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• You may think your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Thinking, Excuse You, Environmental

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• A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it’s an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog.
  ‘What does electricity taste like?’ I ask.
  ‘Like a planet around a star,’ Bina48 replies.
  Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I’m not sure which

  Jon Ronson

  Dog, Stars, Profound

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• For the Suprematist, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him, and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless.

  Kazimir Malevich

  Mean, Expression, Ideas

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