Meaningless Quotes - Page 3

• ... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

  David Wong

  Wind, Forever, Life Is

  David Wong (2011). “John Dies at the End”, p.133, Titan Books

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• If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Evil, Design

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• Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.

  Bradley Denton

  Happens, Knows

  "Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede". Book by Bradley Denton, 1991.

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• Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them.

  Nelson Mandela

  Dog, People, Shelter

  Nelson Mandela (2011). “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations”, p.159, Pan Macmillan

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• All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

  G. Stanley Hall

  Truth, Real, Ideas

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• Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds - but with that word realized - with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Liberty, Sound, World

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1901). “Miscellany”

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• To feel that life is meaningless unless “I” can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

  Alan Watts

  Ego, Life Is, Inches

  "Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety".

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• But doubt is a crucial to faith as darkness is to light. Without one, the other has no context and is meaningless. Faith is, by definition, uncertainty. It is full of doubt, steeped in risk. It is about matters not of the known, but of the unknown.

  Carter Heyward

  Light, Darkness, Risk

  Carter Heyward (1976). “A Priest Forever”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.

  Henry Jenkins

  Mean, Technology, Thinking

  "If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest..." by Henry Jenkins, henryjenkins.org. March 10, 2008.

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• Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

  Woodrow Wilson

  War, Government, Principles

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1966). “The papers of Woodrow Wilson”

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• Dream analysis stands or falls with [the hypothesis of the unconscious]. Without it the dream appears to be merely a freak of nature, a meaningless conglomerate of memory-fragments left over from the happenings of the day.

  Carl Jung

  Dream, Memories, Fall

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.2, Psychology Press

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• The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Giving, Mind, Religion

  Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mary Lutyens (1973). “The second Penguin Krishnamurti reader”

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• Second place is meaningless. You can't always be first, but you have to believe that you should have been - that you were never beaten - that time just ran out on you.

  Vince Lombardi

  Believe, Winning, Should Have

  Vince Lombardi (2003). “What It Takes to Be #1: Vince Lombardi on Leadership”, McGraw-Hill Education

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• One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Practice, Silence

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• Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporaryness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless.

  John Green

  Stars, Real, Character

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• If you're just saying, hey, I'm doing this. I'm working to make money. I'm working to increase my status. If that's all there is, I think you will find out that it's meaningless.

  Tony Dungy

  Thinking, Hey, Making Money

  "What's Next For Retired NFL Coach Tony Dungy?". "Morning Edition" Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. March 3, 2009.

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• On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.

  Jean Dieudonne

  Real, Believe, Feelings

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• Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.

  Henry Hyde

  Hate, Liberty, Speech

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• I believe that nothing that happens to me is meaningless and that it is good for us all that it should be so, even if it runs counter to our own wishes. As I see it, I'm here for some purpose, and I only hope I may fulfill it.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Running, Believe, Destiny

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011). “Letters Papers from Prison”, p.123, Simon and Schuster

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• If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Games, Paper, Mathematics

  Eric Temple Bell (1988). “Mathematics, queen and servant of science”, Tempus Books

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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. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Views, Names

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• Sayings remain meaningless until they are embodied in habits.

  Khalil Gibran

  Habit

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• Only in sport? The qualification would seem meaningless to many Australians. What also is there that matters as much as sport? It is only in sport that many Australians express those approaches to life that are un-Australian if expressed in any other connection.

  Donald Horne

  Sports, Connections, Matter

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• Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.

  Man Ray

  Laughter, Criticism, Limits

  Man Ray (1934). “Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934”, p.11, Courier Corporation

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• A life without love, no matter how many other things we have, is an empty, meaningless one.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Matter, Emptiness, Empty

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