Meaningless Quotes - Page 5

• We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action.

  PZ Myers

  Atheist, Lying, Successful

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• The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day's labor, and beckons us to its bosom; an life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us.

  J. G. Holland

  Home, Rivers, Heaven

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 325, 1895.

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• You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Pain, Loss

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• I’m blushing at my own stupid, nonsensical, meaningless thought process, which, by the way, nobody knows about except me.

  Sophie Kinsella

  Stupid, Way, Nonsensical

  Sophie Kinsella (2012). “I've Got Your Number”, p.234, Random House

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• The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.

  John Thomas Sladek

  Alive, Able, Lists

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• The world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a selfperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained.

  Stefan Zweig

  Believe, Animal, Hands

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• Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

  William Barrett

  Men, Hands, Greek

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• No matter which word it is, when I pronounce repeatedly, it ends up sounding utterly ridiculous and meaningless to me.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Matter, Ridiculous, Ends

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• You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Beautiful, Science, Thinking

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• The sea cries with its meaningless voice,
  Treating alike its dead and its living

  Ted Hughes

  Sea, Voice, Cry

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• It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Followers

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• That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Nihilism, Form, Extremes

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• Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.

  Ron Paul

  Reality, People, Perception

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• Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  May, Facts, Barren

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1941). “Economic Analysis”

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• The Girl of the Period, sauntering before one down Broadway, is one panorama of awful surprises from top to toe. Her clothes characterize her. She never characterizes her clothes. She is upholstered, not ornamented. She is bundled, not draped. She is puckered, not folded. She struts, she does not sweep. She has not one of the attributes of nature nor of proper art. She neither soothes the eye like a flower, nor pleases it like a picture. She wearies it like a kaleidoscope. She is a meaningless dazzle of broken effects.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Girl, Fashion, Art

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• But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

  Stephen Spender

  Reading, Civilization, Creative

  1980 Journal entry, 4 Jan.

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• All thoughts are just junk. Essentially, they are coming from the limited experience of past. These thoughts are useful for your survival process. You've picked up some amount of information; you want to survive in the world; this information is useful. If you're looking at life itself, these thoughts are meaningless.

  Jaggi Vasudev

  Life, Past, Survival

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• there is no doubt that the garrulous bore is the most maddening creature to be shut up with for any length of time, on the wide earth. ... As a matter of fact, I have sometimes wondered if these impulsive, perfectly meaningless murders of which one has read at times, can have come about through one party babbling on endlessly - just once too often - when the other longed to be left in peace.

  J. E. Buckrose

  Party, Doubt, Earth

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• Tempted to type meaningless twaddle all the time on Twitter...with alliteration, no less!

  E. A. Bucchianeri

  Type, Alliteration, Tempted

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• Your preschool child will chatter endlessly to you. If you half-listen and half-reply the whole conversation will seem, and become, tediously meaningless for both of you. but if you really listen and really answer, he will talk more and what he says will make more sense.

  Penelope Leach

  Children, Answers, Half

  Penelope Leach (1989). “Your baby & child: from birth to age five”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

  Mason Cooley

  Book

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• Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

  Harlan Coben

  Sports, Caring, Doe

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• To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

  Richard Russo

  Skills, Information, Grids

  Richard Russo (2017). “Risk Pool”, p.154, Atlantic Books

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• These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

  Stephen King

  Country, Hate, Heart

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