Meaningless Quotes
More Meaningless Quotes
By "Suprematism" I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.
kazimir malevich— The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926), trans. Howard Dearstyne [Dover, 2003, ISBN 0-486-42974-1], part II: Suprematism (p. 67)
The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.
Henry David Thoreau— Walking (1862).
Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
aldous huxley— Chapter 11 (p. 106)
Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.
asger jorn— Ansigt til Ansigt [Face to Face], A-5, 1 (1944), p. 14
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— Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
Lewis Mumford— "The Fulfillment of Man"
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— Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013), "Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy" (2013), Oxford University Press, p. 90.
The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.
— Henry David Thoreau, in "Walking" (1862).
... life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; ... it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there.
alan alda— from Alan Alda's graduation speech, 1980
The boats, and trains, and cows and horses were quite meaningless to him, but not quite so baffling as the odd little figures which appeared beneath and between the colored pictures — some strange kind of bug he thought they might be, for many of them had legs though nowhere could he find one with eyes and a mouth. It was his first introduction to the letters of the alphabet, and he was over ten years old.
Edgar Rice Burroughs— Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles
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— On Australian indigenous spirituality.
Love can't flourish in a "society" based on money and meaningless work, but rather requires complete economic, as well as personal, freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship, but which our "society" provides practically no opportunity to engage in.
valerie solanas— p. 11 (SCUM MANIFESTO (1967))
A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.
matthew stover— (I.3) Del Rey, p. 74
The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or barring that refuse to be a party to it.
samuel r. delany— Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 113)
The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.
Peter Drucker— Chapter 6, pg.59
"Value added" is a meaningless concept for a retail business , for a bank, for a life insurance company, and for any other business which is not primarily engaged in manufacturing.
Peter Drucker— Chapter 54, pg.647
It is never literally true that any form is meaningless and "says nothing." Every form in the world says something. But its message often fails to reach us, and even if it does, full understanding is often withheld from us.] and, properly speaking, FORM IS THE OUTWARD EXPRESSION OF THIS INNER MEANING.
wassily kandinsky— Part II. About painting : VI. The language of Form and Colour : FootnoteSimilar quote in outer translation:
There is no form, there is nothing in the world which says nothing. Often - it is true - the message does not reach our soul, either because it has no meaning in and for itself, or - as is more likely – because it has not been conveyed to the right place... Every serious work rings inwardly, like the calm and dignified words: ‘Here I am!'Partly cited in: Raymond Firth (2011) Symbols: Public and Private, p. 43
I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him un intelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.
peter medawar— p.25, footnote to previous quotation.
Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, 'Obama.' Because like his Canadian predecessors, he chose the tough responsibilities of national leadership over the meaningless nostrums of sterile partisanship that we see too much of in Canada and around the world.
brian mulroney— September 17, 2009, YouTube video
Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.
Lewis Mumford— Values for Survival (1946)
What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.
bertrand russell— Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 450.
My university education had been a shallow and superficial enterprise. The central driving forces of the economy I lived in were either ignored or left vague, to the point of meaningless.
herbert schiller— Introduction, One Life, One Century, p. 19
All phenomena are real in some sense , unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.
robert anton wilson— Nature's God This is a statement derived from one in the Principia Discordia
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; and 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.
— Josiah Gilbert Holland, p. 325. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless.
— Marcel Proust (1982) Remembrance of Things Past: The captive. The fugitive. Time regained. p.381
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, in a letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!
— Richard Feynman in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in the chapter Is Electricity Fire?
