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)
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— Walking (1862).
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"
I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne; and lo! the Bacchanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, men and women wrench, wriggle and foam in an endless alliteration of heated and meaningless words, the veriest garbage of Baudelaire flowered over with the epithets of the Della Cruscans.
algernon charles swinburne— Robert Buchanan, Contemporary Review (October 1871).
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).
The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played out, all the great thoughts have been thought, all possible discoveries can be construed in advance, and human beings are defined by self-preservation through adaptation this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was.
— Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 8
Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.
bradley denton— p. 107 (Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991))
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
evans— The Natural History of Nonsense XIX
You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.
alan keyes— PBS' Newshour with Jim Lehrer, December 20, 1999.[8]
Kreeft calls the word "interesting": "that all-purpose meaningless euphemism."
peter kreeft— The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings, Ignatius Press, 2005, 9.
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?"
It is better to go to defeat with free will than to live in a meaningless security as a cog in a machine.
Isaac Asimov— Chapter 19 “Decision” section 7, p. 404
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— 65 : Ignorance Personified, p. 111
Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.
khalil gibran— This line was later paraphrased by John Lennon, in his song "Julia", on The Beatles (1968): "Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia."
Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power.
Franz Grillparzer— Sappho, act 1, sc. 5 (1818)
We like rather to dream of a body of young men as a live thing, as a tree where all the branches are nourished by a single sap, and where each part is meaningless and incomplete except in connection with its fellows. You may lop away the dead branches, you may bend the trunk, you may dig about it and water it; but leave it to assume its own form, do not constrain the peculiar roots, or you will have a crippled, gnarled monster, and no tree.
learned hand— "Class-Day Oration" (1893).
Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.
ursula k. le guin— in an interview in Vice Magazine.
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. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.
h. p. lovecraft— Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
If only there were a lexicographer of Liang Shih-ch'iu's ability who also had the perspicuity to arrange his dictionary by sound rather than radical! ... No wonder most of us are so sour and gray by the time we reach fifty! The amount of time consumed and the spirit expended in this sort of meaningless, not to mention destructive, type of activity is beyond calculation.
victor h. mair— The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986)
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.
leslie stephen— The Fortnightly Review, vol. 34 (1880) p. 177
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— Chapter 7, “Bottom” (p. 107)
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?"
Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless.
— What Next? (1932) (Quotes)
One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped.
paul tillich— Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (1952), p. 82
Kreeft calls the word "interesting": "that all-purpose meaningless euphemism."
— The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings, Ignatius Press, 2005, 9.
Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.
— Naomi Klein, No Logo, 10th anniversary edition (2009: Vintage Canada, an imprint of Random House of Canada, Ltd.), ISBN 978-0-307-39909-0, p. 284. Previously published under the title No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (2000: Vintage Canada), ISBN 0-676-97282-9, p. 284.
