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 malevichScience 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 tolstoyThe 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 ThoreauBeautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.
asger jornWe 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 MumfordI 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 swinburneThe 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.
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.
It wasn't exactly carelessness; her knowledge of literate English contained such vast areas of desert that she took it for granted that half of what she wrote would be meaningless to her.
Raymond ChandlerIf you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.
james richardsonOnly 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 smithThe 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...we like somebody who succeeds with such bad conscience, and who seems to wish that he had the nerve to be a failure or, better still, something to which the terms success and failure don’t apply as when Mallory said, about Everest: “Success is meaningless here.”
Randall JarrellI 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 medawarRead as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.
Rainer Maria RilkeThe only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
leo tolstoyAll 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 wilsonPeople who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.
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.
What they do not see is that their reverence for economic activity and industry and what is called business is also fetish worship , and that in their devotion to that idol they torture themselves as needlessly and indulge in the same meaningless