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)
Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.
Lewis Mumford— Ch. 1 (The Conduct Of Life (1951))
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).
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 Chandler— 1947 On the shortcomings of his ex-secretary. Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner,1 Jul.
"Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."
susan mcclary— "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), ISBN 0415907527
If a model itself is “a poor representation of reality,” they write, “determining the sensitivity of an individual parameter in the model is a meaningless pursuit.”
orrin h. pilkey— [1]
“These games are marvelous,” Amanda said. “I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as ”
Donald Barthelme— “Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said”, p. 77
Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
kenneth boulding— Attributed to Boulding in: Association of American Colleges (1955) Liberal education. Vol. 41, p.430
“Ah, go to hell!” “That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”
john brunner— the happening world (3) “Domestica”
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
Eric Hoffer— Section 10 (The True Believer (1951))
If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.
max horkheimer— pp. 7-8 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.
aldous huxley— Ends and Means, (1937)
In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
karl marx— Vol. III, Ch. L, Illusions Created by Competition, p. 866
[M]ost of Marx' theories which are not mistaken are meaningless. Marx remained influential, however: his influence never was based on the scientific truth-content of his theories but on their psychological appeal.
karl marx— Ernest Van Den Haag, Reason Papers Vol. 26 (Summer 2000), pp. 39-62
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
george orwell— Ch. IV (Burmese Days (1934))
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
george orwell— "As I Please," Tribune (24 March 1944)
Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.
wolfgang pauli— After having dreams about physical terms, which he initially dismissed as a "misuse of physics terminology" by the unconscious, in a letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948)
I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless.
george perle— Page 67See: Allen Forte
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— p. 82 (The Courage to Be (1952))
My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.'
leo tolstoy— Pt. VIII, ch. 19
What I consider completely sterile is the attitude, for instance, of Bertalanffy who is going around and jumping around for years saying that all the analytical science and molecular biology doesn’t really get to interesting results; let’s talk in terms of general systems theory ... there cannot be anything such as general systems theory, it’s impossible. Or, if it existed, it would be meaningless.
— Jacques Monod (1974) "On chance and necessity". In F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky, (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. cited in: Brian R. Gaines (1979) "General systems research: quo vadis?", General Systems, Vol. 24 (1979), p. 4
If you want in on the Discordian Society then declare yourself what you wish do what you like and tell us about it or if you prefer don't. All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense...
— The Free Mantra of Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca (for some strange reason, commonly called Sri Syadasti)
— Also heretically expressed as: "All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." and "The teachings of the Sri Syadasti School of Spiritual School of Spiritual Wisdom are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." — will heresies never cease?
The term " imperialism " is no more precise, and its overuse and recent abuse is making it nearly meaningless as an analytical concept...."imperialism" is "more often the name of the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the events themselves. Where Colonization finds analysts and analogies, imperialism must contend with crusaders for and against.
— Professor Archibald Paton Thorton author of the book Doctorines of Imperialism as quoted in Benevolent Assimilation The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903, by Stuart Creighton Miller, (Yale University Press, 1982): page 3
All statements are true in some sense , false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.
— The Free Mantra of Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca, in THE PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA : or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her · THE MAGNUM OPIATE OF MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER
Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything ( 1965 et al) by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst)
