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
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.
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.
Sir Stephen Harold Spender— Journal entry, 4 Jan. 1980.
... 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
If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.
james richardson— #41 (Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001))
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.
The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.
arthur c. clarke— Chapter 26 (The Light of Other Days (2000))
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)
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)
...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 Jarrell— “ ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ ”, p. 206
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 15 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
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.
Read 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 Rilke— Letter Three (23 April 1903)
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.
The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
leo tolstoy— Ch. 5, translated by David Patterson, 1983
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)
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
People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.
— Graham Greene, ?Philip Stratford (1973) The Portable Graham Greene, p. 133; Cited in: Susan Ratcliffe ed. Oxford Essential Quotations. 2012
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
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
— Englishmen, in Readings in Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy, Volume 1, p.96
