Quotes About Nonsense

There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.

The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

Nonsense is nonsense whether it rhymes or not, just as bad half-pennies are good for nothing whether they jingle or lie quiet.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

...there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense

There's huge amounts of nonsense that goes with everything surrounding music and art. All the things you have to do promote yourself - there's huge amounts of nonsense.

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don't practice nonsense.

Change is always subjective. To talk of evil and misery is nonsense, because they do not exist outside. If I am immune from all anger, I never feel angry. If am immune from all hatred, I never feel hatred.

I don't think feminism, as I understand the definition, implies the rejection of maternal values, nurturing children, caring about the men in your life. That is just nonsense to me.

The record companies fell apart - quite deservedly. Their corrupting, all-binding contract nonsense had to stop.

If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.

The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Naturally, along the way, there are beings and forces that will challenge you. They want to try and get some of your power, take it away from you, all this nonsense, and of course, you just defeat them.

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.

People often say that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. This is nonsense, of course. It's pretty much one hundred percent caffeine.

If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

It wasn’t like in the storybooks. No witches lurked at crossroads disguised as crones, waiting to reward travelers who shared their bread. Genies didn’t burst from lamps, and talking fish didn’t bargain for their lives. In all the world, there was only one place humans could get wishes: Brimstone’s shop. And there was only one currency he accepted. It wasn’t gold, or riddles, or kindness, or any other fairy-tale nonsense, and no, it wasn’t souls, either. It was weirder than any of that. It was teeth.

In the presence of some people we inevitably depart From ourselves: we are inaccurate, we say things we do not feel, And talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we Have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people.

At 50 you're more confident, more comfortable in your skin and you don't put up with nonsense, especially from men.

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense?

I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

You can be distracted by your love life, by the baseball game, movies, by the nonsense. "Can I get my kid into this private school? Can I get this girl to go out with me Saturday night? Am I going to get the promotion in my office?" All this stuff, but in the end the universe burns out. So I think it's completely meaningless.

I know that I reached a point where I wasn't going to let the nonsense happening before me slide anymore.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

Nonsense," said Graff. "Ender always has plans within plans.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

With a metric you can really go to town, otherwise it is just abstract nonsense.

I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I'd told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that'd be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties.

To his enemies the householder must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about non-resistance. If he does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty.

I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense.... But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.

Bureaucratic nonsense at airports drives me crazy.

My parents said I'd always been attracted to music from an early age. The classic story is I started singing before I talked. My Mom would play me tapes, and I'd be able to sing them back perfectly. She said my pitch was dead on, but I'd fill in nonsense syllables for all the rest of it. The words would be all garbled, because I didn't know how to talk yet.

I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.

The idea that a reporter has to be 'fair and balanced' is ridiculous. The fact is, the truth usually is not fair and it's not balanced. Truth stands by itself. And the idea that something called fair and balanced is a substitute for truth and fact is mindless nonsense that has captured much of the national media.

The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. When I first read this statement, the thought, 'What nonsense!' shot through my mind before I realized that I had just made an evaluation.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

Do 40 hard minutes, not an hour and a half of nonsense.

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

It is my experience that people who don't participate in society, who don't have jobs, who don't have friends, are just very stuck in irresponsibility and cultism and all kinds of nonsense.

Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink.

I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt, and, of course, if it ceased to beat, I would cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.

Organized religion is sane and not silly when read as myth and poetry rather than science and law. Religion speaks nonsense when taken literally, but reveals some of the deepest truths of humankind when understood mythically, poetically, and even allegorically-that is when it is read with an active and creative imagination.

I'm not somebody who no matter where I go there are paparazzi or any of that nonsense. But I have a little window into that world and I can enter it and dance around. I want to be the audience's ticket into the party.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.