Popular quotes about Nonsense! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 42
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human
Fyodor DostoevskyIf every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
Penn JilletteValkyrie dialed Skulduggery's number and he picked up. 'Hey,' she said, 'It's me.' Skulduggery paused. 'No it's not. If it were me, then I'd be talking to myself, and I don't do that any more. I certainly don't RING myself. That's one of the first signs of madness, and if it's not, it should be.' She sighed. 'Are you finished talking nonsense?' 'I haven't talked nonsense all morning. I miss it.
Derek LandyAll philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
Samuel ButlerPerhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.
David BohmI do not like to employ secretaries that have more wit than myself. I am afraid to make them write all my nonsense.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de SevigneI certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.
Christopher IsherwoodI think as an actor, you're more like a dancer, and you have to use your body. I don't understand all these questions about nudity. It's a nonsense. He's an actor, an artist, so get on with it.
Steve McQueenBy deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.
Horace WalpoleCable news is more titillating to talk about who's up and who's down and all that nonsense as opposed to what's actually done.
Kal PennLearning -the kind of ignorance affected by (and affecting) civilized races, as distinguished from ignorance, the sort of learning incurred by savages. See nonsense.
Ambrose BierceFor awareness you need not go to the Himalayas; you need not go anywhere. Your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware. Somebody insults you - listen to it in full awareness. And you will be surprised - the insult is no more an insult. You may even smile. It does not hurt; it hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises and appreciates you - listen with alertness. And then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things. Nobody can bribe you; flattery becomes impossible. You will smile at the whole nonsense.
RajneeshThe persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.
Neil deGrasse TysonThere is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard ShawComputers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil PostmanThere is no hunt in Thanet, nor is there a fox problem. There is no Tooting hunt, no Wandsworth hunt and no Clapham hunt, but we can see foxes on their streets at night. If we want to control vermin we should work out how to deal with that problem. The idea that foxhunting controls the fox population is arrant nonsense.
Roger GaleI was told that my going to college wouldn't be good for my career. I think that's nonsense. It's good to empower yourself by cutting yourself off from this business every once in a while.
Claire DanesThis topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
Albert EinsteinThe Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
George OrwellThe most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.
Ralph Waldo EmersonAre you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadenedthe senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.
Alexander CockburnWhy 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?
Dmitri MendeleevYou may be right. I think it was round about Christmas when I got my Welsh dragon tattoo.โ At that, Tessa had to try very hard not to blush. โHow did that happen?โ Will made an airy gesture with his hand. โI was drunkโฆโ โNonsense. You were never really drunk.โ โOn the contraryโin order to learn how to pretend to be inebriated, once must become inebriated at least once, as a reference point. Six-Fingered Nigel had been at the mulled ciderโโ โYou canโt mean thereโs truly a Six-Fingered Nigel?
Cassandra ClareDoctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.
Thornton WilderYou must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C. S. LewisTo regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something which must be abolished is the greatest nonsense on earth; having the most disastrous consequences, fatally stupid- almost as stupid as a wish to abolish bad weather - out of pity for the poor.
Friedrich NietzscheIf you love something, Let it go, If it comes back it's yours, That's how you know kno-o-ow Nonsense, Christina Aguilera! I say, 'If you love it, file it away under "Things I love". If it's required at a later date, you'll know exactly where it i-i-i-is.
Jon RichardsonWhy should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan SokalIt is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the 'grammelot.'
Dario FoI find it difficult to believe that I belong to such an idiotic, rotten species - the species that actually boasts of its freedom of will, heroism on command, senseless violence, and all of the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism.
Albert EinsteinAfter I saw how badly animals were treated to en up in our plates, how bad it was for our health and for the environment, I decided to stop this nonsense and educate others. After all, animals canโt talk and they need people that have notoriety like me to be their voices.
Georges LaraqueToo often the media assumes that "poverty" is an African American or a Latino issue. Of course, that's nonsense. While a higher percentage of the African American and Latino population does live in poverty as compared to the white population, when overall numbers are looked at, it is clear that people of all races, ethnicities, and colors, are represented amongst America's poor.
Sasha AbramskyEvery succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.
Anthony EdenI never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.
Bob DylanIn reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinThere are two kind of men,' said Ka, in a didatic voice. 'The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girls eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.
Orhan PamukA lot of lies and misinformation has been put about by eco nuts on the back of a report by an idiot economist [Sir Nicholas Stern]. Environmental head bangers are talking nonsense when they claim that aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions. Coal-fired and oil-fired power stations are the biggest contributor of carbon but I have yet to hear any fearless eco warriors advocating nuclear power as they drive around in their SUVs to their next protest meeting.
Michael O'LearyIf you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
Carl SaganLove is a romantic designation for a most ordinary biological process-or, shall we say, chemical-process ... a lot of nonsense is talked and written about it.
Greta GarboI, too, have felt that the war goes on and on. When my son, Ian, died at El Alamein-- side by side with... visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said, "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and nexe year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.
Mary Ann Shaffer