Popular quotes about Nonsense! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 43
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
Henry JamesFootball makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.
Peter TempleIt's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.
Ernest HemingwayUnless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don't practice nonsense.
BodhidharmaChange 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.
Swami Vivekanandacultivate in young minds an equal love of the good, the beautiful and the absurd; most people's lives are too lead-colored to lose the smallest twinkle of light from a flash of nonsense.
Fanny KembleThe 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.
Christopher HitchensThis was nonsense, he thought. The need of her was a physical thing, like the thirsty of a sailor becalmed for weeks on the sea. He'd felt the need before, often, often, in their years apart. But why now? She was safe; he knew where she was - was it only the exhaustion of the past weeks and days, or perhaps the weakness of creeping age that made his bones ache, as though she had in fact been torn from his body, as God had made Eve from Adam's rib?
Diana GabaldonThe notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense.
C. S. LewisAs a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions they have generated. There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept - if you desire peace, prepare for war. This is absolute nuclear nonsense.
Lord MountbattenSome people want tolerance to mean now that all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong.
Rick WarrenAre 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 CockburnQuarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
George EliotDemocracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.
Benito MussoliniIf you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.
Andrew YoungSome consider me as a living Buddha. That's nonsense. That's silly. That's wrong. If they consider me a simple Buddhist monk, however, that's probably okay.
Dalai LamaThe first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense
Bertrand RussellIt'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.
Anne Sullivan MacyI believe that I can create whatever I want to create. If I can put my head on it right, study it, learn the patterns, and - it's hard to put into words, it's real metaphysical, esoteric nonsense, but I feel very strongly that we are who we choose to be.
Will SmithNonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.
Dr. SeussI don't think he would have had any trouble answering Justice Sonia Sotomayor's excellent challenge in a case involving GPS surveillance. She said we need an alternative to this whole way of thinking about the privacy now which says that when you give data to a third party, you have no expectations of privacy. And [Louis] Brandeis would have said nonsense, of course you have expectations of privacy because it's intellectual privacy that has to be protected. That's my attempt to channel him on some of those privacy questions.
Jeffrey RosenThe book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. MenckenEveryone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
Bill DraytonI believe that. But I want you to know something โ when it comes to all this enemies nonsense, Iโm out. I am a neutral country. I am Switzerland. I refuse to be affected by territorial disputes between mythical creatures. Jacob is family. You are . . . well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence. I donโt care whoโs a werewolf and whoโs a vampire. If Angela turns out to be a witch, she can join the party, too.
Stephenie MeyerIt has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.
Thomas LigottiI think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.
Anton ChekhovIf anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.
Noam ChomskyWhy 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 cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.
Dmitri MendeleevA 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'LearyThe idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
Margaret HalseyYou were there all day long, 12 hours a day. So there was none of this, 'I'm going back to my trailer, my trailer's bigger than your trailer,' that kind of Hollywood nonsense.
John C. ReillyThe politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the โwarโ against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.
Christopher HitchensI'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.
Kathy GriffinPeople tell me they want to make the Bible relevant. Nonsense. The Bible's already relevant. You're the one that's irrelevant!
Howard G. HendricksMuch of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that โ romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.
Kurt VonnegutI don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy.
Charles M. SchulzCan a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.
C. S. LewisI invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
Henry FordOmnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
C. S. LewisMost talk about 'super-geniuses' is nonsense. I have found that when 'stars' drop out, successors are usually at hand to fill their places, and the successors are merely men who have learned by application and self-discipline to get full production from an average, normal brain.
Charles M. SchwabWe Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution.
J. StalinFinish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo EmersonHe was not only the most brilliant strategist of all our generals, but he had a good political sense. A man of that quality was too difficult for Hitler to swallow for long. At conferences Manstein often differed from Hitler, in front of others, and would go so far as to declare that some of the ideas which Hitler put forward were nonsense.
Erich von Manstein