Popular quotes about Nonsense! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 44
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.
Gilbert K. ChestertonHunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
Bill BrysonI 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 SevigneA little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.This was said by gene wilder ... what does it mean ?
Gene WilderWhen people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
Samuel ButlerThere was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.
Martha C. NussbaumThere is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense.
Clifford Truesdellcultivate 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 HitchensYou women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonComputers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil PostmanIf, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.
Gilbert K. ChestertonFor me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.
Gene RoddenberryWhat is the power of life? With all the ungraceful dirt, nonsense, you remain graceful.
Harbhajan Singh YogiI have heard a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They have n't got life enough in them.... Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
Henry David ThoreauAs musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.
Brian MolkoThe point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.
Alan WattsI know that I reached a point where I wasn't going to let the nonsense happening before me slide anymore.
Ariana MadixYou don't have to be the best guitar player, or have the best voice, or even be the best looking person - writing a song that moves people is worth more than all the other nonsense. (Just look at Bob Dylan - he's got almost no vocal range at all, but his songs are deeply moving and iconic.) If I had to offer one piece of advice: Write a song that moves people, and write it from within yourself. Your personal narrative is more engaging and moving than anything else you can imagine in your mind.
Ryan RossIt was one lesson he never forgot.You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted.And you don't act like the goverment with their "proportional responses" and all that nonsense.If someone hurts you,mercy and pity must be put aside,You eliminate the enemy.You scorch the earth.
Harlan CobenThe 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 RussellI lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.
Edie SedgwickI 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 EinsteinWhy can't you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can't just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it. You can't cut it out but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad.
T. H. WhiteEveryone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
Bill DraytonLove 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 GarboJust as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Alan WattsI think our culture is sick and tired of fluffy nonsense and people want something more sincere and heartfelt.
Joseph Gordon-LevittA free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
Daniel WebsterBut can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
Nick HanauerI think that's the real shame: We spent the last 48 hours talking about these disgusting, disgusting comments and disgusting behavior instead of talking about hurricane relief or what's going on in Flint, Michigan. It's just appalling to have to be dealing with such nonsense and such disgusting, you know, criminal speech.
Natalie PortmanMuch 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'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.
Jay GriffithsI never used to watch horror films because I was a nervous type. I believed all the publicity about The Exorcist when it was released - you know, all that nonsense about people fainting in the cinema - and decided it would definitely freak me out. I particularly remember my girlfriend telling me about Suspiria - ironic considering my first ever film work was with Argento - and how scary it was.
Simon BoswellWe 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. StalinIndeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.
Norman FinkelsteinHuman beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
Sydney SmithFor my part I think the Learned, and Unlearned Blockhead pretty equal; for 'tis all one to me, whether a Man talk Nonsense, or unintelligible Sense, I am diverted and edified alike by either; the one enjoys himself less, but suffers his Friends to do it more; the other enjoys himself and his own Humour enough, but will let no body else do it in his Company.
Mary AstellI think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means.
Marina WarnerThe time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
H. L. Mencken