Quotes About Nonsense

Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.

I read some gossip thing saying, because I looked really uncomfortable in a paparazzi photo or something, they're like, 'He should get used to it. That's the price to pay if you're getting $12m a movie'. If I'm getting paid $12m a movie I'd walk around naked. That's all nonsense. I don't know who makes that stuff up. Even the price for the first one was nonsense.

Nonsense is nonsense even when spoken by world-famous scientists.

What (Stephen) Hawking says in his book The Grand Design is the universe exists because it needed to exist, and because it needed to exist, it therefore created itself. His conclusion merely restates his premise, which means his argument is circular. Nonsense is nonsense, even when spoken by famous scientists.

It'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.

Donald Trump claims - he did interview after the debate where he said, well, gosh, you can't find Americans to do these jobs to be waiters or waitresses or bellhops.What ridiculous nonsense. "The New York Times" reported roughly 300 Americans applied for those jobs. He only hired 17. Instead, he brought in foreign workers, because they're captive workers, because you can pay them less because they can't leave.

There 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.

I 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.

Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.

Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it's nonsense.

Find the enemy and shoot him down. Anything else is nonsense.

Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.

I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

A goal without a method is nonsense.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation's catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

To 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.

For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.

Live in constant gratitude. No matter what the condition today, no matter how dark, how dreary, how painful and difficult....to day is merely the passing outcome of yesterday's nonsense. How you feel today, and what you give your attention to, builds tomorrow.

Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

You 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.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every 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, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Too 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.

The 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.

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.

Nonsense, when earnest, is impressive, and sometimes takes you in. If you are in a hurry, you occasionally mistake it for sense.

In truth it is best to learn wisdom, and abandoning all nonsense, to leave it to boys to enjoy their season of play and mirth.

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 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.

One problem I have with talking about myself in the context of class divisiveness is that I can be - and indeed have been - used by others to demonstrate its absence and that it's only a matter of hard work to move upward socially. After all, how could I complain about anything, if the retort is: "But look where you got to? It can't be all that bad." But this is nonsense as an argument quite aside from its empirical absurdity because no single case can invalidate a statistical claim.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

To say whatever nonsense comes into your head without any repercussions has got to be a bigger high than heckling a movie screen in a darkened theater.

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

Love 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.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

I've realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what's really going on. People are live streaming from the ground, so everyone's starting to become more aware. When you pull back from this playground of duality, where someone is right and someone is wrong, you recognise that this is the way things have played out for years and years. And as long as the youth culture can see the madness that's going on in the world, there will eventually be a revolution.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

I think our culture is sick and tired of fluffy nonsense and people want something more sincere and heartfelt.

Jean [Kennedy Smith, JFK's sister] told me she thinks the whole sports angle has been overplayed, that politics was central to him. This nonsense that he only went into politics because his older brother Joe was killed is not true. He was determined he was going to be in politics, but he would have waited his turn.

I'm open to anyone who can or has demonstrated that they can effectively market and distribute with the best. It wouldn't hurt if they could put up with my nonsense too.

I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there.