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.

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

When theres ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was 'well, thats nonsense!', so what that means is that a true creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.

There are more martyrs to nonsense than truth, truth preferring missionaries.

Fear of the devil is nonsense. Fear of demons is foolish. The Spirit of God anointing the Christian heart makes the soul impregnable to the powers of darkness.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.

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.

Goodness often blossoms like roses on very rickety trellis-work, and beauty can grow out of nonsense.

The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

For 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.

This 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?

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

Prescribing hard work for the soft, or easy work for the hardy, is generally nonsense. What is always needed in any aim is right effort, right time, right people, right materials.

To say that I haven't been motivated to play is absolute nonsense.

The 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.

As 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.

If the Army wants witches and satanists in its ranks, then it can do it without Christians in those ranks. It's time for the Christians in this country to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. A Christian recruiting strike will compel the Army to think seriously about what it is doing.

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.

For 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.

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

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.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

Christianity works while infidelity talks. She feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, visits and cheers the sick, and seeks the lost, while infidelity abuses her and babbles nonsense and profanity. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'

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.

The 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

What's important is that twice two is four and all the rest's nonsense.

I 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.

Nonsense 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.

If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called 'behaviorist psychology.'

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

I 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.

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 am amused when goody-goodies proclaim, from the safety of their armchairs, that children are naturally prejudice-free, that they only learn to "hate" from listening to bigoted adults. Nonsense. Tolerance is a learned trait, like riding a bike or playing the piano. Those of us who actually live among children, who see them in their natural environment, know the truth: Left to their own devices, children will gang up on and abuse anyone who is even slightly different from the norm.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

[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.

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

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

A mind is a terrible thing. All this evolution nonsense is making me feel like a complete APE!

I'm very giving. Even if it's for nonsense, I'll give it to you.

You 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.

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.

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.

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.

You've always been free. You've always been bright and shining. Everything else is just nonsense.