Indifferent Quotes - Page 11

• Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

  Erica Jong

  Sex, Two, People

  Fear of Flying ch. 10 (1973)

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• Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world-or the last.

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Men, Gone Away, Silence

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• Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face.

  James Russell Lowell

  Eye, Doors, House

  James Russell Lowell (1845). “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets”, p.76

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• Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and far from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Ionia.

  Samuel Johnson

  Philosophy, Thinking, Past

  'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland' (1775) 'Inch Kenneth'

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• Large eyes were admired in Greece, where they still prevail. They are the finest of all when they have the internal look, which is not common. The stag or antelope eye of the Orientals is beautiful and lamping, but is accused of looking skittish and indifferent. "The epithet of 'stag-eyed,'" says Lady Wortley Montgu, speaking of a Turkish love-song, "pleases me extremely; and I think it a very lively image of the fire and indifference in his mistress' eye.

  Leigh Hunt

  Beautiful, Song, Eye

  Leigh Hunt (1873). “Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs, from His Uncollected Prose Writings”, p.216

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• Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Roots, Clothes

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• The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Sports, Mistake, Two

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• There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.

  Agatha Christie

  People, Mets, Certain

  Agatha Christie (1974). “Murder on board: including The mystery of the Blue Train, What Mrs. McGillicuddy saw! [and] Death in the air”, Dodd Mead

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• All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

  Berthold Auerbach

  Selfish, Men, Vanity

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• We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

  Maurice Blanchot

  Atheist, Distance, Thinking

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• It is by sympathy we enter into the concerns of others, that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy may be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.

  Edmund Burke

  Sympathy, Men, Suffering

  Edmund Burke (1823). “A philosophical inquiry, etc”, p.54

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• Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons. ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind.

  Anne Roiphe

  Daughter, Mother, Father

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• I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.

  Anna Kavan

  People, Wish, Mountain

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• Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.

  Ove Arup

  Art, Engineering, Imagination

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• I believe, not theoretically, but from direct personal experience, that very few of the things that happen to us are purposeless or accidental (and this includes suffering and grief - even that of others), and that sometimes one catches a glimpse of the link between these happenings. I believe - even when I am myself blind and deaf, or even indifferent - in the existence of a mystery.

  Iris Origo

  Grief, Believe, Suffering

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• A delicacy of taste is favorable to love and friendship, by confining our choice to few people, and making us indifferent to the company and conversation of the greater part of men.

  David Hume

  Men, People, Choices

  David Hume (1875). “Essays Moral, Political, and Literary”, p.93

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• Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Mean, Joy

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• all tamed animals are nervous, we have given them reason to be, not only by cruelty but by our love too, that presses upon them. They have not been able to be entirely indifferent to this and untouched by it.

  Stevie Smith

  Animal, Our Love, Able

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• When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.

  Edith Hamilton

  Speak

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• Cats, for the most part, seem indifferent to human activities that do not revolve around their needs and wants. They all but roll their eyes at the owners who expect their cats to do things for them.

  Joyce Jillson

  Cat, Eye, Needs

  Joyce Jillson (2005). “Joyce Jillson's Astrology for Cats”, BowTie Press

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• Only to the rude ear of one who is quite indifferent does the song of a bird seem always the same.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Song, Rude, Bird

  Rosa Luxemburg (1946). “Letters from prison”

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• religion is perhaps its own worst enemy. For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion.

  Georgia Harkness

  Worst Enemy, Religion, Needs

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• I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that he was indifferent.

  George Sand

  Believe

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• I think a lot of that album ["Tonight" ] is still very good . . . the songs, but I think I was indifferent to the arrangements.

  David Bowie

  Song, Thinking, Albums

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• I would not like to draw analogies, with the past.Governments, leaders, intellectuals, mainly intellectuals who should know the ethical dimensions, are so important, so essential to culture, religion, to civilization, and to our own lives. And that means what? It means not to be indifferent, not to stand idly by. That is a biblical commandment that we are committed.

  Elie Wiesel

  Mean, Biblical, Past

  Source: www.savetibet.org

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