Indifference Quotes - Page 27

• people never write calmly but when they write indifferently.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Writing, People

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe (1837). “The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”, p.146

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• Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

  Honore de Balzac

  Drama, Passion, Gestures

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• Poise and indifference so often look the same.

  Sue Grafton

  Confidence, Looks, Poise

  Sue Grafton (2010). “J is for Judgement”, p.236, Pan Macmillan

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• Love and hate always remember; it is only indifference that forgets.

  Myrtle Reed

  Hate, Remember, Forget

  Myrtle Reed, Mary Badollet Powell (1911). “The Myrtle Reed Year Book: Epigrams and Opinions from the Writings and Sayings of Myrtle Reed”

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• Artists will sometimes speak of Rome with disparagement or indifference while it is before them; but no artist ewer lived in Rome and then left it, without sighing to return.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Art, Rome, Return

  George Stillman Hillard (1853). “Six Months in Italy”, p.20

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• Throughout the 1980s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.

  Hillary Clinton

  Powerful, Ethos, Community

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• Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Soul, Useless, Erode

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• Up until the end of the Bush Administration, there was indifference to the North Korean suffering under Kim Jong-Il.

  Ed Royce

  Suffering, Administration, Kim

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• Poor dusky children of slavery, men and women of my own race-the transition from slavery to freedom was too sudden for you! The bright dreams were too rudely dispelled; you were not prepared for the new life that opened before you, and the great masses of the North learned to look upon your helplessness with indifference-learned to speak of you as an idle, dependent race. Reason should have prompted kinder thoughts. Charity is ever kind.

  Elizabeth Keckley

  Dream, Children, Men

  Elizabeth Keckley (2016). “Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”, p.52, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn't write a novel, people said I couldn't write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.

  Osamu Dazai

  Pain, Liars, Writing

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• The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all species are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

  Richard Dawkins

  Running, Animal, Years

  "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1995.

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• The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.

  Elie Wiesel

  Strong, Hate, Love Is

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• Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism [sic] and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

  George Eliot

  Commitment, Waiting, Quality

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• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

  Emma Goldman

  Christian, Jesus, Philosophical

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Years, Atheism, Done

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• Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

  Aldous Huxley

  Luxury, Reform, Excuse

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Work, Animal

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• Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.

  Blaise Pascal

  Death, Loss, Men

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

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• A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.

  Gertrude Stein

  Time, Communication, Conversation

  Gertrude Stein (1952). “The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein: Mrs. Reynolds, and five earlier novelettes”

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• From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
  To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.

  Franz Kafka

  Courage, Adversity, People

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• The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

  Anton Chekhov

  Change, Blow, Men

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• Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. And each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference.

  Paul Tillich

  Faith, Doubt, Essentials

  Paul Tillich (1958). “Dynamics of faith”

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• As Nature is always careless and indifferent
  Who sees, who steps, means nothing and this is pretty.

  Stevie Smith

  Beauty, Nature, Mean

  Stevie Smith (1988). “New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith”, p.115, New Directions Publishing

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• And we may be led, then, upward through more
  Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
  With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.
  Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
  Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

  John Ashbery

  Country, Art, Powerful

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”

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• Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discardsit with indifference.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Change, Gratitude, Fickle

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