Indifferent Quotes - Page 5

• True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, and the permanent from the transient. And, yes, it means distinguishing between the good and the better, and even between the better and the best.

  Sinclair B. Ferguson

  Mean, Essentials, Permanent

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• The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

  James Joyce

  God, Art, Imagination

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ch. 5 (1916).

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• In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
  Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
  The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
  Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
  And on the vacant air.

  William Wordsworth

  Sweet, Nature, Heart

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.143

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• Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole,he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mother, Women, Despise

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• What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic; they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent.

  Howard Zinn

  Believe, People, Feelings

  "An Interview With Howard Zinn". Interview with Stefan Sirucek, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 30, 2010.

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• We feel bound to be punctual and conscientious with those we are indifferent about; while we can afford at any time, on the frostiest night, to be an hour after our appointment with the single gentleman who occupies an apartment in our heart's core.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Heart, Night, Gentleman

  "Sketches from Life, Vol. 1-2". Book by Laman Blanchard, Wiley & Putnam, "That Good Wine Needs No Bush", 1846.

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• Great is the rose
  Infected by the tomb,
  Yet burgeoning
  Indifferent to death.

  Nathalia Crane

  Rose, Tombs

  "Venus Invisible and Other Poems" by Nathalia Crane, ("Tadmore"), 1928.

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• the Americans must have the Almighty dollar. Their cupidity renders them daring and indifferent to everything else. It is nothing to them to expose their lives and those of others in order to gain money. How materialistic these people are!

  Theodore Guerin

  Order, People, Dollars

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• Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

  Victor Burgin

  Victor Burgin, Alexander Streitberger (2009). “Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin”, p.118, Leuven University Press

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• Now I am . . . like anyone with a strong preference for the fly rod, totally indifferent to how large a fish I catch by comparison with other fishermen. So when a fifteen-year-old called Fred, fishing deep in midsummer with a hideous plastic worm, caught a four and a half pounder . . . I naturally felt no resentment beyond wanting to break the kid's thumbs.

  Vance Bourjaily

  Strong, Kids, Years

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• The fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant, that nothing fears. He blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream; he addresses himself to it as a lover to his mistress; he woos it and stays with it till he knows its hidden secrets. Where it deepens his purpose deepens; where it is shallow he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days.

  John Burroughs

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

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• When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

  Simone Weil

  Evil, Excellence, Literature

  Simone Weil (1977). “The Simone Weil Reader”

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• Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.

  Simone Weil

  Silence, Cry

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• No two on earth in all things can agree;
  All have some darling singularity;
  Women and men, as well as girls and boys,
  In gewgaws take delight, and sigh for toys,
  Your sceptres and your crowns, and such like things,
  Are but a better kind of toys for kings.
  In things indifferent reason bids us choose,
  Whether the whim's a monkey or a muse.

  Charles Churchill

  Girl, Kings, Boys

  Charles Churchill (1822). “The Poems of Charles Churchill”, p.95

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• Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations - and seen them die, and seen new ones born again - Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

  Beryl Markham

  Men, Race, Land

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• The name of the new religion, said Rumfoord, is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Teaching, Men, Hands

  Kurt Vonnegut (2007). “The Sirens of Titan”, p.183, Dial Press

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• My religion is truth, love and service to God and humanity. Every religion that has come into the world has brought the message of love and brotherhood. Those who are indifferent to the welfare of their fellowmen, whose hearts are empty of love, they do not know the meaning of religion.

  Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

  Heart, Humanity, Brotherhood

  The Progressive, February 2002.

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• Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

  Ernesto Sabato

  Life, Stars, Novelists

  Ernesto Sabato (2011). “The Tunnel”, p.48, Penguin UK

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• To quarrel with God is to pay God the supreme compliment: it is to take God seriously. It is to say that God matters enough to be worth some anger. To be indifferent to God is to pay God the supreme insult. It is to say that nothing of consequence is at stake.

  Robert McAfee Brown

  Thought Provoking, Matter, Pay

  Robert McAfee Brown (1983). “Elie Wiesel, messenger to all humanity”

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• The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.

  Norman Cousins

  Death, Heart, Compassion

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• With his continual doctrine [Bishop Hooper] adjoined due and discreet correction, not so much severe to any as to them which for abundance of riches and wealthy state thought they might do what they listed. And doubtless he spared no kind of people, but was indifferent to all men, as well rich as poor, to the great shame of no small number of men nowadays. Whereas many we see so addicted to the pleasing of great and rich men, that in the meantime they have no regard to the meaner sort of poor people, whom Christ hath bought as dearly as the other.

  John Foxe

  Men, Small Numbers, People

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• Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Preference, Mathematician, Aesthetic

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• Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Numbers, People, Enemy

  "Zbig Brzezinski: Israel’s Actions in Lebanon Essentially Amount to 'the Killing of Hostages'” by Steve Clemons, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 26, 2006.

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• Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
  brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?

  Polybius

  Mean, Rome, Years

  Polybius, Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (2012). “The Histories of Polybius: Translated from the Text of F. Hultsch”, p.1, Cambridge University Press

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• Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.

  William James

  God, Vision, Essentials

  Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.600, Simon and Schuster

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