Meaningless Quotes - Page 14

• What baffles me is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial - or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

  Peter De Vries

  Ideas, People, Despair

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• As long as you and I understand salvation as checking off a box to get to God, we will find ourselves in the meaningless sea of world religions that actually condemn the human race by exalting our supposed ability to get to God. On the other hand, when you and I realize that we are morally evil, dead in sin and deserving of God's wrath with no way out on our own, we begin to discover our desperation for Christ.

  David Platt

  Wrath, Race, Hands

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• And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

  Donald Miller

  Together, Stories, Taste

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• Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Soundtracks, Interaction, Humans

  Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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• How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

  George Orwell

  Different, Would Be, Impossible

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Life is a process by which a few desperate longings morph into a thousand meaningless wants.

  Robert Breault

  Life, Want, Longing

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• A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Battle, Friendship Love, Literature

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.297, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.

  Anais Nin

  Love You, Joy, Piercings

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• Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

  Lewis Mumford

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Revenge

  "The Conduct Of Life" by Lewis Mumford, Ch. 1, 1951.

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• We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

  Joan Didion

  Fate, Men, Escaping

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Aug 24, 2011

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• If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Peace

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• Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

  Frederick Douglass

  Freedom, Rights, Tyrants

  Frederick Douglass (2013). “Selected Addresses of Frederick Douglass”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

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• School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Learning, School, Exercise

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• African nationalism is meaningless, dangerous, anachronistic, if it is not, at the same time, pan-Africanism.

  Julius Nyerere

  Patriotism, Dangerous, Africanism

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• Pride is the switch that turns off priesthood power. Humility is a switch that turns it on . . . . Some suppose that humility is about beating ourselves up. Humility does not mean convincing ourselves that we are worthless, meaningless, or of little value. Nor does it mean denying or withholding the talents God has given us. We don't discover humility by thinking less of ourselves; we discover humility by thinking less about ourselves. It comes as we go about our work with an attitude of serving God and our fellowman.

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Attitude, Mean, Humility

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• Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

  Bergen Evans

  Memorial Day, Freedom, Fear

  "The Natural History of Nonsense". Book by Bergen Evans, 1946.

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• The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.

  C. S. Lewis

  Brain, Religion, Atheism

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.228, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.

  Marion Woodman

  Inspiration, Addiction, Understanding

  Marion Woodman (1985). “The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation”

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• Discipline divorced from wisdom is not true discipline, but merely the meaningless following of custom, which is only a disguise for stupidity.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Wisdom, Fun, Discipline

  Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Essays”, p.220, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• Practice without improvement is meaningless.

  Chuck Knox

  Wrestling, Practice, Improvement

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• The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers - weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies.

  Jesse Owens

  Sports, Lying, Athlete

  "Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete". Book by Tony Gentry, 1990.

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• Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Jargon, Disease

  William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

  Edward Weston

  Photography, Understanding, Important

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell (1983). “Edward Weston on photography”, Gibbs Smith Publishers

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• Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

  John Berger

  Photography, Choices, Decision

  John Berger (2008). “Selected Essays of John Berger”, p.344, Vintage

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• Some say they are not bound by the doctrine which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing. Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation. Others finally belittle the reasonable character of the credibility of Christian Faith. These and like errors, it is clear, have crept in among certain of our sons who are deceived by imprudent zeal for souls or by false science.

  Pope Pius XII

  Christian, Character, Son

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