Meaningless Quotes - Page 29

• in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.

  Arthur Koestler

  Pertinent Questions, Society, Lasts

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• No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

  Michael Novak

  Children, Compassion, Progress

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• It is a libel to suggest that children need rewards for attending to tasks, apart from intrinsic interest and satisfaction. Children work very hard in their purposeful endeavors in the world, when they have ends they want to accomplish themselves. It is meaningless teaching, not learning, that demands irrelevant incentives.

  Frank Smith

  Children, Teaching, Tasks

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• Fashion is a part of the world and part of history. It's not a meaningless swirl of meaningless clothes. They (clothes) reflect the times.

  Valerie Steele

  Fashion, Clothes, World

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• Too many modern painters set themselves satisfied with just a coincidence, the spot in its raw, meaningless form.

  Pierre Alechinsky

  Coincidence, Modern, Form

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• Unfortunately when I start to talk or when someone watches over my shoulders my pencil either stops or I draw meaningless lines.

  E. J. Hughes

  Drawing, Watches, Lines

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• You do not get peace by shouting: Peace. Peace is a meaningless word; what we need is a glorious peace.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  War, Needs, Shouting

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• This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Destiny, People, Giving

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1967). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966”, p.841, Best Books on

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• I also made two very important discoveries as time went on. In the first place, I discovered that making money was easy. I had been led to believe that money and possessions would insure me a life of happiness and peace of mind. So that was the path I pursued. In the second place, I discovered that making money and spending it foolishly was completely meaningless. I knew that this was not what I was here for, but at that time I didn't know exactly what I was here for.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Money, Believe, Discovery

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.4, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

  Rajneesh

  Motivational, Meaningful, Mother

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• You can say you love someone - but unless you demonstrate that love through your actions, your words become meaningless.

  Stephen Covey

  Motivational, Action, Love Someone

  Stephen R. Covey, Rebecca R. Merrill (2008). “The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything”, p.128, Simon and Schuster

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• The only way I can experience my life as meaningless is to work as hard as I possibly can to tell myself it has no meaning. At a deeper level of reality, my life can't help but have meaning, because everything is continually unfolding, and I am connected into that unfolding in ways that I can't even imagine.

  Joseph Jaworski

  Motivational, Reality, Levels

  Joseph Jaworski, Peter Senge (2011). “Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership”, p.11, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• The US is often the first to call for transparency and integrity in the reporting of other governments. It has never provided transparency or integrity in its reporting on the war in Iraq. It has downplayed the growth of the insurgency and other civil conflicts. It exaggerated progress in the development of Iraqi forces, and has reported meaningless macroecomic figures claiming 'progress' in the face of steadily deteriorating economic conditions for most Iraqis outside the Kurdish security zone, and does so in the face of almost incredible incompetence by USAID and the Corps of Engineers.

  Anthony H. Cordesman

  Integrity, War, Government

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• In the first stage of insight-building, all that researchers can do is observe phenomena. Second, they classify the phenomena in a way that helps them simplify the apparent complexities of the world so they can ignore the meaningless differences and draw connections between the things that really seem to matter. Third, based on the classification system, they propose a theory. The theory is a statement of what causes what and why, and under what circumstances.

  Clayton Christensen

  Differences, Connections, World

  Source: www.strategy-business.com

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• We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Meaningful, Fun, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.

  T.C. Boyle

  Dog, Teeth, Why Not

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If we keep treating our most important values as meaningless relics, that's exactly what they'll become.

  Michael Josephson

  Important Values, Relics, Ifs

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• Without the cross we have a meaningless and powerless Christianity.

  Michael Catt

  Christianity, Crosses, Powerless

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• Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

  Hubert Selby, Jr.

  Mean, Artist, Giving

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• Like most human behavior, violence has meaning: it only seems 'senseless' or 'meaningless' to the extent we are unable-or unwilling-to decode it.

  Stephen A. Diamond

  Violence, Existential, Behavior

  Stephen A. Diamond (1996). “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”, p.9, SUNY Press

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• Knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding.

  Moses Finley

  Understanding, Sake, Waste

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• Some help others in order to receive blessings and admiration. This is simply meaningless. Some cultivate themselves in part to serve others, in part to serve their own pride. They will understand, at best, half of the truth. But those who improve themselves for the sake of the world - to these, the whole truth of the universe will be revealed.

  Laozi

  Pride, Blessing, Helping Others

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• In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"-and the light shineth in the darkness.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Morning, Light, Darkness

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.37, Beacon Press

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• When you break an agreement in a relationship, you must offer an amendment first, or it is meaningless.

  Marshall Sylver

  Agreement, Firsts, Break

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• Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Change, Thinking, One Day

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