Meaningless Quotes - Page 6

• Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

  Hakim Bey

  Clouds, Order, Desire

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.3, Autonomedia

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• I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

  Leo Tolstoy

  Wall, Regret, Wife

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• The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

  Lorrie Moore

  Character, Self, Play

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• Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Mean, Simple, Ordinary

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p.160, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• From these activists we can learn a crucial lesson: without citizens creating the institutions necessary for facilitating the growth of public deliberation, democracy will be a meaningless term. Without political leaders articulating this idea and acting upon it, public life and citizenship will continue to stagnate.

  Kevin Mattson

  Ideas, Creating, Leader

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• Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Opportunity, Economics, Advantage

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• I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Dream, Morning, Rap

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.513, Simon and Schuster

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• Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

  Boris Pasternak

  Sleep, Long, Understanding

  Roger Martin du Gard, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Gabriela Mistral (1971). “Roger Martin du Gard: Gabriela Mistral ; Boris Pasternak”

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• A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain anything without sacrificing something else in return, but once you have overcome it and made it your own...you will gain an irreplaceable fullmetal heart.

  Hiromu Arakawa

  Pain, Heart, Sacrifice

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• A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain something without sacrificing something in return.

  Hiromu Arakawa

  Pain, Sacrifice, Lessons

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• …God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.

  Rohinton Mistry

  Quilts, Squares, Design

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• Football is the love of my life. I would never say I don't want to play. Somebody could say that this game is meaningless. Who is it meaningless to? I guess people who are watching the game? Or the people who are playing it? It's definitely not meaningless to us.

  Shawne Merriman

  Football, Games, Play

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• as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

  Anne Rice

  Water, Losing Someone, Patterns

  Anne Rice (2013). “The Mayfair Witches Series 3-Book Bundle: Witching Hour, Lasher, Taltos”, p.176, Ballantine Books

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• Fame is foolish, it is pointless, meaningless. Even if the whole world knows you, how does it make you richer? How does it make your life more blissful? How does it help you to be more understanding, to be more aware? To be more alert, to be more alive?

  Rajneesh

  Spiritual, Understanding, Doe

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• All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.

  Charles Yu

  Heart, Ideas, People

  Charles Yu (2010). “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel”, p.124, Vintage

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• Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents

  Orhan Pamuk

  Incidents, Strings, Wells

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “Snow”, p.244, Faber & Faber

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• Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.

  Antonio Damasio

  Beautiful, Intelligent, Leaving

  Antonio Damasio (2003). “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Goodness, Minutes, Whole Life

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)”, p.696, Vij Books India Pvt Ltd

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• I have studied many religions, many different persuasions of thought in Christian belief, and I have come, in this experience to this: the most important question in anyone's life is the question asked by poor Pilate in Matthew 27:22: 'What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?' No Other question in the whole sweep of human experience is as important as this. It is the choice between life and death, between meaningless existence and life abundant. What will you do with Christ? Accept Him and life, or reject Him and die? What else is there?

  Dale Evans

  Christian, Jesus, Life And Death

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• I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

  Ruth Ozeki

  Believe, Long, Matter

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• Alex gazed at her. Her mouth was slightly open; she ran her fingernail against her lower teeth as she thought. She'd knotted her hair at the nape of her neck again, and a strand had slipped loose onto her shoulder, gleaming in the lantern light. Suddenly all of his objections seemed meaningless. Don't, he thought. You'll regret it. He didn't care anymore. Slowly, unable to stop himself, he reached out and cupped his hand around her foot.

  L.A. Weatherly

  Regret, Feet, Light

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• The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

  James Frey

  Book, Years, Two

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• The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

  Jim Butcher

  Evil, Doe, Distinction

  Jim Butcher (2011). “Ghost Story: The Dresden Files, Book Thirteen”, p.317, Hachette UK

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• The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

  John Steinbeck

  Feelings, Doe, Action

  John Steinbeck (2008). “The Winter of Our Discontent”, p.107, Penguin

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• You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be a failure.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Pain, Loss

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