Nonentity Quotes

• Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Depth, Misery, Harmony

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.1631, Delphi Classics

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Eye, Heart, People

  Letter to Theo, from The Hague, July 21, 1882.

  149 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

  George Eliot

  Time, Opportunity, Men

  George Eliot (1860). “Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.45

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Egotism - usually just a case of mistaken nonentity.

  Barbara Stanwyck

  Mistake, Cases, Egotism

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  66 Copy quote

  Show source

• Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Ambitious, Rough Drafts

  7 Copy quote

• A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Intellectual, Groups

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.69, Knopf

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities.

  Geoffrey Fisher

  Christian, Two, People

  6 Copy quote

• Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kings, Men, Ideas

  8 Copy quote

• We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

  Anthony Burgess

  Children, Son, Civilization

  7 Copy quote

• Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Music, Drawing, Mind

  Letter to Theo from The Hague, July 21, 1882.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? ... I, for one, would much rather swoon over a few thin slices of prime beefsteak, or one small serving of chocolate mousse, or a sliver of foie gras than indulge to the full on such nonentities as fat-free gelatin puddings.

  Julia Child

  Media, Hype, People

  7 Copy quote

• First you have to know who you are. That is the most important thing, as if you don't know who you are you will either get swallowed up or you follow some unsuitable trends and just become a nonentity.

  Iris Apfel

  Important, Trends, Firsts

  Source: www.thegayuk.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?

  George Eliot

  Opportunity, Men, Use

  George Eliot (2016). “The Sad Fortunes Of The Reverend Amos Barton”, p.56, George Eliot

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

  William James

  Emotion, Humans, Human Emotions

  Dr. William James (2013). “What is an Emotion?”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.

  Boris Pasternak

  Real, Thinking, Doctors

  4 Copy quote

• Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.

  Isabel Paterson

  Terrible, Rugged, Right Now

  4 Copy quote

• Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

  Nicolas Chamfort

  War, Struggle, Eye

  5 Copy quote

• It is a fiction, a shade, a nonentity, but a reality for legal purposes. A corporation aggregate is only in abstracto—it is invisible, immortal, and rests only in intendment and consideration of the law.

  Edward Coke

  Reality, Law, Corporations

  4 Copy quote

• Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president's sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.

  H. L. Mencken

  Son, Government, Political

  17 Copy quote

• Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

  William Carlos Williams

  Home, Writing, Faces

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Heart, Eye, Men

  Vincent van Gogh, Rachel Barnes (1990). “Van Gogh by Vincent”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Such is life, my fellow-mummers-just like a poor player that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blanky, signifying-nothing.

  Joseph Furphy

  Art, Player, Stories

  Joseph Furphy, Frances Devlin-Glass (1991). “The annotated Such is life: such is life : being certain extracts from the diary of Tom Collins”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise instead of penalty [Christians were punished for not worshiping Roman gods] that we have rejected what we have come to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those whom we are certain are nonentities. What does not exist is in its nonexistence secure from suffering.

  Tertullian

  Christian, Religious, Errors

  6 Copy quote

• Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Player, Games

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.20, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

  Wendell Berry

  Loss, Thinking, Land

  4 Copy quote