Vacuity Quotes

• Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits-the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Years, Intellectual, Poverty

  Theodore Roosevelt (1910). “Works: The strenuous life”

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• The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Mind, Plies, Intimacy

  "The Temptation to Exist". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1956.

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• Our moods do not believe in each other.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Mood

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “A Dream Too Wild: Emerson Meditations for Every Day of the Year”, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• Cooperation in the most natural thing in the world

  Janine Benyus

  World, Pitching, Cooperation

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• But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Islands, Doe, Kind

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal (2000). “The religious thought in Islam”

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• Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

  Tennessee Williams

  Struggle, Mean, Salvation

  Tennessee Williams (1945). “The Glass Menagerie”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

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• Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

  George Steiner

  Book, Reading, Boredom

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• Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Weed, Nature, Wall

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.178, Penguin

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• Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Gossip, Television, Vacuous

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• Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one's self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realisation may be enormous, as vast as the distance between the stars.

  Robert Beer

  Stars, Spring, Work

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• From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

  Wendell Berry

  Art, War, Ambition

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Mad Farmer Poems”, p.17, Counterpoint Press

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• A lot of times you see really good-looking guys on TV and you sort of assume that maybe there's some sort of vacuity behind them.

  Misha Collins

  Guy, Tvs, Assuming

  "Q&A: Supernatural's angelic Misha Collins". Interview with Tim Surette, www.tv.com. October 2, 2008.

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• I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

  Graham Greene

  Pain, Men, People

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

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• When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public.

  Elena Kagan

  Meaningful, Air, Issues

  "Panel on Obama's Nomination of Elena Kagan to Replace Justice Stevens on Supreme Court". "Special Report With Bret Baier", www.foxnews.com. May 10, 2010.

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• Much that we hug today as knowledge is ignorance pure and simple. It makes the mind wander and even reduces it to a vacuity.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Ignorance, Simple, Hug

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1986). “The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi: Non-Violent Resistance and Social Transformation”, Clarendon Press

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• Ignorance is mere privation by which nothing can be produced: it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction: and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget.

  Samuel Johnson

  Ignorance, Grieving, Knowing

  Samuel Johnson (2012). “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia”, p.31, Simon and Schuster

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• In indolent vacuity of thought.

  William Cowper

  William Cowper (1849). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper ...: Including the Copyright Poems, with a Life of the Author”, p.238

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• Your friends will notice at once that glib vacuities fail to impress, and hate you, and tell lies about you. It's worth it.

  Aleister Crowley

  Hate, Lying, Failing

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• The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, People, Giving

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.111, Vintage

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• Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.

  Henry Giroux

  Littles, Moral

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Heart, Men, Mind

  "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman" by Sarah Moore Grimke, Letter 8, 1837.

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• In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!

  Ellen Glasgow

  Favorite Hobby, Vacuums, Hobbies

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• Conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.

  Marcel Proust

  Expression, Giving, May

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.575, Modern Library

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• Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.

  Russell Baker

  Empty Mind, People, Brain

  Russell Baker (1991). “There's a Country in My Cellar”, Avon Books

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• For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

  Thomas Piketty

  Long, Use, Scientific Method

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