Irrelevancies Quotes & Sayings

People are like that here. Strangers smile at you on the beach, come up and offer you a shell, for no reason, lightly, and then go by and leave you alone again. Nothing is demanded of you in payment, no social rite expected, no tie established. It was a gift, freely offered, freely taken, in mutual trust. People smile at you here, like children, sure that you will not rebuff them, that you will smile back. And you do, because you know it will involve nothing. The smile, the act, the relationship is hung in space, in the immediacy and purity of the present; suspended on the still point of here and now; balanced there, on a shaft of air, like a seagull.

The pure relationship, how beautiful it is! How easily it is damaged, or weighed down with irrelevancies - not even irrelevancies, just life itself, the accumulations of life and of time. For the first part of every relationship is pure, whether it be with friend or lover, husband or child. It is pure, simple and unencumbered. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My mind is not like a neat and tidy garden; it is a vast and untidy wilderness, full of irrelevancies, but with lots of places to wander and get lost. — Roopa Farooki

It is here that we see neoconfucian idealism at its romantic worst, often celebrating its utopian dreams in 'heroic' self-congratulatory verse, while assuming as always that conscientious officials down the line would find a way to live up to the norms set at the top.

Such was the kind of unrealism that allowed many of Kang's [Youwei] best insights to evaporate into the thin air of utopian plans and arcane irrelevancies. — Wm Theodore De Bary

Perry wanted to be the villain, probably for strategic reasons. But it didn't take. He wasn't smart enough; he probably didn't even know how "Ayn" was pronounced. — Chuck Klosterman

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: "tomorrow," "later on," "when you have made your way," "you will understand when you are old enough." Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd. — Albert Camus

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. — Dalai Lama XIV

There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber. — Kurt Vonnegut

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually ... and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it. — C.S. Lewis

Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies. — Noam Chomsky

Time used to do irrelevancies can be channeled into something productive instead — Sunday Adelaja

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies. — Dalton Camp

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind
the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain. — John Steinbeck

What tended to happen, to Colin and Mary at least, was that subjects were not explored so much as defensively reiterated, or forced into elaborate irrelevancies, and suffused with irritability. — Ian McEwan

You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies. — Neil Gaiman

They say that as one grows older one mellows, become more tolerant. Perhaps. Sometimes I think it is more a stripping off, a peeling away of irrelevancies. But somehwere in youth, as childhood is left behind, certain truths about ourselves become apparent, and once we recognise them, we must abide by them. — Molly Izzard

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends ... — Max Beerbohm

Somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis's narrative (" ... such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it'll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper ... ") and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave ... Mr. — Neil Gaiman

Very few of us relate to what it's like to be a hero. But everyone understands what it's like to fail. — Kathleen Tessaro

What does it matter how much we do if what we're doing isn't what matters most? — Stephen Covey

Observe your cat. It is difficult to surprise him. Why? Naturally his superior hearing is part of the answer, but not all of it. He moves well, using his senses fully. He is not preoccupied with irrelevancies. He's not thinking about his job or his image or his income tax. He is putting first things first, principally his physical security. Do likewise. — Jeff Cooper

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern - a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson's language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism. — Terry Eagleton

If you want to make something clear to someone, you mustn't forget the main point, the most important thing, and if you bring in something else as an illustration you mustn't wander off into endless irrelevancies. — Anton Webern

Running is in my blood-the adrenaline flows before the races, the love/hate of butterflies in your stomach. — Marcus O'Sullivan