Irrelevant Material Quotes & Sayings

Amid increasing chaos, here lay the potential dominants. Much action and the play of forces even on a huge scale and with enormous material effects is often irrelevant, and counts for little or nothing in the final result: but along the chain of commanding causation even the smallest events are vital. It is these which should be studied and pondered over; for in them is revealed the profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men. No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world. — Winston S. Churchill

The scene that made me furious was watching Padme, a woman who just gave birth to two beautiful children, just giving up the will to live. — Timothy Zahn

You don't run,' he corrected me. 'But you're more than able.' There was no shadow of doubt in his voice. Hearing it from someone else made me realize: there was nothing stopping me from running but me. — Alexandra Heminsley

We cannot allow the American flag to be shot at anywhere on earth if we are to retain our respect and prestige — Barry Goldwater

There was a Young Person in pink, Who called out for something to drink; But they said, 'O my daughter, there's nothing but water!' Which vexed that Young Person in pink. — Edward Lear

I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories. — Gerhard Richter

Good. Now I've got work to do," I said, pulling away. "Some of us have jobs, you know."
He grinned, "Yeah. Suckers. — Alicia Kobishop

But I would like to reach the point where I could cut up an illustrated magazine at random and see to it that the parts would each become a painting. I cannot properly explain it right now. Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice. — Gerhard Richter

Slow adaptation is driven by forces such as evolution. Fast adaptation is driven by forces such as insight. — Gary A. Klein

I guess you gotta try the rest before you settle down with the best. — Jeri Smith-Ready

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Sometimes, losing your dreams could be worse than losing your reality. — Jassy Mackenzie

This makes it tough to find a lot of solid material on him because so much of his work got discounted as irrelevant. Most of it just ends up buried in pseudo-science books. Pretty much the only place you can find him is lumped in with guys like Edgar Cayce or Immanuel Velikovsky. He believed in telepathy, shared dreaming, race memories, all that kind of stuff. The idea that people's minds can all connect on some extra-sensory level. — Peter Clines

Riches can all be lost, but that happiness in your own heart can only be veiled, and it will bring you happiness again, as long as you live. — Anne Frank

It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal. — William Ernest Henley

Because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound. — Salman Rushdie

As he throws himself into one scheme after another, he draws lessons that improve his focus and judgment. He knits what he learns into mental models of investing, which he then uses to size up more complex opportunities and find his way through the weeds, plucking the telling details from masses of irrelevant information to reach the payoff at the end. These behaviors are what psychologists call "rule learning" and "structure building." People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied later in similar situations. Likewise, people who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour. — Peter C. Brown

The first step to truly living a good and fearless life, is accepting responsibility for your actions. Accepting what part you had in any situation. Difficult, to say the least, but liberating. — Jann Arden

Theism, as religious people typically hold it, does not merely state that some entity created the universe, but that the universe was created specifically with humans in mind as the most important part of creation. If we have any understanding at all of how an intelligent agent capable of creating the material universe would act if it had such an intention, we would say it would not create the huge structure we see, most of it completely irrelevant for life on Earth, with the Earth in such a seemingly random location, and with humans appearing only after a long and rather random course of evolution. — Tim Maudlin

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary. — Iain Pears

The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience's eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience 'right now.' — Lee Hall

I dare to be great. The man without imagination stands unhurt and hath no wings. This is my credo, this is my forte. — Don King

You are a goddess. You are a catch. You are, like, the outcome of every self-help book ever written. — Georgia Clark

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. — Ben Shahn