Nonsensical Quotes & Sayings

In an era when information can be sent instantaneously anywhere, it is utterly nonsensical that our Nation's police, the fire, and EMS personnel cannot consistently communicate with each other. — Bill Pascrell

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. — A.J. Ayer

Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. — H.L. Mencken

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature. — Stanislaw Lem

You are right, Steppenwolf, a thousand times right, and yet you must perish. You are far too demanding, too hungry for today's straightforward, cosy world, satisfied as it is with so little. You have one dimension too many for its liking, so it will spit you out. It is impossible for anyone wishing to live and enjoy life in today's world to be like you or me. It is no home, this fine world, for people like us who, instead of nonsensical noise, demand music; instead of pleasure, joy; instead of money, soul; instead of industrial production, genuine labour; instead of frivolity, genuine passion ... — Anonymous

What is the greatest thing in us is our Spirit, is the Spirit that we have and we should know that we should be proud of it that we have got the Spirit within us. And if you become proud, then you will not do nonsensical things. — Nirmala Srivastava

But I was right and the real world seemed increasingly nonsensical. Why train for years to do a job you bitched about all day? Didn't it make more sense to follow your dreams and maybe do a little good at the same time? I didn't want to be a lawyer or a bank manager or a goddamn burger flipper. We only get one life and I wanted mine to be exciting ... — Mark Millar

My friends tried to ignore my quirks since they didn't have a clue what to do about them. It didn't seem hard on them though. They were already trained to ignore their parents' alcohol abuse, constant bickering, serial marriages, and nonsensical advice. — Terry Spencer Hesser

Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery. — Blaise Cendrars

It's finding those nonsensical pieces of conversation that we all do all the time. We do all the time. When we're talking on the telephone, there are arguments with people who agree when they both think that they disagree. — Barry Levinson

As an actor you're only supposed to be a lover. I am a romantic hero though I don't like that tag. With all the hardships, problems, illness, goodness, badness, awards and money ... an actor will always be a lover. And a lover makes mistakes. You'll be silly, nonsensical and stupid. — Shahrukh Khan

Don't depend on other people to be responsible for you. Don't make yourself stressed out over nonsensical things like material things. — Eartha Kitt

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. — Germaine Greer

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance. — Robert Silverberg

The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words. — Lord Kelvin

Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed
with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of
shame. She knows it's nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she
never had. — Elizabeth Berg

And now there's this. A talent show. Silly and nonsensical. Stupid and fun. Together. Laughing. Being part of the human race. Knowing about the horrors that have happened and will happen but choosing to live anyway. Maybe there's an art to being human. — Susan Ee

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge. — Alan Bradley

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past. — Anne Rice

Life is the path. Can the path be seen? Observe the path and you are far from it. Without observation how can one know they are on the path? The path cannot be seen, nor can it not be unseen. Perception is delusion; abstraction is nonsensical. Your path is freedom. Name it and it vanishes. — Eric S. Nylund

I'm blushing at my own stupid, nonsensical, meaningless thought process, which, by the way, nobody knows about except me. — Sophie Kinsella

What a strange demented feeling it gives me when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head. — Yoshida Kenko

Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

IT'S EASY to poke fun at nonsensical office speak. For one thing, it sounds exhausting: a colleague might "reach out," "drill down," and promise to "circle back" in a single e-mail. But by signaling membership in a white-collar tribe, meaningless jargon can be quite powerful. — Anonymous

When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one's particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. — David Bentley Hart

Reality really is theater. There's no other way to describe it. It's all so nonsensical, ridiculous and chaotic. — Joe Rogan

The Council's expanding the refuges, at least, but it's still nonsensical. — Francesca Haig

Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least. — John H. McWhorter

He wanted to crumple her up and toss her from his mind like a scrap piece of paper filled with nonsensical doodles or dissonant words that formed unbalanced rhymes. Yet, he refused throw her away. — Emmie White

I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand. — Peter Watts

I am none of those nonsensical fools that can whine and make romantic love
I leave that to younger brothers. Let my estate speakfor me. — Sarah Fielding

If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction ... Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person. — Richard Matheson

The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is. — Christopher Hitchens

Would you buy a giant inflatable jumping castle if you had no children and no garden to put it in? No? Then why would you eat food that you didn't need and didn't enjoy? It's just as nonsensical. — Ingrid Lindberg

He told me that the phrase "the happiest days of your life" referred to your school days.

This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children. — Neil Gaiman

If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organization for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid that that which we have at present. — Claus Von Stauffenberg

The God I decide to believe in is the God of the bathroom floor. A God of scandalously low expectations. A God who smiles down at a drunk on the floor, wasted and afraid, and says, There you are. I've been waiting. Are you ready to make something beautiful with me? I look at the blue cross and decide I will let it be. I will stop deeming myself unworthy of invitations and trust the inviter. I will test out the ridiculous, nonsensical possibility that somehow, in some way I can't yet see, I will rise to meet this call. Yes, — Glennon Doyle Melton

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored. — Alain De Botton

This may all sound nonsensical. Well, India is a country of nonsense. It is nonsensical to parch one's throat with thirst when a kindly Mahomedan is ready to offer pure water to drink. And yet thousands of Hindus would rather die of thirst than drink water from a Mahomedan household. These nonsensical men can also, once they are convinced that their religion demands that they should wear garments manufactured in India only and eat food only grown in India, decline to wear any other clothing or eat any other food. — Mahatma Gandhi

Hundreds of studies have shown that people overrate their health, leadership ability, intelligence, professional competence, sporting prowess, and managerial skills. People also hold the nonsensical belief that they are inherently lucky. Most people think they are more likely than the average person to attain a good first job, to have gifted children, and to live to a ripe old age. They also think that they are less likely than the average person to be the victim of an accident, crime, disease, depression, unwanted pregnancy, or earthquake. Why — Steven Pinker

Did you hear the nonsensical prattle spewing from her pie-hole? — Tucker Max

It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response. — Daniel J. Siegel

Everything looks nonsensical before it works. — Burt Rutan

then he spluttered at me, "You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?" I — Naomi Novik

English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey - just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions. — Catherynne M Valente

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'
I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her ... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me. — George Eliot

This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be "natural" and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.) — Erich Fromm

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism. — Richard Dawkins

Stephen Tennant is the most sparkling talker who ever comes to my house, and perhaps the most amusing. He dances like the will-o'-the-wisp where other people stick in the mud. Though his really kindred spirits are the most exotic people he can find, he also greatly enjoys a talk with some extremely commonplace person, when he pretends that he thinks they mean something which they never thought of in their lives. He can be by turns poetic, malicious, and nonsensical. His talk is very pictorial and he handles words as if they were pait on a brush. When Stephen is alone with one friend he is often drawn to speak of very grave and profound subjects, and then he becomes unhappy, for he is never sure about what he loves and believes in, and would like to love and believe in so much. — Edith Olivier

You'd be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical. — Dianna Hardy

Ollie-O was in a semicatatonic state, uttering nonsensical phrases like "This is not biodegradable - the downstream implications are enormous - the optics make for rough sledding - going forward -" before getting stuck on the words "epic fail," which he kept repeating. — Maria Semple

But of all Nonsense, Religious Nonsense is the most nonsensical; so enough, & more than enough of it - Only, by the bye, will you, or can you tell me, my dear Cunningham, why a religioso turn of mind has always a tendency to narrow and illiberalise the heart? — Robert Burns

No. I can't have sex with you today because there aren't enough spoons. — Jenny Lawson

Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams. — John N. Gray

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical. — Errol Morris

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Throughout the narrative you will find many statements that are obviously nonsensical and quite at variance with common sense. For the most part these are true. — Robert Gilmore

Mad Olia had a lot to say, and most of it was nonsensical, if it could be understood at all. Like bad poetry spoken underwater. — Charlie N. Holmberg

I'm drunk-nonsensical tired out. — Robert Frost

The reality of the dying person is very different from that of the living. She is experiencing we cannot fully understand or enter into. If a person is conscious and able to talk, I always listen and take my cues from him. The desires of the dying, however nonsensical or puzzling they may be, are met. If the patient talks about the past, or about people long dead, I assume she is experiencing things we in the room are unaware of. I never discount that reality. If the person is unconscious, I speak as if he is able to hear and understand. If words from loved ones are forthcoming, it is again important to assume that the patient hears and understands what is being said. The most important thing to remember is that the experience is about the dying person, not the survivors. — Megory Anderson

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved ... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. — A.J. Ayer

Peeta crouches down on the other side of her and strokes her hair. When he begins to speak in a soft voice, it seems almost nonsensical, but the words aren't for me. With my paint box at home, I can make every color imaginable. Pink. As pale as a baby's skin. Or as deep as rhubarb. Green like spring grass. Blue that shimmers like ice on water. — Suzanne Collins

In the present world, this technological, psychotic, politicised, nonsensical world, you have to believe that the good guys are going to win! That evil will be banished somehow! — Rufus Wainwright

Lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog ... but cruel. — Caroline Knapp

Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories. — Cullen Bunn

Trying to block women from getting access to contraception or defunding Planned Parenthood is completely nonsensical from a policy standpoint. — Richard Carmona

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning. — Ludwig Von Mises

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn't want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn't that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical. — Sarah Palin

the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters. — Francis Wheen

No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical — Thomas Huxley

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If — Richard Rohr

I wouldn't so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!" Whereupon, — Philip Roth

So there are established sayings: Guidance to enlightenment seems nonsensical. Guidance to progress seems backwards. Guidance to equality seems to classify. Higher efficacy seems at a loss. Great purity seems like shame. Broad effectiveness seems insufficient. Constructive effectiveness seems casual. Basic reality seems changeable. A great expanse has no shores. A large container takes a long time to make. Important news is rarely heard. — Lao-Tzu

In his humble opinion, she possessed the least appealing traits a woman can put on display: undiscriminating curiosity and nonsensical verbosity. — Carol Vorvain

Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It's our hand on the remote. There's a world out there outside the tube. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The attention is to be kept pure. In Sahaja Yoga you know all the methods how the attention, one can keep it pure. If the attention is not pure, then this desire will be always attacked by all petty, nonsensical things which have no meaning in your ascent. — Nirmala Srivastava

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them
as steps
to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the whole world aright. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing. — Alexis Hall

One of the first exercises we did in acting class my freshman year was to stand in two rows, two lines facing each other as a class, and just make sounds and move in some completely nonsensical way out into the center of the room. Sort of make an idiot out of yourself, essentially, but to be okay with that. — Chris Parnell

When I wasn't internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I'd heard over the course of my life - bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad. — Cheryl Strayed

That idea is so damned nonsensical and impossible that I'm willing to stand on the bridge of a battleship while that nitwit tries to hit if from the air. — Newton D. Baker

And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. ( ... ) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us.
- "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image" (6. Representation) — Lidia Yuknavitch

It's easy to see from commercials the sorts of activities I should presumably be engaged in, but I'm fairly certain that American manhood is vague, internally contradictory and largely nonsensical. — Tycho Brahe

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Learning is never aversive - usually we are not aware of it at all. It is failure to learn that is frustrating and boring, and so is having to attend to nonsensical activities. — Frank Smith

But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it. — Elizabeth Gaskell

I always laugh at people who say "I've never met a rich technician" I love that! Its such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for 9 years and got rich as a technician — Martin S. Schwartz

Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply. — Paul Watzlawick

The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new "product" without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the "product," they didn't vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn't make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. — Jonathan Franzen

Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways. — A. Ashley Straker

You see?" Thane waved at the photo. "Everything about her is nonsensical. A dragon who lies with a wolf? I suppose pigs fly and the moon is blue, too. — Erin Kellison

Though Kurt would later claim that his graffiti messages were political, in fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting "Boat Ack" in red letters on the ship's hull; on the other side he lettered, "Boat people go home. — Charles R. Cross

Love is irrational. Nonsensical. Makes you feel things that seem wildly inappropriate when you consider the surrounding circumstances. And yet you shouldn't ever question it, shouldn't ever doubt it. You should just accept it for the gift it is. — Alyson Noel

I think we must attack
wherever we meet it
the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true. — C.S. Lewis

Civic duty? Perhaps it would be a little naive to try to coerce me into voting. I assure you my basic standards of healthy living are very different from yours, which is the reason I do not vote. You should note that, as nonsensical a scenario, if forced to choose I would most definitely rather live in a failing, Christ-honoring, God-fearing nation than a flourishing one that mocks said Creator. Beware of my personal ambitions. — Criss Jami

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I'd have found it amusing enough, I dare say, if I hadn't been irritated by the thought that these irresponsible Christian zealots were only making things harder for the Army and Company, who had important work to do. It was all so foolish and unnecessary - the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for? In — George MacDonald Fraser

Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm
say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on! — Kate Douglas Wiggin

One ounce of the practice of righteousness and of spiritual Self-realisation outweighs tons and tons of frothy talk and nonsensical sentiments. — Swami Vivekananda