Nothings Going Quotes & Sayings

I had to use my wits or else I'd have been sunk - and nothings going to sink me. Everyone was always pulling at me, tugging at me, as if they wanted a piece of me. It was always, 'do this, do that,' and not just on the job but off, too. God, I've tried to stay intact, whole. — Marilyn Monroe

Who knew? I had no idea that someone could be such a thorn in your foot during a death march and still be irresistibly attractive in some magical, undeniable way."
"So is this what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more ... complementary. — Susan Ee

What labor and pains worldlings take to obtain the vain things of this life-to obtain the poor things of this world, which are but shadows and dreams, and mere nothings! — Thomas Brooks

I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: Good Lord, what humus! — Karel Capek

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings. — Thomas Ligotti

Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something. — Jean Paul

At the same time, Job's friends offer no real help. They come to "comfort" him (2:11), but Job ends up declaring them "miserable comforters" who would "comfort" him "with empty nothings" (21:34). — Anonymous

The best training is to learn to accept everything as it comes, as from Him whom our soul loves. The tests are always unexpected things, not great things that can be written up, but the common little rubs of life, silly little nothings, things you are ashamed of minding one scrap — Amy Carmichael

You can have a zillion nothings and still have nothing — Saadi

Because of the gospel, throwing away my idols feels less like a painful sacrifice and more like a liberating dance. For all my "empty nothings" have ever given me is momentary pleasure and lasting regrets. Remind me of this all year long when I'm tempted to think otherwise. — Scotty Smith

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. — Abraham Lincoln

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition. — Jean Cocteau

I named all the nothings after you. Because, my darling Nora ... no matter where I traveled, you were always what was missing. — Tessa Dare

The American people were, in the beginning, Revolutionaries and Tories. The American people ever since have been Revolutionaries and Tories. They have been Revolutionaries and Tories regardless of the labels of the past and present. Regardless of whether they were Federalists, Democrat-Republicans, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Unionists or Confederates, Populists, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, or Progressives. They have been and are profiteers and patriots. They have been and are conservatives, liberals, and radicals. — Saul Alinsky

While sitting on the hopper, in a blissful state of belieflessness, the Universe sent me this silly pun: Arrogant know-it-alls actually know nothing,
while humble know-nothings seem to know everything... — Maximus Freeman

How do you ... ? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.
Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology. — China Mieville

To say that 'life's a joke' is not so much to belittle life as to correctly identify the elusive nature of the joke. Jokes have the measure of us. They change in the telling, defy capture, slip through our fingers like water. And they outlast us all. They are trifles, fragments, nothings that turn out to be all that's left: the aptest metaphor for our pathetic species' struggle to survive. — Jimmy Carr

There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings. — Sylvia Plath

So is that what people call sweet nothings? Because somehow, I expected it to be a little more . . . complimentary. — Susan Ee

I believe life is a parenthesis between two nothings. I'm an atheist. I believe in a personal God, which is conscience, and that's what we must be accountable to every day. — Mario Benedetti

Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings! the Hungarian police were screaming.
That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death. — Elie Wiesel

What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. — Leigh Bardugo

Heidegger's parlamblings on 'Nothing' and 'Not' and 'the Nothing that Nothings' were the last supposedly respectable gasp of classical philosophy. — John Gardner

Yael was a cobweb version, composed of gaps and strings and fragile nothings. — Ryan Graudin

All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men
and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't ... — Ayn Rand

The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Nothings makes a woman look older that a rich costume. — Coco Chanel

Girl, all you have to do is say the word, and Mr. Lusty McLust a Lot here will be happy to whisper some dirty nothings in your ear. — Wendy Higgins

Do ghosts have to be forgiven? All I remember of the funeral is, 'Your husband was a brilliant man.' Was that all the comfort that I had to draw on? I wanted to announce, 'Yes he was a brilliant man and now like all the great minds he is dead.' Sometimes I cry myself to sleep, sniffling, stifling my sobs in my pillows. Sometimes I fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow and find my arms reaching across the other side of the bed for Kenny so I can whisper sweet nothings in his ear as he falls asleep.

I reached out for the bottle of sleeping tablets on my bedside table and swallowed them one by one. — Abigail George

Landry looked crestfallen. "Too bad. Having a beautiful woman whisper sweet nothings in my ear with a French accent would have been intriguing."
Okay, what was a woman supposed to do after a line like that? Everly couldn't resist leaning closer and giving him what she hoped was a sexy, come-hither look.
"I think I may be able to help you with those sweet little nothings," she said in her best French accent. — Paige Tyler

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway. — Jonathan Safran Foer

You see gentlemen, there are ideas ... that is, you see, when some ideas are said out loud, put into words, they come out terribly stupid. They come out so that you're ashamed of yourself. But why? For no reason at all. Because we're all good-for-nothings and can't bear the truth, or I don't know why else. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky