Nugatory Quotes & Sayings

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it. — Patrick Ness

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. — Bernardo Bertolucci

I just open my mouth and out it comes. — Billie Joe Armstrong

...deep inside she wondered--feared--what it would take to break her. — Allison Brennan

The future does not happen just by chance. — Susan Patron

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - — Vladimir Nabokov

The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same state, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things in short which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction ... the attempt to exercise these powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendour of the national government. — Alexander Hamilton

Assurance of hope is more than life, it is health, strength, power, vigor, activity, energy, manliness, beauty. — J.C. Ryle

A failure teaches you that something can't be done-that way. — Thomas A. Edison

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? — Erica Jong

I hate when the major event of a show I watch is spoiled for me. And I'm wracked with guilt when/if I spoil something for someone else. — Bryan Cogman

Regardless of your marital status, your age, or the language you speak, you are a beloved spirit daughter of Heavenly Father who is destined to play a critical part in the onward movement of the gospel kingdom. — Sheri L. Dew

Tisn't any need for you't'know. Even without you knowin', you function as yourself. That's your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored 'elephant graveyard' inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity's last terra incognita — Haruki Murakami

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. — Christopher Morley

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history. — Roger Kimball

To refer the power in question to the clause "to provide for the common defense and general welfare" would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms "common defense and general welfare" embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust. — James Madison

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world. — E.B. White

In theory, say you did have thousands of people - no, thousands of systems - enraged at a hypothetical Galactic Empire in a faraway galaxy. But they're all upset over local matters, over particular grievances, and they never get together on anything. So they get no strength in numbers, no strategic advantages from cooperation. They're easy to divide and conquer. And worst of all, no common spirit ever develops. — John Jackson Miller