Sterile Quotes & Sayings

All I want is some man to take delight in me. 5:30? 6:30 A.M. as usual, no cigs. Better a maudlin drunk than a sterile one. My pimples are more like small boils; I have the plague. My lip is split. My tits are swollen and I can't ever sleep. I now breathe with my heart, which skips rope. Back to sex? — Maryse Holder

Never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile. — Norman Mailer

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. — Octavio Paz

Between cold war and hot peace, our love got sterilized to death. — Natalya Vorobyova

Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers. The workers cooperate in the food-gathering, nest-building and rearing the offspring. Males are reared only at the times of the year when their presence is required. — Christopher O'Toole

No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate. — Edward Dahlberg

I did a 'Last Comic Standing' audition in 2006, where you're just performing for three people in a comedy club, in a big comedy club, and I remember them cutting me off, asking about my name in the middle of one of my jokes. Yeah, it's just real weird when you're doing stand-up in that type of sterile, unnatural setting. — Hannibal Buress

After getting her settled safely on the couch, I retrieved a sterile razor blade from the kit in the closet, along with alcohol swabs, gloves, and gauze. A fluffy white towel came from the bathroom. — Lucian Bane

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. — Peter Ustinov

In 1966 Rolf Edberg wrote "This is mankind's home", "in the narrow borderland between the deathly heat beneath our feet and the coldness of space above us". He describes the fragility of our existence in poetic terms: "the atmospheric layer is so thin that it cannot be represented on any globe with even the finest brushstroke. At its thickest, it is only a few fractions of a millionth of the Earth's radius. This thin layer is what makes the difference between our planet and the sterile landscape of the moon." After reading that, one does feel the need to take better care of this fragile layer. — Margot Wallstrom

Political power without economic power is sterile. — Louis O. Kelso

There are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness. — Albert Camus

Long ago Mars was an oasis of running water.Today the Martiansurfaceis a sterile,barren desert. Here on Earth, who knows what climactic knobs we unwittingly turn,which might one day render Earth as dry and lifeless as Mars. (From the cover of Old Poison by Joan Francis) — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ... we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. — Gregory Bateson

I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from. — Thomas Heatherwick

Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren't even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he'd left. Consumed with hatred, he looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible. — Anne Rice

Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance. — Winston S. Churchill

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks 'modern'; ergo, Japan is supremely modern. — Alex Kerr

I have of late
but
wherefore I know not
lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. — William Shakespeare

Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves. — Guy De Maupassant

Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled. — John Maynard Smith

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows! — Elizabeth Bibesco

It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. — Davide Longo

If we were making a record in Kentucky, there might be some more elements that recall a time, a place, or a relationship. Recording for the BBC you enter into this strange and wonderful, but kind of sterile, place with which you have no personal history, and that's the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London. — Will Oldham

Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life. — Adolf Hitler

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. — Aneurin Bevan

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent. — Maya Angelou

Space exploration promised us alien life, lucrative planetary mining, and fabulous lunar colonies. News flash, ladies and gents: Space is nearly empty. It's a sterile vacuum, filled mostly with the junk we put up there. — Graham Hawkes

When you're in the womb, you're in a sterile environment. When you enter the birth canal and are born, you're no longer in a sterile environment. Very quickly you have bacteria living on your skin, in your nose and throat. — Paul A. Offit

Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used. — Polykarp Kusch

As it happens, the higher the hygiene standards in a country, the higher that nation's incidence of allergies and autoimmune diseases. The more sterile a household is, the more its members will suffer from allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thirty years ago, about one person in ten had an allergy; today, that figure is one in three. — Giulia Enders

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted. — Eric Hoffer

The beauty of Molly's is that it is not, whether in the daytime or at night, the exclusive preserve of an age or income group. Unlike the sterile night scenes of pretentious San Francisco or New York, Molly's (and most other New Orleans bars) welcomes all ages, all colors, and all sexual persuasions, provided they are willing to surrender to the atmosphere. — Andrei Codrescu

Nothing he could do or say would bridge the gulf because there was nothing here to appeal to. There was nothing here but anger and fear, things in themselves entirely sterile. Divorced from the love of righteousness, the fear of God, they were nothing. There was nothing here. He had not realized before the ghastly evil of negation. He had seldom felt such evil. Nothingness was a bottomless pit... — Elizabeth Goudge

It has made me better loving you ... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can't think of anything better. It's just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it's a delightful story. — Henry James

Time ... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile. — Walter Bradford Cannon

When you sit on something trying to preserve it, you die and become sterile. — Garth Brooks

Now is the time to show maximum responsibility. It is not the time to pay off old scores nor for sterile partisan recriminations. It is time to re-establish a climate of calmness and mutual respect. — Giorgio Napolitano

He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there. — Douglas Adams

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere - mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self ... Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students. — John Holt

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them. — Oscar Wilde

Always.
In the twilight of the morphling, Peeta whispers the word and I go searching for him. It's a gauzy, violet-tinted world, with no hard edges, and many places to hide. I push through cloud banks, follow faint tracks, catch the scent of cinnamon, of dill. Once I feel his hand on my cheek and try to trap it, but it dissolves like mist through my fingers.
When I finally begin to surface into the sterile hospital room in 13, I remember. I was under the influence of sleep syrup. My heel had been injured after I'd climbed out on a branch over the electric fence and dropped back into 12. Peeta had put me to bed and I had asked him to stay with me as I was drifting off. He had whispered something I couldn't quite catch. But some part of my brain had trapped his single word of reply and let it swim up through my dreams to taunt me now. Always. — Suzanne Collins

There aren't any syringes." Red Sox came over and held a sterile pack out. When she tried to take it from him, he kept a grip on the thing. "I know you'll use this wisely."
"Wisely?" She snapped the syringe out of his hand. "No, I'm going to poke him in the eye with it. Because that's what they trained me to do in medical school. — J.R. Ward

Man's experience tells him that wherever there are signs of life, death in in the offing. The more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, until the supreme moment - the enchanted moment when something new is created - when death and life meet in an embrace of mad ecstasy. The rapture and terror of life are so profound because they are intoxicated with death. As often as life engenders itself anew, the wall which separates it from death is momentarily destroyed. Death comes to the old and the sick from the outside, bringing fear or comfort. They think of it because they feel that life is waning. But for the young the intimidation of death rises up out of the full maturity of each individual life and intoxicates them so that their ecstasy becomes infinite. Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning. — Walter F. Otto

People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly through annoying industrial noise. — Edward Frenkel

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols ... — Hermann Hesse

He's going to pack it with wet, sterile gauze instead," Verex explained. "It will heal slowly, from the inside out." The prince's voice was strong and sure. He was turning the grim words of the physician into something hopeful. "Really, that's the best way to avoid infection, because the wound can be cleaned out daily."
The physician gave him a sidelong look. "I'm not sure I need the commentary." But Kestrel did, and Verex knew that she did. — Marie Rutkoski

On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum. — Carl Sagan

Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile - there's no sound, there's no air. It's totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it's really hard to create emotion. — Thomas Bangalter

and thread, and even bandages, because he knew those at the clinic would not be sterile. The hospital was one of those communist-built structures of steel and glass, slapped up in the fifties, that could have been designed by a four-year-old. The workmanship was so shoddy that the cement abutments and window ledges were already crumbling. Probably not — Trevor Scott

But in America the sovereignty of the people is neither hidden nor sterile as with some other nations; mores recognize it, and the laws proclaim it; it spreads with freedom and attains unimpeded its ultimate consequences. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Rome is burning, Jesus says. Drop your fiddle, change your life and come to Me. Let go of the good days that never were - a regimented church you never attended, traditional virtues you never practiced, legalistic obedience you never honored, and a sterile orthodoxy you never accepted. The old era is done. The decisive inbreak of God has happened. — Brennan Manning

May walked slowly around the body, studying it. Putrefaction had been halted in its advance, but the corpse's skin had turned green and black, producing an acrid odour. He found it hard to imagine that this man had recently been walking around, eating in restaurants, watching TV. He was someone's lover, someone's son, but there was almost nothing human left. Without a head his trunk bore an unsettling similarity to something you would find in a meat locker. How would his loved ones feel if they could see him like this? 'Get anything else?' 'It's tricky because the usual decay process has been interrupted by the relatively sterile storage of the body. Usually, after two to three days you get staining on the abdomen. The discolouration spreads, veins grow dark, the skin blisters after a week, tissue starts softening and nails fall off at around the three-week stage, and finally the face becomes unrecognisable as the skin liquefies - — Christopher Fowler

The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense. — Julius Evola

Washington tends to be full of too many traps. I think reporters there do a lot of attending news briefings and news conferences expecting to get the real news out of those relatively sterile environments. But you've got to deal with the obscure people as well as the names. — Tom Brokaw

Despair is sometimes the great energizer of the mind, though sometimes its flowering may be sterile. — Taylor Caldwell

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. — Sinclair Lewis

Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile. — Elie Wiesel

Democracy is always the work of kings. Ashes, which in themselves are sterile, fertilize the land they are cast upon. — Walter Savage Landor

I always found it interesting how the church often has a tendency to try to make everything look better than it really is. No divorces are happening here. No alcoholism, domestic violence, or abortions. Just smiling faces and warm handshakes as you walk in the door. It like we're saying, if we can just create a sterile enough environment, then doggone it, our environment will be clean. But of course, God sees us all for who we really are, and He is privy to all of your angry words, gossiping tongues, and secret stashes. He knows who you really are, yet He loves you anyway. — Bill Johnson

If you cannot attract a woman, you are, by definition, sterile. — Erik Von Markovik

Tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in our
wills. If the balance of our lives had not one
scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the
blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us
to most preposterous conclusions: but we have
reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal
stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that
you call love to be a sect or scion. — William Shakespeare

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. — Sylvia Plath

There, alone in the sterile room, sitting on a pink vinyl chair that boasts many cracks in its once nice upholster, you wait. You think to yourself , who would have thought I would be ringing in the New Year by urinating into a cup to see if I have chlamydia? — Amanda Steele

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous. — Umberto Eco

No doubt, our love persisted, but in practice it served nothing; it was an inert mass within us, sterile as crime of a life sentence. It had declined on a patience that led nowhere, a dogged expectation. — Albert Camus

Yet the age was not so utterly destitute of virtues but that it produced some good examples.
[Lat., Non tamen adeo virtutum sterile seculum, ut non et bona exempla prodiderit.] — Tacitus

We need to boil water. We need clean towels," Ava announced, following too. "She ain't birthin' no baby! She's got a gunshot wound!" Indy shouted. "I know that!" Ava shouted back. "But we need a sterile environment. — Kristen Ashley

I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, nor risk and enthusiasm, nor barbaric, grotesque, or sublime heroism. He talks in proverbs and gives advice. He does not live, feel, desire, wait for anything. He levels down all the incongruities of life and then suffers the consequences. So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void. — Emil Cioran

Brains, like cabbages, are beautiful-but in a different way. Cabbage heads are dumb and sterile, whereas brains are personal, intelligent and vibrant. — Carl Pfeiffer

The program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week ... If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted. — J.M. Coetzee

Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. — Rachel Carson

'I really don't see what all the fuss is about, Sir Hugh,' said Kate with a polite smile. 'As a man of science you should know that urine is sterile. It's only when it's left to stand that it accumulates bacteria. So, if I were you, Sir Hugh, I'd eat my soup quickly.' — Kenneth Oppel

And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port. — Michel Foucault

I think people tuned in a lot to see Barbara when she first came here and they just didn't like the show they saw. I think it was dull. It was sterile. — Roone Arledge

No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait. — Albert Camus

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we're particularly receptive to signs. — Kate Bolick

Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before. — Edwidge Danticat

Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating. — Sufjan Stevens

Sterile." "Or they were very careful, and — Nora Roberts

I was 21 and had been going out with my boyfriend for two years when I found out I was pregnant - despite being told by doctors that I was sterile. Jamie's father and I hadn't discussed marriage, and to me, it wasn't something to be entered into just to stop gossip. — Joanna Lumley

Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism. — Roberto Bolano

Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practices into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique. — Peter Senge

The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts, acquired by rule, results in sterile inventory. To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of the superficial phase, a transitory mood. — Edward Weston

Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian
heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions — Frank O'Hara

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? — Charles Baudelaire

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. — Graham Greene

As to those in the World Trade Center ... Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break ... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it. — Ward Churchill

Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall. — Albert Camus

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die. — Albert Camus

Man-made fabrics? What provenance do they have? A squirt of gloop into a petri dish? Strands of plastic spun in sterile laboratories? They are but toxins made safe by men in white coats. — Fennel Hudson

The dilemma is this. In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects. — Henry Hazlitt

Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention. — Simone Weil

These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful. — Franz Kafka

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people. — Robert C. Martin

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

Traditional nursing facilities are sterile institutions rather than homes - which is why many Americans do not want to live in one or want this as their only option for themselves or their family members. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey