Thoughtless People Quotes & Sayings

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system. — Richard Mitchell

Over time events trickle out of the minds of forgetful, thoughtless people, and so, since they retain and conserve nothing, the empty space within them, that should be filled with good things, is filled instead with hopes, so that they neglect the present and look to the future, despite the fact that fortune may yet foil the future, whereas the present cannot be taken away. — Plutarch

Make excellent mistakes.
Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything
which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure. But that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people spectacular mistakes
huge, honking screwups! why? They're trying to do something big, but each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence.
Making mistakes seems risky. It is/ But it's more risky not to.
I'm not talking about random, stupid, thoughtless blunders, though. I'm talking about good mistakes.
Mistakes come from having high aspirations, from trying to do something nobody else has done. — Daniel H. Pink

What ought to be done is neglected, what ought not to be done is done; the desires of unruly, thoughtless people are always increasing. — Shawn Conners

Varian, please. I didn't mean what I said.'
'Of course you didn't,' he said snidely. 'No one ever does. People always speak without thought. But it's amazing how much damage thoughtless words can wreak, isn't it? — Kinley MacGregor

Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force. — Wislawa Szymborska

Daja doesn't exactly need to be tested on whether she's honorable or not."
"Doesn't she? Don't all of you? This is your first taste of the things which may come from your being powerful mages. People will offer you gold, status, even love. I want to know how you will react. If want to know if your teachers will release greedy, thoughtless monsters into the world. — Tamora Pierce

God goes with thoughtless people. — Robert Walser

The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done. — Mark Twain

He'd never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom tended to explode in your face. Just when he thought he'd found it he'd be suddenly involved in what he supposed other people - thoughtless, feckless people - would call an adventure. And he'd be forced to visit many strange lands and meet exotic and colourful people, although not for very long because usually he'd be running. He'd seen the creation of the universe, although not from a good seat, and had visited Hell and the afterlife. He'd been captured, imprisoned, rescued, lost and marooned. Sometimes it had all happened on the same day. — Terry Pratchett

So many kinds of people exist
hundreds of plans for profit and fame
hearts intent on glory
always trying to get rich
minds that never rest
rushing about like smoke
dependents gather around
one yell and a hundred heads nod
but less than seventy years from now
ice becomes water and roof tiles break
dead at last all cares cease
who will be their heir
drop a ball of mud in water
and behold the thoughtless mind — Han-shan

But as the word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way. Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one of his greatest assets. And it was born of his shyness: I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth. — Susan Cain

The economy is a thoughtless weather system- and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing — Kurt Vonnegut

You'll forget it all: the cruel power of your superiors, the thoughtless things you wish you'd never said, the stupidities, the unfinished work, the lack of consideration, the betrayals, the injustices, the indifference, those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, the endless waits, the things and people forever beyond your reach, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes - all those catastrophes - in just a few minutes you'll forget them all. The prospect comforts you. Patiently you wait. — Orhan Pamuk

Many times people ask me, "What is sin and what is virtue? And how to decide?" If you decide your decision will be wrong. If you choose you will be wrong. All choice is wrong. There is no way to decide. There is no need to decide what is sin and what is virtue. You only need a transparent mind, a clarity, a thoughtless mind, a no-mind, a mirror-like consciousness. In that consciousness WHATSOEVER HAPPENS is virtue. In that consciousness WHATSOEVER CANNOT HAPPEN is sin. — Rajneesh

Death is an inevitable cycle. But sickness before death is a symptom of resistance. Most people think they've got to get sick to die. But, you could be like the cat who chooses to get run over. Or, you could just lie down in your bed happily one night, so content and thoughtless, wanting nothing in this physical world; and just reemerge into Pure Positive Energy ... You can play it out any way you choose. — Esther Hicks

Every person whether Greek or Barbarian who is in training for wisdom, leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busybodies, and hold in contempt the places where they spend their time courts, councils, marketplaces, assemblies in short, every kind of meeting or reunion of thoughtless people ... People such as these, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long. — Pierre Hadot

One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flatout hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down. — M.R. Carey

it is one thing to explain that mortality in general is good for
people in general. It is something else again to try to tell someone who has lost a parent, a wife, or a child, that death is good. We
don't dare try to do that. It would be cruel and thoughtless. All we can say to someone at a time like that is that vulnerability to death is
one of the given conditions of life. We can't explain it any more than we can explain life itself. We can't control it, or sometimes even
postpone it. All we can do is try to rise beyond the question "Why did it happen?" and begin to ask the question "What do I do now that
it has happened? — Harold S. Kushner

No area of human life is so full of difficulties and heartaches as relationships. If you listed everything that upset you during the past week, I suspect most had to do with other people. People can be selfless and kind, but they can also be difficult, stubborn, ego-driven, thoughtless, mean, selfish, manipulative. But the problem is not just other people; it's also ourselves. — Billy Graham

Young people are thoughtless as a rule. — Homer

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved. — Jose Saramago

Of course China is an important new market for Tod's, and of course we need to succeed commercially. But I believe the way to do that is not to aim to deliver results in the short term by thoughtless expansion, but instead to explain to the Chinese people what our brand is really about. — Diego Della Valle

If you develop a detachment, through thoughtless awareness, God will take over, He will do your work. He will look after you. You should have faith in God that is the main thing which people don't understand what it means to have faith in God . That He is almighty, He does everything, He looks after everything, why should we worry? This is a very good way of life, is not to worry. — Nirmala Srivastava

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives. — Ben Affleck

The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise. — Wendell Berry

I think I have a big fear of things spiraling out of control. Out of control and dangerous and reckless and thoughtless scares me, because people get hurt. — Taylor Swift

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. — Charlotte Bronte

When a man plays with your heart it is for one of two reasons: He knows he can or he is undecided. — Shannon L. Alder

Thoughtless people are not unusual," observed the Scarecrow, "but I consider them more fortunate than those who have useless or wicked thoughts and do not try to curb them. Your oil can, friend Woodman, is filled with oil, but you only apply the oil to your joints, drop by drop, as you need it, and do not keep spilling it where it will do no good. Thoughts should be restrained in the same way as your oil, and only applied when necessary, and for a good purpose. If used carefully, thoughts are good things to have. — L. Frank Baum

[I am not] one of those thoughtless people who always uncritically accept what is new as necessarily better. — Pope Benedict XVI

Strange that one man's actions could touch so many other people, like a single, thoughtless breath of wind coming in an open window and blowing the playing cards every which way. — Karleen Koen

You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear. — Wendell Berry

So thoughtless awareness is the first beautiful state you have to achieve. That will give you peace and a witness state to enjoy the drama of life, to enjoy the different varieties of people, while you will be growing within yourself. — Nirmala Srivastava

With thoughtless and impatient hands We tangle up the plans The Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain He saith, "Be quiet, man, while I untie the knot." (Author unknown, in Jack M. Lyon et al., Best-Loved Poems of the LDS People [1996], 304) — Boyd K. Packer

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness, of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. — Sinclair Lewis

Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life. — Albert Schweitzer

Why do people feel guilty about TV? What is wrong with it? Just this: it shuts out all the wonderful things of which the mind is capable, leaving it drugged in a state of thoughtless stupor. — Hugh Nibley

Intrusive, thoughtless people! said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers. — Franz Kafka

People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to provide mink coats and diamonds for chattering, trivial, pale matrons, or genocidal opportunities for their unsexed, unloved, and, finally, despicable men - oh, pioneers!

There will be bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come: but the Western party is over, and the white man's sun has set. Period. — James Baldwin

Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing - to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

How to do meditation, many people ask. Don't do anything, just go into thoughtless awareness. Try to go to the thoughtless awareness. If you can get into that condition of thoughtless awareness, you've done your job because that's the point where you are with the truth, with the reality, with the joy, with everything that is so fundamental. — Nirmala Srivastava

It was an accident," he tells her, pointing out the obvious. "And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don't strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide." He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down. "Yeah, — M.R. Carey

At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Let them eat cake". — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking ... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. — Charles Baudelaire

Try to understand that there is more thoughtlessness than malice in the world. People are not out to offend you deliberately and maliciously. But all of us are thoughtless at times and do not readily realize that our words and actions are going to hurt people. — Lawrence G. Lovasik