Unfounded Quotes & Sayings

No one can bar me from joyfully proceeding on what the great masters have left us; after all, to rediscover everything again, should be understood to be unfounded. But one should however proceed on merit, and not simply repeat wat was. All genius, sincere, deserves his place, even though maybe later in life. — Felix Mendelssohn

Unfounded hate only multiplies quarrels. — Nachman Of Breslov

So often, children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes, yet we adults have them all the time! We think if we don't nip it in the bud, it will escalate and we will lose control. Let go of that unfounded fear and give your child permission to be human. We all have days like that. None of us are perfect, and we must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves. All of the punishments you could throw at them will not stamp out their humanity, for to err is human, and we all do it sometimes. — Rebecca Eanes

She had talked of this at length with Kadambari - Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they'd never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection? — Amitav Ghosh

The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant. — Friedrich Schleiermacher

Contrary to your unfounded and silly assumptions, I do not have a panty fetish and I do not sleep with them over my face at night. I do, however, have a new fetish for your pussy, and if you're interested in letting me sleep with that over my face at night, feel free to let me know. — Whitney Gracia Williams

Within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism. — Daniel M. Gilbert

not if Shannon is over her illness. Come, Dytyna. We discuss your performance now." "When will we know if I'll be competing?" "We will not know until Monday when we check in at the Olympic arena. Coach Taylor will know then." "I'm going back to the hotel to call your father, Kerri. We plan on meeting for lunch then will head on over to the hockey arena. Two kids in the Olympics! Whoa. I'll see you later." She leaned down and gave Kerri a hug before she kissed her forehead. "Stay out of trouble." "I can hardly get into any trouble in the Olympic village, Mom." At almost seventeen, Kerri was still able to feel embarrassed at receiving her mother's counsel, and she thought that her mother's advice was unfounded. The village was closed off, after all, from the rest of Turin and from the fray of the crowds that converged upon the venues. She watched her mother walk away before she stood up and adjusted the strap — Eleanor Webb

Don't trust your fears. They're unfounded. — Josh Langley

What can be more astounding than the unfounded doubts and fears of God's favoured people? — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Unfounded fears about your competence and abilities can cripple your unique talents and gifts, which are waiting to be released. — Dan Miller

After all, what does the stock market sell us if not the unfounded hope of a rosy future? — Haruki Murakami

I'm going to make the wildly unfounded assumption that Satara's dead by your hand and not Tory's. Now, stay with me on this, Cajun. My father slit my throat and murdered my wife because he thought I'd betrayed him by getting married. Before that, he loved me more than his life and I was his last surviving child. His second in command. Now what do you think he's going to do to you once he sees her body? I can assure you, it won't be a fun-filled trip to Chuck E. Cheese. (Urian) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise. — Thomas Jefferson

The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life - a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter. — Rene Guenon

If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system? — Yuval Noah Harari

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry — Eric S. Raymond

Most of us make assumptions about how someone will relate to us, and they are often unfounded. — Michele Jennae

Anyone who still feels today that he has to lead a double life because he's gay is driven by a fear that I think is unfounded. — Jens Spahn

I'm very curious to meet a guy who makes you completely forsake the scientific method in favor of unfounded supposition and speculation."
"It's called intuition! — Rosemary Clement-Moore

I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighboring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded air of superiority. — Horace Walpole

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. — Aldous Huxley

The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. — John Stuart Mill

Laboring types surrounded me with bad teeth, parrot voices, and unfounded optimism. — David Mitchell

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. — John Holt

Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems. — Paul Karl Feyerabend

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others. — Thomas Paine

I have an unfounded belief that there is a conspiracy out there creating unsupportable theories. — Ted Agon

Seems as unfounded ... to say there isn't a God as to say there is. — James Agee

The greatest danger, of course, was to believe that I was equal to them, because assurance can morph into arrogance that Death loves to prove unfounded. — Dean Koontz

Always have the guts to tell people the things they must hear. Because your words, no matter how difficult to say, might be the gift to their freedom. Maybe, your unfounded fears were never theirs. Because truth is how people move on. — Shannon L. Alder

The more you engage with the outside world, the more you'll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You'll see that they're unfounded. You'll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They've already forgotten what happened. They don't think about it. There will have been five more sensations since your incident. — Sophie Kinsella

There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another. — Vladimir S. Soloviev

Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating - soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. — William T. Vollmann

Symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everyone around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him. — Joseph Heller

We want to believe something very similar about racism and accusations of racism. If we can prove that a particular allegation of racism is unfounded or untrue, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief and try to move on. That is part of racism's power. It tricks us into thinking that we can wish it away with a string of logical premises and conclusions, with a singular decree of guilt or innocence. We fantasize about isolating this thing and determining its measurable impact once and for all, especially now that blatant forms of racism have been so thoroughly demonized in mainstream society. — John L. Jackson Jr.

Reports of a hurricane are unfounded. — Michael Fish

Gossip is unfounded bullshit. Opinions are ours by rights of the Constitution. — Carolyn Brown

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion. — Leo Tolstoy

The hypothesis of the supernatural and/or a supreme being is vague, unfounded, and inapplicable in any practical fashion — PZ Myers

Why did the best answers to unfounded criticism always come to a person while stewing about the situation afterward? — Laura Lee Guhrke

When we suffer prolonged anxiety, we have a tendency to become self-obsessed...You believe the whole world is thinking about you constantly. You believe the world is judging you and talking about you...The more you engage with the outside world, the more you'll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You'll see that they're unfounded. You'll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They've already forgotten what happened. They don't think about it. — Sophie Kinsella

One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. It should be enough, perhaps, to point to the long Christian philosophical tradition, with all its variety, creativity, and sophistication, and to the long and honorable tradition of Christianity's critical examination and reexamination of its own historical, spiritual, and metaphysical claims. But more important in some ways, it seems to me, is to stress how great an element of faith is present in the operations of even the most disinterested rationality. — David Bentley Hart

The soldier is convinced that a certain indefinitely extendable time period is accorded him before he is killed, the burglar before he is caught, men in general, before they must die. That is the amulet which preserves individuals - and sometimes populations - not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in some cases allows them to brave it without being brave. Such a confidence, just as unfounded, supports the lover who counts on a reconciliation, a letter. — Marcel Proust

This was mere unfounded prejudice
that seems obvious to me
because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant" could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time. — Italo Calvino

What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible. — Greg Sestero

There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred in the cause of supporting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as here. — Helen Thompson Woolley

Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility. — Zoe Heller

Just remember: If you make unfounded assumptions before choosing a path, you're blindly sauntering along. — Auliq Ice

The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights. — Thomas Jefferson

Most fears are exaggerated. As you go through life, your brain acquires expectations based on your experiences, particularly negative ones. When situations occur that are even remotely similar, your brain automatically applies its expectations to them; if it expects pain or loss, or even just the threat of these, it pulses fear signals. But because of the negativity bias, many expectations of pain or loss are overstated or completely unfounded. — Rick Hanson

I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943) — Wilhelm Reich

You're not by any chance writing out a new order form, are you?" said Mrs. Weasley shrewdly. "You wouldn't be thinking of restarting Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, by any chance?" "Now, Mum," said Fred, looking up at her, a pained look on his face. "If the Hogwarts Express crashed tomorrow, and George and I died, how would you feel to know that the last thing we ever heard from you was an unfounded accusation? — J.K. Rowling

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Subject: Re: Wet Panty Fetish I did realize that you slipped your thong into my pocket this morning. I've noticed that you've done this all week. Contrary to your unfounded and silly assumptions, I do not have a panty fetish and I do not sleep with them over my face at night. I do, however, have a new fetish for your pussy, and if you're interested in letting me sleep with THAT over my face at night, feel free to let me know. Andrew — Whitney Gracia Williams

The feeling that one must be an authority in a subject to say anything about it is unfounded. We are all laymen outside the field of our own specialty, — Morris Kline

The source of so much of my anxiety in life and the tensions in my relationship is my anxiety about my kid. It's all very abstract and unfounded and ungrounded. — Lisa Cholodenko

In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers , is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power. — Peter Drucker

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are. — John Eliot

Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller. — Laila Lalami

If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny. — Tim Ferriss

Mother Earth taught me that my anger
toward nature was unfounded.
And she therefore invited me to open my heart to this
possibility: so too may be my anger toward man. — Anasizi Foundation Good Buffalo Eagle

Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of "the Enlightenment." Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition - or impermeable partition - between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. — David Bentley Hart

The rumor that the state of my health will necessitate my resignation is entirely unfounded. — Frederick William Borden

People who read mainly the Grounding and the Critique often criticize Kant for having his head in the clouds and for not being convincingly capable of dealing with concrete cases. A reading of the Metaphysics of Morals will show anyone how unfounded such criticisms are. — Immanuel Kant

When a "runner" runs, they run. But in time the "runner" finds themselves in a no-brain situation. They are faced with the choice of living in pain from the separation from the twin soul, or returning and facing that deep love, working through their fears (often unfounded) of possible rejection and reaching their own personal Eden. — Chimnese Davids

If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, according to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled good, or order be relatively replete with exquisite and subtile evil. To neither of these conclusions, which are equally presumptuous and unfounded, will it become the philosopher to assent. Order and disorder are expressions denoting our perceptions of what is injurious or beneficial to ourselves, or to the beings in whose welfare we are compelled to sympathize by the similarity of their conformation to our own. — Christopher Hitchens

To overcome negative emotions, consulting intuition is always useful. How can it guide you. During nervous periods, it offers a more centered alternative to agitation. Intuition is a neutral from of information that allows you to soberly gauge the validity of your worries. If you tune in and find out they're unfounded, you'll be relieved. If they are founded, you can develop a strategy to deal with them. — Judith Orloff

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime. — John Carter

The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it's a valid thing. It's a valid forum and I'm not going say that they aren't valid feelings. But it's sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it's sad that it's used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity ... — Chris Gethard

Rather to my surprise, I found myself genuinely indignant at the suggestion that murder was to be reintroduced as a means of political advancement for the first time since the Tudors, and even more indignant that the legal and political establishments in all their forms - which included, at that stage, the police - were going to cover up the whole episode. In the event, it turned out that my anxieties were unfounded, as Thorpe was totally innocent of all charges brought against him. — Auberon Waugh

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it. Strange — John Stuart Mill

To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded. — Rachel Cusk

Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope — Yiyun Li

He insists that I need nothing more than to let myself be carried away- and that even my greatest fears are unfounded. — Paulo Coelho

My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive. — Clarence Thomas

There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment. — Nicolaus Copernicus

With no evidence for an afterlife, we should recognize the true value of our current lives as our one and only shot at happiness. Wasting it on unfounded claims and ancient myths is an absolute tragedy. — Armin Navabi

It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made. — Edith Wharton

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it. — Gus Van Sant

Whenever women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam. It is an unfounded argument. It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants. — Shirin Ebadi

If you summarily rule out any single sensation and do not make a distinction between the element of belief that is superimposed on a percept that awaits verification and what is actually present in sensation or in the feelings or some percept of the mind itself, you will cast doubt on all other sensations by your unfounded interpretation and consequently abandon all the criteria of truth. On the other hand, in cases of interpreted data, if you accept as true those that need verification as well as those that do not, you will still be in error, since the whole question at issue in every judgment of what is true or not true will be left intact. — Epicurus

It is an act of homophobia to believe that people in the LGBT community are either too sinful to respond to God's call on their life, or to believe that people in the LGBT community have a fixed nature that will never, according to the blustering, unfounded, and uncharitable declarations of secular psychology, change by the power of God's command. What does God change? Our heart. That is where it all starts. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

It is not always necessary to search for the cause behind everything, because every cause is unfounded. A cause only looks like a cause from a certain viewpoint. — Laszlo Krasznahorkai

P. G. Wodehouse ... used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded ... — Stephen Fry

Einstein's theory, experimentally corroborated for the last hundred years, regardless of how outlandish and opposed to our prejudices (disguised as they are with the 'common sense' costume), is rational, consistent, and intelligible to the layperson - if s/he has the audacity of accepting the unfounded nature of those prejudices. — Felix Alba-Juez

At one level the story of the second fall of Zimbabwe can be read as tragic yet a courageous one: a simple but soaring binary about unfounded courage in the face of immeasurable oppression. But at another level, it is a window into a much more complex, perhaps even darker and sadder, narrative about contemporary slaveship and the terrible collision of aspiration and frustration and the need to survive that has been unleashed upon the people of Zimbabwe. Exploitation and oppression are not matters of race. — Thabo Katlholo

It was another of Mma Makutsi's odd statements - utterly unfounded in fact, Mma Ramotswe suspected, but not a point that she wished to argue. As far as she was concerned, if a chair was empty, then anybody should be welcome to sit in it. We should share our chairs, she felt. Maybe that was the real problem with the modern world - not enough of us were prepared to share our chairs. — Alexander McCall Smith

Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed too high and collected too rigidly. — Henry Knox

To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts. — Pierre-Paul Grasse