Unmeaning Quotes & Sayings

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. — Alexander Pope

Ethan chuckled. "It hasn't escaped my attention, Sentinel, that you cringe every time I mention our future." "I don't cringe. I only cringe when you pretend-propose." He had a penchant for going down on bended knee - and straightening a hem or helping me with a shoe. "Nobody finds that amusing." "I find it excessively amusing. You do realize, don't you, that the proposal won't always be fake? — Chloe Neill

You want to try and bring a character to life in an honest a way as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether he's a doctor, an actor, a car salesman or a captain of a starship. If you can bring truth and honesty to that character, then your audience will believe you. — Scott Bakula

I was reared in a pub - as a young fellow, serving in the pub I learnt far more there about human nature than I learnt in any university or school. I think it gave me a great insight into people. — Brian Cowen

At its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning. The soul is broken, but life lingers on. As the will fails, the mask of tragedy falls aside. What remains is only suffering. The last sorrow cannot be told. If the dead could speak we would not understand them. We are wise to hold to the semblance of tragedy; the truth unveiled would only blind us. — John N. Gray

Ever heard of knocking, asshole?" I spat, not bothering to look at him.
"Ever heard of locking the door, whore?"
Turning, I glared at him and slammed the door in his face, locking it.
Smirking, he yanked the door back open. "Oh I guess I forgot to mention that the lock is broken." - Christopher Mason & Mia Ryder — Sadie Grubor

Silence is better than unmeaning words. — Pythagoras

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. — Walter Pater

The perplexity of life arises from their being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call it's triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. — G.K. Chesterton

Most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall. — Matthew Arnold

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war. — E.L. Doctorow

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. — Bryce Courtenay

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two. — William Hazlitt

It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition ... This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible. — William Hazlitt

I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam. — G.K. Chesterton

There is nothing wrong in America that can't be fixed with what is right in America. — Bill Clinton

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats ... these are the facts. — Alexander Trocchi

I am impressed with the belief that our naval force ought not to cost more in proportion than the British. In some things they may have the advantage, but we will be found to have equally great in others. — John C. Calhoun

After i had escaped, the police had so persistently and brutally badgered my mother that she had had a heart attack. What they had done to Evelyn was beyond belief. I understood why Evelyn had reacted to my call the way she did. At one time, Evelyn's office telephone had ten intercepts on it. She and my mother had received phony notes in my handwriting. They had received telephone calls with my voice telling them to "come to the spot and bring some money." They had found electric eyes and all kinds of other devices in and around their houses. — Assata Shakur

A nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation; but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not only of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time. It is a vestment, which accommodates itself to the body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices - for man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right. — Edmund Burke

If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

That the crowning miracle of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth - for of flower or blossom such youth has none - the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post- Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it. — Charles Dickens

It is a great advantage for any man to be able to talk or hear, neither ignorantly nor absurdly, upon any subject; for I have known people, who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly; it has appeared by their inattentive and unmeaning faces. — Doug Stanhope

The Warrior Princess Submissive herself may be uncertain of her own submissive nature, so it is entirely understandable that the Dominant seeking to woo her might be somewhat tentative, himself. If the Dominant has even the tiniest iota of doubt about his own dominance or his D/s relationship skills, he is doomed. He will be eaten alive, and not in a good way. — Michael Makai

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Botswain, a dog. — George Gordon Byron

Too long I've owed you this apology
For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
You were afflicted with in those old days.
But it was of the essence of the trial
You shouldn't understand it at the time. — Robert Frost

We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality. — Rabindranath Tagore

In some ways. it began when I heard her singing. Her voice twinning, mixing with my own. Her voice was like a portrait of her soul; wild as a fire, sharp as shattered glass, sweet and clean as clover — Patrick Rothfuss

Tyrant will eat whatever the fuck is available. — Stephen R. Bissette

The man who does that which avails in reforms or other good works always has clubs thrown at him. The nobodies are passed over in Silence, or with good natured unmeaning compliments after they leave high places. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Champagne is never a mistake. — Liane Moriarty

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by. — H.G.Wells

These repeated insults were not to be endured by an imperious nobility. Such invitations became less cordial - less frequent - in time they ceased altogether. The widow of the unfortunate Count Berlifitzing was even heard to express a hope "that the Baron might be at home when he did not wish to be at home, since he disdained the company of his equals; and ride when he did not wish to ride, since he preferred the society of a horse." This to be sure was a very silly explosion of hereditary pique; and merely proved how singularly unmeaning our sayings are apt to become, when we desire to be unusually energetic. — Edgar Allan Poe

They say that Japan's rigorous building codes and regulations saved thousands of lives over there. Or, as Republicans here saw it, it 'fostered a socialist, anti-business environment that's worse than being dead.' — Bill Maher

If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too. — Frederick Corder

There's nothing a well-regulated child hates so much as regularity. I believe a really healthy boy would thoroughly enjoy Greek Grammar
if only he might stand on his head to learn it! — Lewis Carroll

Haldeman is the only man in America in this generation who let his hair grow for a courtroom appearance. — Mary McGrory