Vacuous Quotes & Sayings

Even under more ingratiating conditions than rocket travel, this new conquest has already disclosed drawbacks quite as remarkable as its advantages. On a transcontinental flight by a jet plane approaching super-sonic speed, the actual trip is so cramped, so dull, so vacuous, that the only attraction the air lines dare to offer are those vulgar experiences one can have by walking to the nearest cabaret, restaurant, or cinema: liquor, food, motion pictures, luscious stewardesses. Only a lurking sense of fear and the possibility of a grisly death help restore the sense of reality. — Lewis Mumford

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act. — Steven Pinker

The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech. — Michael Shermer

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.
Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies. — Jane Jacobs

Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform. — Cyril Connolly

The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world
in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational. — David F. Wells

It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects? — Richard Dawkins

Something simple-minded and morally vacuous? A hamster, perhaps? Maybe Veronica?"
"Excuse me!" Veronica griped form the back table.
"Those are gerbils, Mr. Charbonnet, not hamsters. And I'd thank you to minimise the insulting commentary."
"My apologies, sir." Alec nodded. "The gerbil is a noble beast. I shouldn't have compared it to Veronica. — Cecily White

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. — Cormac McCarthy

Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve. — Noam Chomsky

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.' — Damian Lewis

I really enjoy the fun of putting something out and people liking it or hating it or talking about it, but vacuous attention, it feels disgusting. It's like a hangover. — FKA Twigs

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant. — David F. Wells

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [ ... ]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. — David Craig

Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception. — Thomas Szasz

We live in a vacuous world, yet we do so with a feeling of urgency. — Astrid Berges-Frisbey

Maybe our young people are not as vacuous as we would like to lead ourselves to believe - that all they're interested in is hairdos and looking at other beautiful people. Maybe they're interested in learning something. — David James Elliott

But desire must also be cultivated; the beautiful does not always immediately commend itself to every taste; Christ's beauty, like that of Isaiah's suffering servant, is not expressed in vacuous comeliness or shadowless glamor, but calls for a love that is charitable, that is not dismayed by distance or mystery, and that can repent of its failure to see; this is to acquire what Augustine calls a taste for the beauty of God (Soliloquia 1.3-14). Once this taste is learned, divine beauty, as Gregory of Nyssa says, inflames desire, drawing one on into an endless epektasis, a stretching out toward an ever greater embrace of divine glory. And, — David Bentley Hart

I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one's response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves. — David Bentley Hart

Again, the "distance" between being and nonbeing is qualitatively infinite, and so it is immaterial here how small, simple, vacuous, or impalpably indeterminate a physical state or event is: it is still infinitely removed from non-being and infinitely incapable of having created itself out of nothing. — David Bentley Hart

Never had I been so conscious of the earth of the toughness and fragility and flowing life of it.
I realised for the first time that the stones were not dead, nor the dust devoid of life, nor the waters vacuous.
Our earth lived.
It lived and breathed and sang and flowed and ached, in ever tiny part.
And it's singing called to me - whispered, hummed, through the skin of my feet, through my whole self, until with all my being I was attuned to it. — Sherryl Jordan

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health. — Rodney A. Smolla

Accord dissolves but blame is impossible to assign, leading to malaise, confusion and a vacuous resentment. — Steven Erikson

How she longed for the uninhibitedness of kids her age, their vacuous sense of immortality. — Paolo Giordano

It goes without saying that one generally should not try to dissolve disparate creeds into one another, much less into some vague, syncretistic, doctrinally vacuous 'spirituality. — David Bentley Hart

I just find that you can become a very boring person living in L.A. I tell you, living there on a day-to-day basis is vacuous: terribly fake. — Pierce Brosnan

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated. — Roger Scruton

Once the principals in their party are seated, with those lower on the totem pole left to grumble and move on to find another table, our once-cozy booth transforms into a damp fusion of vacuous wretchedness, with the three women all complaining alternately about their wet hair/clothes and their respective distance from Talon, while the man himself is trying to maneuver his Paul Bunyan frame way too close to me. — Elle Lothlorien

One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films. — Woody Allen

"The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger. — Kenny Smith

(One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. — Glen Duncan

But there's nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present.
They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there's no competition. I've stopped fighting them. They're crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry - I see you already have.
Damn ghosts. — Sara Gruen

Hate is strewn like confetti by the fear-fueled, specious, tiny- dicked (or un-tender) vacuous dictators, of any gender, whom never knew true love, only sadism. They ALL need some good pharma. — Elizabeth Lucye Robillard

Rest in inaction, and the world will be reformed of itself; Forget your body and spit forth intelligence. Ignore all differences and become one with the Infinite. Release your mind, and free your spirit. Be vacuous, be devoid of soul. Thus will things grow and prosper and return to their Rust and Rest. Returning to their Root. Returning to their Root without their knowing it, the result will be a formless whole which will never be cut up, to know it is to cut it up. (Great Nebulous says to General Clouds) — Zhuangzi

When they thought of me, they always remembered the vacuous Billie Dawn. It was as simple as that. — Judy Holliday

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.
It is a vacuous answer ... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.
Religion utterly failed to provide an explanation of the biosphere other than that 'God made it all'. Then Darwin thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought ... arrived at an answer.
I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all. — Peter Atkins

She went through a standard set of questions, the ones that are always the same. They're designed for two important purposes: first, so that when the detectives eventually get involved they can be certain that the correct questions, and the same ones, have been asked. The second vital purpose is to make sure that the first-responder cops, usually in a patrol car, don't come across as vacuous idiots. This is important, because most detectives seem to think that the beat cops actually are vacuous idiots. And quite honestly, sometimes they are - but then, the same can be said of the detectives, as my recent experience had so thoroughly proved. — Jeff Lindsay

Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world. — Fernando Pessoa

Lack of panache, I silently corrected him. "I don't know how you'd describe it, but there's earnestness about you, Mona. There's nothing frivolous about you." They call it boring. Insipid. Vacuous. Dry. Dull. Plain. Vanilla minus the vanilla flavor. But thanks for trying to make it sound like an attribute. Now I feel as though I should schedule an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon for both a facelift and a personality implant. — Jennifer Coburn

Again and again parents describe ... the trancelike nature of their children's television watching. The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth. The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look. — Marie Winn

In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience. — Rollo May

He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit bit impedient cigarette; the woman's eyes slowly closing in as in a film scene.. — Vladimir Nabokov

Still, when your truthful eyes,
your keen, attentive stare,
endow the vacuous slut
with royalty, when you match
her soul to her shimmering hair,
what can she do but rise
to your imagined throne?
And what can I, but see
beyond the world that is,
when, faithful, you insist
I have the golden key
and learn from you once more
the terror and the bliss,
the world as it might be? — Lisel Mueller

First of all you must understand that practising martial arts means studying a certain oriental philosophy of life, otherwise it's merely a vacuous sport devoid of any significance. — William C. Brown

Everyone knows that in real life, fictionally handsome men are vacuous vessels of Satan. — Penny Reid

We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that. — Thom Yorke

Romney and Democratic rival President Obama have led their partisan backers down a trail of lies, negativity and vacuous policies that seem certain to guarantee an angry electorate four more years of gridlock. — Ron Fournier

The dark leaden mask hides the devil with a soul of deceit, with his warm syrupy vacuous words coercing, enticing and grasping with exposed sharpened claws, scratching slow at his prey's surface with bullet pointed precision, inserting the slow hot mercurial poison of falsification of love straight into the flowing veins of the succumbing vulnerable heart. The prey's wanton escape futile, isolated & drawn into the hot fiery abyss. — Alison Blackmore

You watch stuff like 'The Real Housewives' and you start to think, 'We're all so vacuous! Is there any nobility to any of these people?' But then you look out into the world, and there are people who are doing cool stuff with their lives. — Mike White

Musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing the guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed are so transparently vacuous. — John Maus

There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue. — Anton Chekhov

The only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality o the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops — Jeff Lindsay

But it does not require much effort to see that the dialogue in liberal democracy is of a peculiar kind because its aim is to maintain the domination of the mainstream and not to undermine it. A deliberation is believed to make sense only if the mainstream orthodoxy is sure to win politically. Today's 'dialogue' politics are a pure form of the right-is-might politics, cleverly concealed by the ostentatiously vacuous rhetoric of all-inclusiveness. — Ryszard Legutko

Too many Muslims are involved in marriages that devolve into an empty observation of duties and an equally vacuous demand for the fulfillment of rights. — Zaid Shakir

I used to routinely turn down things that might compound the impression that I was some kind of vacuous blonde. But now, when I look back, I think I should have done them because I would be very rich - being taken seriously isn't all it's cracked up to be. — Mariella Frostrup

Such a divine profession is art! When everything else looks so stale and disgustingly vacuous, so enthralls even the littlest real effort of art our innermost and carries us from town, from country, from earth, as that it must be truely a blessing of the Gods. — Felix Mendelssohn

You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent ... - Yossarian — Joseph Heller

When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation. — Lord Chesterfield

Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head. — Peter Ustinov

It's one thing for a person to live his life as a vacuous shell without fully comprehending the extent of his transgressions, but I was guilty of the greater sin; I knew what was right, and I chose to reject it. — Tarek Saab

Well," the voice said, seemingly oblivious, "one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?" "Uh-huh, — Iain M. Banks

The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word. — John Green

Roilant caught himself, with exasperation, slipping into vacuous philosophy, a sure sign his opinion of life was at its very lowest. — Tanith Lee

All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghost of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there's no competition. I've stopped fighting them. They're crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry- I see you already have. Damn ghost. — Sara Gruen

One knows one's madness, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy. — Glen Duncan