Dull Minds Quotes

This is Red Barber speaking. Let me say hello to you all. ~ Red Barber

Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds. ~ Red Smith

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. ~ George Eliot

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Thus it happens that your true dull minds are generally preferred for public employ, and especially promoted to city honors; your keen intellects, like razors, being considered too sharp for common service. I ~ Washington Irving

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity. ~ John Nash

Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more. ~ Wilkie Collins

Consistency is the playground of dull minds. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The choice between a Labour government and a Tory one is sharpening minds. ~ Lucy Powell

I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds. ~ Octavia E. Butler

"It is against their own insoluble problem of being human that the dull and base in humanity are in revolt in anti-Semitism. Judaism, nevertheless, together with Hellenism and Christianity is an inalienable component of our Christian Western civilization, the eternal "call to Sinai" against which humanity again and again rebels." ~ Hermann Rauschning

Maps gave them control over their surroundings, for the first time ever. It showed how to get from one place to another. It sounds simple now, but a thousand years ago it would have been an incredible feat of imagination and imagery. All maps are drawn as though looking down. From a bird's point of view. From their god's point of view. Imagine being the first person to think of that. To be able to wrap their minds around a perspective they'd never seen. And then draw it. ~ Louise Penny

We hurry through our days, with our eyes and ears plugged into our devices, our minds far away, not noticing the physical or emotional impression we make on others.....

Popular culture stokes delight in humiliation and conflict. ~ Sarah L. Kaufman

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little ... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper ... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad. ~ Michael Wincott

Some of history's cleverest business minds understood the power of share platforms, from the aggressive titans who made fortunes building the nation's railroads, to Conrad Hilton, who created the first premier brand of international hotels. ~ Lisa Gansky

Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students. ~ James W. Loewen

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. ~ Abraham Lincoln

We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication of a great mind. ~ Joseph Addison

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. ~ Edith Wharton

We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light ~ Richard Wilbur

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

God wants us to seek Him more than anything else, even more than we seek answers to prayer. When we come to God in prayer, sometimes our hearts are so full of what we want that we leave God out. Our minds become consumed with the gift rather than the giver. ~ Charles Stanley

I have no idea how it got so big. I was just trying to find something to do while I was living in Boulder, Colorado, which isn't really a funny town. There are a lot of smart people there, but comedy isn't at the forefront of their minds. ~ George Meyer

We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden his who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of his country. Let it rise! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and the parting day linger and play on its summit! ~ Daniel Webster

Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom! ~ John Keats

Let dull critics feed upon the carcases of plays; give me the taste and the dressing. ~ Bill Vaughan

A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

Our lives go by in our own minds. The war is inside our heads and only we can return the peace. It is essential to remember that in one sense we are always right. If we say, we can, we can. If we say we cannot, that's how it is, we cannot. ~ Mabel Katz

A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot. ~ Mark Haddon

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some ~ Pema Chodron

Pride is yet again in the way of our mind's ability to accept that we may not be the most intelligent and advanced people in the universe or on Earth since it was formed along with the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. ~ Mario Stinger

Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope. ~ Tami Hoag

The minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them. So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind. ~ Seneca.

I realized that, instead of moving people closer to a salvation decision, an answer can push them further away. Rather than engaging their minds or urging them to consider an alternative perspective, an answer can give them ammunition for future attacks against the gospel. ~ Randy Newman

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings, small and flawed. It is only their spirits that are beautiful and strong. ~ Richard Paul Evans

When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us. ~ Sri Chinmoy

In Zen there is a sense of blending, of stepping out of your body and mind and gaining access to powers and abilities that are far beyond the minds of mortal men. ~ Frederick Lenz

When you're battling against the minds of the studios and the money that can go into promoting larger budget films, it's very hard for a very small-budget Australian film to get a look in. You can get critically acclaimed and go to various film festivals around the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean the majority of people are going to hear about it. ~ Hugo Weaving

Because this, as it turned out, was her destiny. Not to be the powerful sorceress her people had been waiting for, not to be the ruthless killer the assassins needed. Her destiny was to save one person at a time, change things one tiny step after another.
It still hurt, a tinge of loss. Her life wouldn't be grand, or dramatic, or momentous. There would be no great choices to make, no moments when everything would change. It would make a dull story if she was ever called upon to tell it.
It hurt, yes. But it was also something of a relief. ~ Leah Cypess

Truth between candid minds can never do harm. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There is a cold war on the go. America and Russia are competing for the hearts and minds of Indians, Iraquies, Nigerians; scholarships to universities are among the inducements they offer. ~ J.M. Coetzee

What turns ordinary people into overachievers is the way they use their minds when they are called on to perform. ~ John Eliot

Life is exciting because of uncertainty. Certainty make it very dull and boring. ~ Debasish Mridha

Leaving the world behind is the best experience most feeble minds fear to try. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I promise they are not dull, for I am not one inclined to sit through pages of nonsense and bloated speech, though perhaps you enjoy works and authors who think very highly of themselves. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I don't see myself in the role of a great dissenter and I would much rather carry another mind even if it entails certain compromises," RBG said at a roundtable on judging in 1985. "Of course there is a question of bedrock principle where I won't compromise," she added, but she had "learned a lot about other minds paying attention to people's personalities in this job. ~ Irin Carmon

So I dream nightly of an embarcation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea--
one trip a lifetime's loss or gain :

as Europe is my own imagination
--many shall see her,
many shall not--
though it's only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.

And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument . . .

And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in gray barren dunes under
the world's waste of light
toward ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in . . . ~ Allen Ginsberg

We're just trying to find happiness in the bodies and minds we were given, like everyone else. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of 'God' which is metaphorical - for example, a theist who believes in 'God' as a principle of conscience or morality. This 'God' exists in a person's mind and it is not something which atheists will dispute. Atheists agree that gods exist as ideas in people's minds; the disagreement lies over whether any gods actually exist independently of human beliefs. Those are the gods which atheists disbelieve in or deny.

The second type of theism involves gods that exist as physical objects: stones, trees, rivers, or even the universe itself. Believers treat these objects are their gods, but do atheists reject their existence? Of course not - but how do they then remain atheists? The point of disagreement here is whether the label 'god' communicates any information beyond the more common label of 'stone,' 'tree,' or 'universe.' If not, then as far as atheists are concerned, those objects don't merit the extra label 'god' and they remain atheists. ~ Austin Cline

Temples have their images; and we see what influence they have always had over a great part of mankind. But, in truth, the ideas and images in men's minds are the invisible powers that constantly govern them; and to these they all pay universally a ready submission. ~ Jonathan Edwards

Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning. ~ Paolo Giordano

Willingness to show we are interested in our children's needs takes the burden and worries off their minds. It shows compassion on our end, and it builds trust on their end. ~ Charlena E. Jackson