Inanity Quotes

tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones ~ Richard Dawkins

A human beings' perception of reality emanates from viewing the universe, which is in a constant state of creation and destruction. The universe in which we move and work in outlasts human interests, hopes, expectations, and joy, and all forms of aversion, effort, pain, and humiliation. The world outlasts our dreams, love songs, bouts of inanity and anxiety, it outlast regrets, remorse, and shame. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

So, my dear…"
She faced him with thudding heart, the crystal piece clutched desperately in her hand, but she was hardly aware that she even held it.
"… You say I have let another man into my bed."
Erienne opened her mouth to speak. Her first impulse was to chatter some inanity that could magically take the edge from his callous half statement, half question. No great enlightenment dawned, however, and her dry, parched throat issued no sound of its own. She inspected the stopper closely, turning it slowly in her hand rather than meet the accusing stare.
From behind the mask, Lord Saxton observed his wife closely, well aware that the next moments would form the basis for the rest of his life or leave it an empty husk. After this, there could be no turning back.
"I think, my dear," his words made her start, "that whatever the cost, 'tis time you met the beast of Saxton Hall."
Erienne swallowed hard and clasped the stopper with whitened knuckles, as if to draw some bit of courage from the crystal piece.
As she watched, Lord Saxton doffed his coat, waistcoat, and stock, and she wondered if it was a trick of her imagination that he seemed somewhat lighter of frame. After their removal, he caught the heel of his right boot over the toe of the left and slowly drew the heavy, misshapen encumbrance from his foot. She frowned in open bemusement, unable to detect a flaw. He flexed the leg a moment before slipping off the other boot. His movements ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Descending the endless stairs for the sixth time, Mr. Lecky thought of all the goods those closed doors hid. Fantastic was the discouragement it caused him. Aware of such variety and great quantity, Mr. Lecky saw the danger of forgetting or never even imagining things which, discovered, he would want. Everlastingly midway between two equal errors, to which could he cleave? To have time for everything, one must make haste. To gain access to everything, one must be patient.

Moreover, hasty, or patient as Job, with what great labor would Mr. Lecky carry up on his back all he got! Making, as he was every moment, the climb back longer, giving, as he did with each step down, consent to toil more and more severe, he could anticipate vaguely and abhor another possibility. Curious and insubstantial as his fearing not to find what he could not think of, was his resentment of a perhaps coming time when he might, in revolt against the inanity of exertion, live meanly and miserably, with no object but somehow to make what was already at hand suffice for him. Against this insidious ill chance there exists no defense, since so often what today is detested will appear tomorrow - though surely still detestable - good and wise. ~ James Gould Cozzens

If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? ~ George Eliot

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Into The Eyes of Racism (A Sonnet)

I looked into the eyes of racism,
All I found was insecurity.
I looked into the eyes of prejudice,
All I found was pretend sanity.
I looked into the eyes of bigotry,
All I found was savage inanity.
I looked into the eyes of hate,
All I found was delusion of purity.
I looked into the eyes of disparity,
All I found was mindless conformity.
I looked into the eyes of apathy,
All I found was spineless vanity.
I looked a lot and observed plenty,
It's time to burn bright against brutality. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Alcohol. It sucks the life out of a face and replaces it with its own dumb shine of inanity. It's up to you. If you want to lose yourself, have a drink. ~ Kevin Brooks

We have imagined that a white hospital train with a white Diesel engine has taken you through many a tunnel to a mountainous country by the sea. You are getting well there. But you cannot write because your fingers are so very weak. Moonbeams cannot hold even a white pencil. The picture is pretty, but how long can it stay on the screen? We expect the next slide, but the magic-lantern man has none left. Shall we let the theme of a long separation expand till it breaks into tears? Shall we say (daintily handling the disinfected white symbols) that the train is Death and the nursing home Paradise? Or shall we leave the picture to fade by itself, to mingle with other fading impressions? But we want to write letters to you even if you cannot answer. Shall we suffer the slow wobbly scrawl (we can manage our name and two or three words of greeting) to work its conscientious and unnecessary way across a post card which will never be mailed? Are not these problems so hard to solve because my own mind is not made up yet in regard to your death? My intelligence does not accept the transformation of physical discontinuity into the permanent continuity of a nonphysical element escaping the obvious law, nor can it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and thought-behind-thought and sensation-behind-sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness. Unquote. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things. ~ H.G. Wells

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Aping urbanity,
Oozing with vanity,
Plump as a manatee,
Faking humanity,
Intellectual inanity,
Journalistic calamity,
Fox Noise insanity,
You're a profanity,
Hannity ~ John Cleese

it was one of the many petty weaknesses Montaigne cheerfully acknowledged, adding: If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off - though I don't know. ~ Sarah Bakewell

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought. ~ Richard Mitchell

Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The breathtaking inanity of the [school] Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. ~ John E. Jones III

I lent my ear to the patient's lips - so close that I could feel his fetid, warm breath on my skin. "Can you tell me where I can find Señora Jucinta Coronado?" I asked for the last time. I was afraid he'd bite me. Instead he emitted a violently loud fart. His companions burst out laughing and clapped with joy. I took a few steps back, but it was too late: the flatulent vapours had hit me. It was then that I noticed, close to me, an old man, all hunched up, with a prophet's beard, thin hair, and fiery eyes, who was leaning on a walking stick and gazing at the others with disdain.

"You're wasting your time, young man. Juanito only knows how to let off farts, and the others can only laugh and smell them. As you see, the social structure here isn't very different from that of the outside world. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base ~ Michel De Montaigne

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless. ~ Michel De Montaigne