Mindless Quotes

Is it not strange how humans will resort to the most inhumane of actions as the first plausible solution? Why are we such a feral bloodthirsty species when we are supposedly the enlightened ones? Are we guardians ... or just mindless butchers? ~ Dimitri Zaik

Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal. ~ Ian Morgan Cron

Foolish people inflict pain upon them self which is worse than what an enemy can bring upon. ~ Thiruvalluvar

Midnighter: I told you this wasn't going to end well...
Bendix: ...but...I did what you...what the Authority...never could...fixed earth... Midnighter: No. You just gave them peace through corporate control and ignorance... through mindless consumerism.
Bendix: Bulls*%t! The air is clean...no wars...people are happier...you can't deny...it's a finer world. ~ Ed Brubaker

My motions were mindless, each one some feeble attempt to keep from thinking about what had happened, ~ Sarah J. Maas

Dancing through life Swaying and sweeping And always keeping cool Life is faught less When you're thoughtless Those who don't try Never look foolish Dancing through life Mindless and careless Make sure you're where less Trouble is rife Woes are fleeting Blows are glancing When you're dancing Through life ... ~ Stephen Schwartz

Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. ~ Paul Davies

Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity. ~ Roger Zelazny

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect. ~ Maria Konnikova

I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I'm in favor of the music industry ... standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, ... we're not about a coherent set of national ideals, we're not about wisdom. We're about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else ... . We're about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. ... We're about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Ants - the pious insect, Randolph called them: they fill me with oh so much admiration and ah oh so much gloom: such puritan spirit in their mindless march of Godly industry, but can so anti-individual a government admit the poetry of what is past understanding? Certainly the man who refused to carry his crumb would find assassins on his trail, and doom in every smile. As for me, I prefer the solitary mole: he is no rose dependent upon thorn and root, nor ant whose time of being is organized by the analterable herd: sightless, he goes his separate way, knowing truth and freedom are attitudes of the spirit. ~ Truman Capote

Not a mindless relinquishing of physical dignity in exchange for favors or pleasure, but an intentional vulnerability far more dangerous and lasting. ~ Grace Burrowes

Money will brainwash you and leave your ass mindless. ~ Eminem

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male "culture," in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our "society" are raving sex maniacs. ~ Valerie Solanas

Why couldn't she have given him a sultry laugh as she'd seen women do in movies instead of giggling like some enchanted, mindless school girl? ~ Dawn M. Turner

Her lips parted slightly in a smile so female it took his breath away, and her deep blue eyes beckoned him, dared him. Once again her hips lifted. "What are you waiting for?" she breathed.
"For you," he answered, and even as he lost himself in the mindless ecstasy of making love to her, the truth of that remained. He'd waited for her forever. ~ Linda Howard

Mag Rogan and I stood on the edge of a cliff. Below us, the ground plunged so far down that it was as if the planet itself had ended at our feet. The wind tugged at my hair. He was wearing those dark pants again and nothing else. The hard muscle corded his torso, fueled by an overpowering, almost savage strength. Not the mindless brutality of a common thug or the cruel power of an animal, but an intelligent, stubborn, human strength. It was everywhere: in the set of his broad shoulders, in the turn of his head on a muscular neck, in the tilt of his square jaw. He turned to me and his whole body tightened, the muscles flexing and hardening, his hands ready to grip and crush, his eyes alert, missing nothing, and blazing with the brilliant electric blue of magic. I could picture him getting his sword and walking alone onto the drawbridge to defend his castle against a horde of invaders with that exact look on his face.
He was terrifying, and I wanted to run my hands down that chest and feel the hard ridges of his abs. I was some special kind of idiot.
Magic roiled about him, ferocious and alive, a pet monster with vicious teeth. He moved toward me, bringing it with him. "Tell me about Adam Pierce."
I reached over and put my hand on his chest. His skin was burning hot. The muscle tensed under my fingers. An eager electric shiver ran through me. I wanted to lean against that chest and kiss the underside of that jaw, tasting his sweat on my tongue. I wanted him to l ~ Ilona Andrews

It condemned The Wave as a dangerous and mindless movement that suppressed freedom of speech and thought and ran against everything the country was founded on. ~ Todd Strasser

It is a plague of unprecedented proportions. Anyone, who is unfortunate enough to become infected by its deadly parasites, is transformed into a mindless carrier with an inane desire to feed and spread the virus to other potential hosts. Even death is no escape. ~ Jason Medina

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. ~ Dan Simmons

An application of judicial power that does not rest on facts is worse than mindless, it is inherently dangerous. If its deployment does not rest on facts - cold, hard, solid facts, established either by admissions or by trials - it serves no lawful or moral purpose and is simply an engine of oppression. ~ Jed S. Rakoff

Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music. ~ Ross David Burke

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation. ~ Anthony Esolen

I was thrown into a state of sheer, mindless panic. "It's my mother!" I whispered fiercely,
as if Bones hadn't figured that out. "Holy shit, you have to hide!"
I literally shoved him toward the bedroom, yelling, "I - I'll be right there, I'm not
dressed!"
He went, but with none of my hysteria. "Kitten, you still haven't told her? Blimey, what
are you waiting for?"
The Second Coming of Christ!" I snapped. "And not a moment sooner! Here, in the
closet! ~ Jeaniene Frost

The conversation limped along this line of thought much like a zombie: lifeless and mindless and making a jelly of whatever healthy brains were within its reach. ~ Steve Hockensmith

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it. ~ Stephen King

Maybe they're not as mindless as we thought, or so dedicated to turning every last human into one of them. Like Kalyn says, they were just bored, waiting for something better to happen.
And that better thing is us. ~ Scott Westerfeld

In the scale of life there is a gradual decline in physical variability, as the organism has gathered into itself resources for meeting the exigencies of changing external conditions; and that while in the mindless and motionless plant these resources are at a minimum, their maximum is reached in the mind of man, which, at length, rises to a level with the total order and powers of nature, and in its scientific comprehension of nature is a summary, an epitome of the world. ~ Chauncey Wright

I spy something green," Sally announced.
"Trees," Crina hollered, while Mariana called out, "Grass,"
"Nope," Sally answered.
"What's the point of this game again?" Crina asked.
"Mindless entertainment," Jen announced. "It's what Americans are known for. ~ Quinn Loftis

People don't just want a mindless flick with a superstar; they want to connect more deeply. ~ Vikas Swarup

Berkouwer is to be commended for his careful avoidance of "the polarities of a mindless fideism and a faithless rationalism. ~ Bruce A. Demarest

Mindless conformity is what turns us from humans into sheep. ~ Johnny B. Truant

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts.
In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives. ~ Laini Taylor

The suffering or the bad memories are as important as the good memories, and the good experiences. If you sort of, can imagine life as being 99% of the time quite linear, and most of the time you're in a state of neither happiness nor sadness. And then that 1% of the time you experience moments of very crystalised happiness, or crystalised sadness, or loneliness or depression. And I believe all of those moments are very pertinant. It's like I said to you, that for me it's mostly those crystalised moments of melancholy which are more inspirational to me. And in a strange way they become quite beautiful in their own way. Music that is sad, melancholic, depressing, is in a kind of perverse way more uplifting. I find happy music extremely depressing, mostly - mostly quite depressing. It's particularly this happy music that has no spirituality behind it - if it's just sort of mindless party music, it'd be quite depressing. But largely speaking, I was the kind of person that responds more to melancholia, and it makes me feel good. And I think the reason for this is, I think if you respond strongly to that kind of art, it's because in a way it makes you feel like you're not alone. So when we hear a very sad song, it makes us realise that we do share this kind of common human experience, and we're all kind of bonded in sadness and melancholia and depression. ~ Steven John Wilson

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves- either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing. ~ Orson Scott Card

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring - but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down. ~ Trevanian

Stare - really stare - into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime. ~ Ken Ilgunas

A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you. ~ Mariel Hemingway

You're walking into the garden little girl with your belly just rumblin' for an apple."
"My belief happen to be other than your own but I've always thought the Garden of Eden story would have been much better if Eve wasn't portrayed as such a mindless character manipulated by suggestion. I mean if she were a little bolder more resourceful and confident she and Adam might've had snake for dinner instead. ~ Linda Robertson

Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise.
The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation.
The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least. ~ Joel Furches

You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she's watching to help her build those skills. Swing by the couch or lean over her laptop and say, "I'm all for mindless entertainment, but you know that I'm not a big fan of shows that celebrate women for being sexy and stupid." Your daughter may roll her eyes, but do it anyway. Girls can listen and roll their eyes at the same time. ~ Lisa Damour

In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd neither be mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever. ~ Cormac McCarthy

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. ~ Marvin Minsky

You remember the footprint

All that is forgotten you remember from eternity

You remember the footprint which filled with death
As the myrmidon approached.
You remember the child's trembling lips
As they had to learn their farewell to their mother.
You remember the mother's hands which scooped out a grave
For the child which had starved at her breast.
You remember the mindless words
That a bride spoke into the air to her dead bridegroom. ~ Nelly Sachs

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin? ~ Cormac McCarthy

What makes this mentality dangerous is that when the team is held together by careerism and mindless partisanship, individual members are punished for thinking for themselves. ~ Tom Coburn

I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property. ~ Assata Shakur

Look at the cherry blossoms!
Their color and scent fall with them,
Are gone forever,
Yet mindless
The spring comes again. ~ Ikkyu

Suddenly the laws of nature, which up to the point had been blind, mindless rules, were infused with purpose and intention. Things started to happen for a reason, and among these things that happened was reasoning itself. Yet this dramatic change took place without the slightest violation of the same rules that had, up to that point, made the universe a place without purpose. Which, on the level of the rules, it still is. ~ Terry Pratchett

That narrows down the search quite a bit," Daniel commented. "But what if you still don't find her?"
"Then I'm still not going to join the throng of mindless dicks out there looking for a dizney-whore to take advantage of." Will was frowning but Daniel laughed explosively through his nose.
"I can't believe you just said that! ~ Rebekah Joy Anast

The bond between food and me is like other relationships in my life: complicated, evolving, demanding, and in need of constant work. But together we've come so far, moving from my childhood obligation to clean my plate, to a mindless need to fill up, to a truly nourishing and pleasurable exchange. That's the real reward. ~ Ashley Graham

Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way. ~ Truman Capote

Without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble
for novelty. Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing
effects without substance. Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form. ~ Paul Rand

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement - not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason. ~ Ayn Rand

Racism has taken over America; discrimination and misogyny are the law. The clash between our better and darker instincts slams home.
It is the year 2037. What is now referred to as "The Great Madness of '16" has set loose moral, economic, and cultural devastation. In the once powerful United States, paranoia and hatred rage at epidemic levels.
Behind "The Great Barrier Walls", Red State citizens suffer near-slavery and dire hunger at the hands of totalitarian leaders calling themselves the PolitiChurch. Family Values Patrols work the streets, raping, maiming, and murdering in the name of Righteousness. Children are corralled and forced to work for the state.
The world is tearing itself apart. Between those who choose to hate, in an us-against-them world; and those who find healing through helping those in need.
Oppressive governments and bullying leaders crush their followers into mindless subservience, herding them like cattle, whipping up fear and hatred against outsiders.
As one side surges into ever more disturbing and twisted violence, some counterforce leading toward caring and truth seems to be awakening in others.
In this war there can be no compromise.
Had ancients predicted these times? Must mankind destroy itself? Is there no hope?
Or is there something we're not seeing?
- Back cover description of "The Soul Hides in Shadows ~ Edward Fahey

The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water

A woman's shriek assaults the ear

While above, in the sky, inured to everything,

The moon looks on with a mindless leer

("The Unknown Lady") ~ Alexander Blok

It's a thought," I said with a grin.
"That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair.
"I'm not sure all of that sank in."
"Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last. ~ Dan Millman

Such a mindless approach leads not to simple code, but to simplistic code. Simplistic code is incorrect code. Because it is ill-thought through, ~ Anonymous

Don't worry about where you are or what you have or even what you think you want. Take one step at a time and worry only about only this - who you are - who you really are. Find what you love, love what makes you happy - try giving instead of getting, try caring instead of hating. Remove the mindless distractions from your life and focus on the things and people that matter the most to you. Follow your heart to discover what makes you happy, never let go of it, never devalue anything that is beautiful, and build a life that lets you be yourself. ~ Benjamin F Sullivan

Those who serve and those who rule
Lepers, kings and mindless fools
Empire leaders, tyrant's tools
All will fade with time
Hail the cowards, brave at heart
The ugly and the beautiful
Those who never felt their souls
All live transient lives ~ Kreator

It felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky
and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it
wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can
always be better, and things can always be worse. ~ Iain Banks

A wandering corpse, a bundle of mindless functions, ~ Yann Martel

The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a woman's beauty or one to four stars for a movie's appeal. ~ James Fallows

I watch movies, and if I get the chance to watch television, I'm usually prone to watching something completely mindless and mundane that I don't have to follow so closely. ~ Billy Burke

When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95. ~ Jean-Louis Gassee

Despite our accumulation of material wealth, humanity is now engulfed by a widespread economic collapse. Many areas of production exhibit regressive trends so that visible epicentres of decay are growing on all sides and threatening humanity itself. Despite all the research no means can be found to prevent humanity from decaying alive. This is no more than the just and legitimate consequence of human activity. Knowing nothing of Nature's omnipotent laws, and with mindless greed, humanity claws into the life-giving organism of Mother Earth. She is now, with elemental power, beginning to paralyse the wanton hand that dared disturb the forces that serve all Creation. ~ Viktor Schauberger

There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger. ~ Mary Doria Russell

I'm not concerned with paid assassins ... mindless, soulless animals who excel at nothing else. But you, Erik ... you love all the beauty in this world ... you are a genius in so many different fields. Why do you set yourself beyond the pale of humanity by such a despicable crime?"
He took off the mask and turned slowly to let me see.
"This face which has denied me all human rights also frees me of all obligation to the human race," he said quietly. "My mother hated me, my village drove me from my home, I was exhibited like an animal in a cage until a knife showed me the only way to be free. The pleasures of love will always be forbidden to me ... but I am young, Nadir. I have all the desires of any normal man. ~ Susan Kay

I think it's because we're looking for the meaning. Where is the meaning? We have mindless jobs, we take frantic vacations, deficit finance trips to the mall to buy more things that we think are going to fill these holes in our lives. Is it any wonder that we've lost our sense of direction? ~ Matthew McConaughey

A drunk man, staggering and mindless, must be led home by his son, so wet is his psyche ... Water brings death to the psyche, as earth brings death to water ... The psyche lusts to be wet. ~ Heraclitus

Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a "worldview" that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, "faith" in its own mindless mission. ~ Timothy Snyder

A super-legislator body is not what the court was intended to be, When I ponder our country and its greatness, its weakness, its potential, my heart aches for less divisiveness, less polarization, less finger-pointing, less bitterness, less mindless partisanship. ~ Tom Coburn

Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter. ~ Philip Yancey

Mindless performance may be especially helpful in endurance sports because of the supreme importance of the capacity to suffer. The more science and technical detail an athlete incorporates into the training process, the more distracted he becomes from the only thing that really matters: getting out the door and going hard. ~ Matt Fitzgerald

I ran through the streets as though I were running away from a nightmare, running faster and faster toward the Inner City, not knowing why I was running in that direction, since to get home I would have had to go in the opposite direction, but perhaps I did not want to go home. If only I'd spent this winter in London! I said to myself. It was four in the morning, and I was running in the direction of the Inner City when I should have been going home. I should have stayed in London at all costs, I told myself, and I kept on running in the direction of the Inner City, without knowing why, and I told myself that London had always brought me happiness and Vienna unhappiness, and I went on running, running, running, as though now, in the eighties, I was once more running away from the fifties, running into the eighties, the dangerous, benighted, mindless eighties, and again it struck me that instead of going to this tasteless artistic dinner I ought to have read my Gogol or my Pascal or my Montaigne, and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, ~ Thomas Bernhard

Worse, the perpetuation of this "pseudo-mathematics," this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those ~ Paul Lockhart

A man will, by fasting, be delivered from the hopelessness of mere gourmandise. The secular, for all its goodness, does not defend itself very well against mindless and perpetual consumption. It cries out to be offered by abstinence as well as use; to be appreciated, not simply absorbed: Hunger remains the best sauce. Beyond that, though, it cries out to be lifted into a higher offering still. The real secret of fasting is not that it is a simple way to keep one's weight down, but that it is a mysterious way of lifting creation into the Supper of the Lamb. It is not a little excursion into fashionable shape, but a major entrance into the fasting, the agony, the passion by which the Incarnate Word restores all things to the goodness God finds in them. It is as much an act of prayer as prayer itself, and, in an affluent society, it may well be the most meaningful of all the practices of religion - the most likely point at which the salt can find its savor once again. Let a man fast in earnest, therefore. One way or another - here or hereafter - it will give him back his feasts. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

The cruciform does not like pain. Nor do I but, like the cruciform, I am willing to use it to serve my purposes. And I will do so consciously, not instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless avoidance of death by any means. I do not wish to die, but I welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless life. Life is sacred--I still hold to that as a core element of the Church's though and teachings these past twenty-eight hundred years when life has been so cheap--but even more sacred is the soul.
I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so--but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well--bravely and firm of faith--like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerful that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices., All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if the ~ Dan Simmons

Luca scoffed. "Wolves never change."
"Excuse me?" Ryan demanded.
"All about instant gratification. Reacting purely on instinct and engaging in mindless acts of violence and sex."
"Like vampires are any different. Oh, accept for the fact that my boys don't kill those they fuck. Vampires get off on having a life in their hands, the power of draining their victim's life force. Wolves revel in life. You are death and you breed only death. ~ Franca Storm

The current phone obsession is a disease," Chance said. "Everyone's gone mad, typing to themselves all day long like mindless robots. ~ Kathy Reichs

If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts. ~ Samuel L. Blumenfeld

She loved Bram in a clear-eyed way she'd never loved her ex-husband, no rose-colored glasses or mindless giddiness, no Cinderella fantasies or false certainty that he'd put her life in order. What she felt for Bram was messy, honest, and soul-deep. He felt like ... part of her, the best and the worst. Like someone she wanted to struggle through life with; share triumphs and catastrophes; share holidays, birthdays, every days ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of "defocused temporal perception." In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators. ~ Douglas Adams

He was powerless to stop himself. His lips peeled off his teeth as his muscles churned and his hips thrashed against her. Drenched in sweat, head spinning, mindless, breathless, he took everything she was offering him. Took it and demanded more, becoming an animal as she became one, too, until they were nothing but wildness. He ~ J.R. Ward

Tell us again, for we forget, that work done without love is stillborn, mindless, and lost in the very hour of its deliverance. ~ Ray Bradbury

Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple - indeed, mindless - tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance. ~ Alfie Kohn

Her purchases just about busted her vacation budget, but what else is a vacation for, if not for overindulgence and mindless extravagance? ~ Candace Schuler

This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing about. Of liberty, they know nothing; of propriety, they have none: force is their God. When they go for long periods without seeing conquerors who do heavenly justice, they have the air of soldiers without a leader, citizens without legislators, and a family without a father.83 ~ Edward Said

Some Queen of the Pipes, I thought. I'd believed I was better than a mindless drone. But I was the mindless one, hiding away. Even now I referred to them as if I didn't belong. ~ Maria V. Snyder

Rules are foolish, arbitrary, mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further. ~ Bruce Barnbaum

There are a lot of mindless moments in my tunes. ~ Calvin Harris

Wasting time just going mindless, watching your charades. When you were younger, did it occur to you 10 years from then you'd act the same age? ~ David Archuleta

Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers of American women start using the Wonderbra. It will be catastrophic. The male half of the population will be nothing but mindless drooling Zombies of Lust. Granted, this is also true now, but it will be even worse. ~ Dave Barry

So far, we have no good answer to this problem. Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain. Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the 'real' world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a 'virtual world' game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

There is something divine in mindless beauty. ~ Albert Camus

I could not see the unholy creature, but I could feel the bone-aching chill of its presence, and I heard the howl of its mindless hate. I quailed to think of the power that had called it into being and loosed it on the world. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

The act is a vessel that can hold a continuum of human intentions - a sweet, holy song of flesh and love, the simple, mindless rut of youth, or the darkest violation. It encompasses what we bring to it. Too often people fill it with shame. ~ Rhonda Riley

Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?

The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened.

And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories mean nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson