Unimaginative Quotes

The politics of Europe is unimaginative and bureaucratic. ~ Marjorie Scardino

F-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: "those f - ers," or "f - ing cooks"; what they did: "f - ed it up again"; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the "vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language." The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

Fishing in rainy conditions may make fisherman seem crazy to the great mass of unimaginative people, but then few fishermen care what they think ~ John Gierach

To dismiss basic contexts such as link colours, page layouts, navigation systems, and visual hierarchy as 'boring' or 'pedestrian' is akin to laughing at a car's steering wheel as unimaginative. ~ Jeffrey Veen

How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn't mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn't useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation. ~ Adam Phillips

I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had. ~ John Waters

The notion of a universe filled with cowards ... who stay cowardly FOREVER, no matter how advanced they become ... seems no[t] only unimaginative and temporally myopic, but deeply dismal, as well. ~ David Brin

The yawn of the void. A siren call for the unimaginative ~ Dean Cavanagh

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. ~ H.G.Wells

Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and services?" Her answer is simple: "Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man would want to. ~ James C. Scott

Imagination makes people oversensitive,vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it's a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them. Sometimes I've even envied them: they have an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else. ~ Marlen Haushofer

When I thought of how I'd been living, how I'd been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea). ~ Haruki Murakami

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form ... ~ Djuna Barnes

To the pure, all things are pure," Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus' best soothsayer voice, "and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish. ~ Barbara Hambly

There is no river in the world to be compared for majesty and the witchery of association, to the Thames; it impresses even the unreading and unimaginative watcher with a solemnity which he cannot account for, as it rolls under his feet and swirls past the buttresses of its many bridges; he may think, as he experiences the unusual effect, that it is the multiplicity of buildings which line its banks, or the crowd of sea-craft which floats upon its surface, or its own extensive spread. In reality he feels, although he cannot explain it, the countless memories which hang for ever like a spiritual fog over its rushing current.
("The Phantom Model") ~ Hume Nisbet

It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it's fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn't keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers. ~ Abbe Diaz

I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. ~ J.K. Rowling

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative ~ Paul Banks

He opted for a flaky, apricot-filled croissant and Columbian coffee. Dani chided him for being unimaginative, then proceeded to eat most of his, while ignoring her own.
"I'd be glad to buy you one."
Dani gave him a wide-eyed, innocent stare, then popped the last bit of his breakfast into her mouth.
"I couldn't eat another bite. ~ Mary J. Williams

Beware of men on airplanes. The minute a man reaches thirty thousand feet, he immediately becomes consumed by distasteful sexual fantasies which involve doing uncomfortable things in those tiny toilets. These men should not be encouraged, their fantasies are sadly low-rent and unimaginative. Affect an aloof, cool demeanor as soon as any man tries to draw you out. Unless, of course, he's the pilot. ~ Cynthia Heimel

There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants ... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. ~ Jack London

It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away. ~ Nicci French

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love. ~ Alain De Botton

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. ~ Martijn Benders

Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative. ~ Oscar Wilde

To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception - a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds - would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Pavement is for the unimaginative. ~ Patti Brassard Jefferson

Only the unimaginative can fail to find a reason for drinking Champagne ~ Oscar Wilde

A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a "normal" observer, straggling in the dark - the occasional dark - would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do - some more than others - to find ourselves on the street ... You know the street I mean, child. The street of the 20th Century, at whose far end or turning - we hope - is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. But a street we must walk. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen ~ Jose Saramago

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind. ~ John Ruskin

don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

In newspaper-land a dull lie is seldom detected, but an interesting exaggeration drives an unimaginative rival to hysterical denunciations. ~ Edgar Wallace

The locked door in my house is just a diversion. The real valuable items are out in the open, where they are hidden from the unimaginative. ~ Jarod Kintz

Ozzie Boone ... insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow.
By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries. ~ Dean Koontz

Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality, otherwise known as bowdlerizing,is intolerably vulgar...Unimaginative realism evokes only the smug pleasure of recognition.the painter becomes popular because he assures everyone else that he sees no more than they see...Art is suggestive rather than explicit: it makes no attempt to persuade into general agreement or provide mediocre levels of explanation...the bold imagination produces great art; the timid one small art. But the healthy eye does not see more broadly and vaguely than the weak eye; it sees more clearly...a real miracle is an imaginative effort which meets with an imaginative response. ~ Northrop Frye

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds. ~ Ezra Pound

Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be gracefully idle" - his words gathered conviction - "it astonishes me. It - it - I don't understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It is only unimaginative persons who can be really astonished. The imagination can always outrun the possible and actual sights and sounds of the world ... ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

I use that word endlessly: "primitive." "Oh, the primitive world," I say. "What instinctive truths were lost with it!" And while I sit there, baiting a poor, unimaginative woman with the word that freaky boy tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos - and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field! ... I watch that woman knitting, night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six years - and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat of his God's hairy cheek! Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the Kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for luck - and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity. Do you see? ~ Peter Shaffer

There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on.
Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall?
Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it. ~ Richard Matheson

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. ~ Nick Hornby

The smallest world on earth is that which is created by a closed mind. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The concept of marriage must have been thought up by an unimaginative pig. ~ Albert Einstein

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it. ~ Brooks Atkinson

We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don't want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren't equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap - if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person's love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair. ~ Sam Byers

Facts are for the unimaginative. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love. ~ Mary Wesley

Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her. ~ Joe Meno

Of course she teased the girls, but it was not the same as having a grown man to work on - she had often felt like pinching Bob for being so stolid. July was no better - in fact, he and Bob were cut from the same mold, a strong but unimaginative mold. ~ Larry McMurtry

Only an unimaginative man would think that mechanistic, command-and-control organizations could ever produce an equitable, enduring, free society. Only a thoughtless man would create them. Only an arrogant man would run them. Only a cruel man would perpetuate them. ~ Dee Hock

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies, adds rich specimens to our cabinets of character, dramatizes life for the unimaginative, daguerreotypes it for the unobservant, multiplies experience for the isolated or inactive, and cheers age, retirement and invalidism with an available and harmless solace. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile? ~ Sylvia Plath

The criminal mind is perverted and convoluted but almost invariably unimaginative,'he said as Molly came out in a fluster ~ M.R.C. Kasasian

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man ... ~ Margaret Halsey

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me. ~ A. N. Wilson

Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem. ~ Paul Rand

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Musical 'fusion' projects have earned themselves a bad name, but that's mainly because they often involve pop artists conscripting orchestras to play unimaginative backdrops to their acts. What's really exciting is when you spark off a dialogue between very different musical forces. ~ Charles Hazlewood

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew
knew
that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? ~ J.D. Salinger

Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams whence the jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind. To the villagers of Lucena she seemed to have dissolved, perhaps into fireless smoke. After Dunia left our world the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then for a long time they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown by the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up completely and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic. ~ Salman Rushdie

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. ~ Isaac Asimov

pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. ~ Dean Koontz

The habitual use of profanity is not progressive, just unimaginative. ~ Ron Brackin

It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men. ~ Francis Wyndham

Cursing is the crutch of an unimaginative mind. ~ Rick Yancey

Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Because the people of New Hampshire take their responsibilities as citizens of the Republic seriously, they keep it interesting for candidates who, believe it or not, can get a little tired of the mannered, predictable, and unimaginative qualities that typically afflict modern political campaigns. ~ John McCain

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a
red flag to a bu ... was like putting something very annoying in front of
someone who was annoyed by it. ~ Terry Pratchett

He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage. ~ Robertson Davies

Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. ~ P. J. O'Rourke