Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.
Robert Frost
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Sir Max Beerbohm
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison
That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Quentin Crisp
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
Bertrand Russell
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
Charles Dickens
All that Swinging Sixties nonsense, we all thought it was passé at the time.
David Bailey
SIN: Self-Inflicted Nonsense
Eric Butterworth
The six senses are horse sense, innocence, common sense, concupiscence, nonsense and stupidity.
Carl William Brown
To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.
Frank Gelett Burgess
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
H. L. Mencken
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
George Eliot
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Pablo Picasso
The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.
George Steiner
While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato’s Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Jefferson
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
Samuel Butler
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
George Santayana
Don’t talk to me about a man’s being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?
William Pitt
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.
Robert Frost
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Sir Max Beerbohm
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison
That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Quentin Crisp
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
Bertrand Russell
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
Phyllis Mcginley
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.
Edgar Watson Howe
I like nonsense – it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
Dr. Seuss
Wisdom becomes nonsense in the mouth of a fanatic.
Otto Schuwdrmer
Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Aldous Huxley
Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but sometimes always, by God, never.
Hans Richter
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin Disraeli
Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
W. H. Auden
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Northrop Frye
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.
Robert Frost
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Sir Max Beerbohm
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison
That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Quentin Crisp
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
Bertrand Russell
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
Phyllis Mcginley
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.
Edgar Watson Howe
I like nonsense — it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
Dr. Seuss
Wisdom becomes nonsense in the mouth of a fanatic.
Otto Schuwdrmer
Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Aldous Huxley
Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but sometimes always, by God, never.
Hans Richter
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin Disraeli
Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
W. H. Auden
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Northrop Frye
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.
Robert Frost
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
Sir Max Beerbohm
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison
That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
Quentin Crisp
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
Bertrand Russell
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
Phyllis Mcginley
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.
Edgar Watson Howe
I like nonsense — it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
Dr. Seuss
Wisdom becomes nonsense in the mouth of a fanatic.
Otto Schuwdrmer
Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Aldous Huxley
Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but sometimes always, by God, never.
Hans Richter
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin Disraeli
Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli
I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want -an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Northrop Frye
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis
From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
Phyllis Mcginley
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.
Edgar Watson Howe
I like nonsense — it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
Dr. Seuss
Wisdom becomes nonsense in the mouth of a fanatic.
Otto Schuwdrmer
Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
Aldous Huxley
Your damned nonsense can I stand twice or once, but sometimes always, by God, never.
Hans Richter
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Soren Kierkegaard
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ”ideals,” of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.
Lionel Trilling
The emancipation of today displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts. There is even a reaction from the ideal of an intellectual and emancipated womanhood, for which the pioneers toiled and suffered, to be seen in painted lips and nails, and the return of trailing skirts and other absurdities of dress which betoken the slave-woman’s intelligent companionship.
Sylvia Pankhurst
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.
Cardinal J. Newman
To reprove small faults within due vehemence, is as absurd as if a man should take a great hammer to kill a fly on his friend’s forehead.
Source Unknown
Absurdity. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce
My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.
Lord Byron
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
Albert Camus
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
Vaclav Havel
The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.
Thomas Hobbes
It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
Archibald MacLeish
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
Agnes Repplier
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Arthur Schopenhauer
As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
Voltaire
We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time. It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present. But what of that! We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
”I” is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion –to rid God of His Maggots.
Victor Hugo
What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed — and not for pay? Absurd – or insincere?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Einstein is an analytical mathematician seeking to give a physical interpretation to the conclusions of his mathematical process. In this he is hampered by a load of contradictory and absurd assumptions of the school that he follows, which throws him into all manner of difficulty. Einstein has such a faculty for embracing both sides of a contradiction that one would have to be of the same frame of mind to follow his thought, it is so peculiarly his own. The whole Relativity theory is as easy to follow as the path of a bat in the air at night.
Jeremiah Joseph
What makes us discontented with our condition is the absurdly exaggerated idea we have of the happiness of others.
French Proverb
Every absurdity has a champion to defend it; for error is always talkative.
Oliver Goldsmith
It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
W. H. Auden
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
Northrop Frye
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
