Top 89 Gratuitous Quotes
#1. I'd like to think I'd never do a gratuitous fart joke.
Harold Ramis
#3. There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.
Michael Reeves
#4. A little bit of gratuitous violence in a well-thought-out story is fine.
Ray Wise
#5. I don't like gratuitous violence. I don't like the 'Saw' movies. I don't like the 'Hostel' movies. I don't like anything that is violence for violence's sake.
Michael Biehn
#6. His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.
Charles Stross
#7. An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Man Ray
#8. To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
H.L. Mencken
#9. Pounce if I'm outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout's runnin' hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil.
Steve Aylett
#10. I tried not to think of all the horror movies featuring this exact scenario, soon to be followed by an abundance of gratuitous blood and gore.
M.A. George
#11. A single crocus blossom ought to be enough to convince our heart that springtime, no matter how predictable, is somehow a gift, gratuitous, gratis, a grace.
David Steindl-Rast
#12. Well, I had done nudity in one other thing, but nudity for an actress is a very particular thing. It has to do with the material, and making sure it's not gratuitous, that it's done in a way that's shot beautifully, and it's for a reason. And I'd never played a lesbian before.
Laura Prepon
#13. Through the metal bars of the jungle gym, she watches two gray squirrels chase each other around a tree. Around and around and around. So gratuitous.
Thomas Pierce
#14. I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job.
Michael Robotham
#15. Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.
Constantin Stanislavski
#16. I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.
Rebecca Romijn
#17. Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.
Steven Pinker
#18. Did Google need to make robot cars in order to make Streetview work? Absolutely not. It's the equivalent of saying you need a walking robot in order to push an upright vacuum cleaner. It's gratuitous robotics!
Colin Angle
#19. I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.
Rebecca Solnit
#20. Sometimes nudity is gratuitous. We just live in a society where everything goes.
Judi Dench
#21. Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.
Steven Pinker
#22. Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.
James Wood
#23. And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.
Mircea Eliade
#24. We were mainly concerned about nudity - how much could be shown in 1959 and how much would convey, without being gratuitous, the terror of being attacked naked and wet.
Joseph Stefano
#25. If to know is to work, then knowledge is the fruit of our own unaided effort and activity; then knowledge includes nothing which is not due to the effort of man, and there is nothing gratuitous about it, nothing "inspired", nothing "given" about it.
Josef Pieper
#26. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Simone Weil
#27. I think the last one would have to be The Godfather because it was such a powerful story. There was lots of violence in it but I could take it because I thought there was a reality to it. It wasn't gratuitous, it was just these guys' story.
Bobby Farrelly
#28. Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
Philip Larkin
#29. Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.
Joaquim Nabuco
#30. Nowadays, everything is so gratuitous. The violence is suggested, and it's much more impactful than showing everything.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen
#31. I've seen shows on Showtime, and they're very provocative, if you will, but nothing to the point that's over-the-top or gratuitous.
Megalyn Echikunwoke
#32. Although we may deplore the film's scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.
Mark Leyner
#33. I do not like the word tolerance, but could not think of a better one. Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one
Mahatma Gandhi
#34. I don't think they're gratuitous with the nudity on 'Game of Thrones.' It's very much part of the world. There's a lot of it, but that's the world they come from. It never is there to distract from the scene or the actors or story.
Neil Marshall
#35. That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.
Irvine Welsh
#37. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
George Eliot
#38. There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
John Updike
#39. Life is not found in commandments or declarations of penalties, but in the promise of mercy and only in a gratuitous promise.
John Calvin
#40. Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
Billy Collins
#41. It seems like a totally gratuitous myth to tell people a giant rabbit comes round at night leaving candy in a haphazard way around the house ... and the cover shows the bunny caught in the act.
Todd Rundgren
#42. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
Al Alvarez
#43. A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
Flannery O'Connor
#44. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve "the problem of evil," yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the "problem of good." How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.
Richard Rohr
#45. Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
#46. This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional gramar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.
Christopher Moore
#47. A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;
Promiscuities of bed and board and road;
The one assured treasure
A life, in recollection, truly possessed.
Robert Wells
#48. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
Annie Dillard
#49. Inside, the festivities would continue, probably well into the night, with flirtation and merriment and gratuitous use of mistletoe. It was an inexpressibly wearying thought.
Lauren Willig
#50. I'd never been fond of gratuitous cursing. I figured it was lazy, a communication habit of people who couldn't be bothered finding the correct word.
Susan Lyons
#51. I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films.
Edward Norton
#52. I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.
Jonathan Miller
#53. My moral compass swings far to the left, but when it comes to gratuitous violence, I have trouble.
Michael Biehn
#54. The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous.
Barbara Demick
#55. I did my first nude scene in Mildred Pierce, and that was absolutely terrifying, but it was for an important part of the film and for a reason, and it's incredibly powerful. It's not gratuitous. I think the stuff they show on MTV is so much worse.
Evan Rachel Wood
#56. I've specifically decided to say no to projects that weren't advancing Latinos, that weren't showing us in a positive light, roles that were gratuitous and spreading untruths.
Gina Rodriguez
#57. In a word: charity cannot be neutral, antiseptic, indifferent, lukewarm or impartial! Charity is infectious, it excites, it risks, and it engages! For true charity is always unmerited, unconditional, and gratuitous!
Pope Francis
#58. Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift ... that's nausea.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#59. Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
William James
#60. I went in and said, "If I see one more gratuitous shot of a woman's body, I'm quitting ... " I think the show should be emotional story lines, morals, real- life heroes. And that's what we're doing
David Hasselhoff
#61. It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Henry Miller
#62. I hated Shallow Grave, that movie made me angry. And I hated Happiness. I generally hate movies that use extreme violence or gratuitous shock value in place of having a heart. For example: movies that combine extremely sadistic violence with humor I find offensive.
Jesse Michaels
#63. I really like gratuitous nudity. I hate when people go, 'I'll only do it if it makes sense for the movie'. It never makes sense. So I like it - the more gratuitous the better.
David Duchovny
#64. Thwart," I said. "To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person."
"I'm pretty sure that isn't the definition." Sarissa said.
"It is today.
Jim Butcher
#65. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
Billy Collins
#67. I fear gratuitous censorship more than gratuitous violence.
Marty Rubin
#68. Artists should be aware that petty stroking could be the source of arrested productivity. An artist's job includes the avoidance of premature closure by the begged or gratuitous approval of others.
Robert Genn
#69. Thwart: to prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person.
Jim Butcher
#70. There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
#71. I'm always on the side of the characters, rather than the side of the people attacking them. I get realistic. It's not gratuitous.
Alexandre Aja
#72. But their discovery of the void brings with it new implications: not only that they must continue on in their actions and diligence, no longer considered as duties but as gratuitous, senseless routines, but also the exhilarating realization that all is nothing but a game.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
#74. Public charities and benevolent associations for the gratuitous relief of every species of distress, are peculiar to Christianity; no other system of civil or religious policy has originated them; they form its highest praise and characteristic feature.
Charles Caleb Colton
#75. What's lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what's a crusade? Something you make out of crosses - a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols.
Aldous Huxley
#76. Gratuitous fat jokes always hurt, no matter what.
Josh Peck
#77. I don't ever want anyone to hear my music and look at it as just gratuitous violence, or hustling and money-getting - I try to tell the perspective of the woman, the man, the mind, why.
Pusha T
#78. It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex (writing of Ayn Rand)
Claudia Roth Pierpont
#79. Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don't want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#80. Though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit - merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.
Evelyn Underhill
#81. I don't say that I'm going to be like every other comic that's blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don't do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.
Gallagher
#82. It never seems to occur to such "criminals" that to behave with decency to another human being might also be "gratuitous.
Saul Bellow
#84. Well, for me, gratuitous abstinence is just as bad as gratuitous sex.
Bianca Sommerland
#85. Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
Tom Stoppard
#86. To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#87. The idea of a priori moral judgements ('It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain') is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree.
William Boyd
#88. I do say no to things that I think are completely gratuitous.
Amber Valletta
#89. I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist.
Amber Dawn
