Top 100 Inanimate Quotes
#1. I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.
Nicholas Trandahl
#2. Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
Martin Amis
#3. The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
Thomas Carlyle
#4. I hang up. Actually, I smash the phone down because I take my anger out on inanimate objects. Which is better than taking it out on people, right?
Carrie Jones
#5. If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign tous: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?
David Hume
#7. I love museums, but I always thought there was something funny about a group of strangers silently staring at works of inanimate objects together. Each person is having a very personal and maybe even emotional experience, but it's in the confines of an extremely quiet and sterile room.
Hiro Murai
#8. Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories
those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost
Russell Baker
#10. A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
Bertrand Russell
#11. You've been avoiding me," he said, talking to the sandwich.
I laughed. He looked over at me. "Sorry. I just realized that you talk to a lot of inanimate objects.
Rachel Hawthorne
#12. A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.
William Shenstone
#13. Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.
Philip K. Dick
#14. When sperm and egg unite, something goes from inanimate to animate. It is life.
Mitt Romney
#15. I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.
Mike Mills
#16. I've named everything that I've ever owned. Real or inanimate, I have to give it a first and last name. Everything in my apartment comes alive at night.
Amy Sedaris
#17. We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects ... and the assorted human beings who perpetuate and maintain this perversity.
Isaac Asimov
#18. If matter mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of Nature into a multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit, like a royal guest, to this tenement of clay?
William Jennings Bryan
#19. Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
Vik Muniz
#20. What my work is about is, 'Can something that is not an inanimate object be considered valuable?'
Tino Sehgal
#21. Inanimate objects have a life of their own, especially when they are the daily companions of a living soul. Without that life, they take on a bleak, desolate appearance, like furniture piled up in a warehouse.
Jennifer Worth
#22. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
Kate Atkinson
#23. The State is not, as many political scientists would make it, an inanimate thing; it consists of people, human beings, each of whom operates under an inner compulsion to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor.
Frank Chodorov
#24. Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates.
Victor Hugo
#25. Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now ...
Henry Miller
#26. It is when my umbrella turns inside out that I am convinced of the total depravity of inanimate things.
L.M. Montgomery
#27. The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh.
Amadeo Bordiga
#28. Money is an inanimate object. It can do good works or bad works depending on the hands that wield it, and the hearts governing those hands.
Donald L. Hicks
#29. We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same mechanism used in producing these striking structures that are crystals.
Linus Pauling
#30. Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What
Kevin Kelly
#31. Farm animals are just as interesting and intelligent as the dogs and cats who we know a bit betterYet they are treated by the meat industry as though they are inanimate objects with no feelings or personalities.
Emily Deschanel
#32. How do you wash your clothes?" "Sally has a small washer and dryer." "Sally?" Selene said. "Who is that?" "The Winnebago we're traveling in. Long story, but my dad likes to name inanimate objects." "Ah, that makes perfect sense. The copier at our office is named Hateful Bitch.
Robin Alexander
#33. Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.
Guy Deutscher
#34. The sceptics assert, though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects,as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind.
David Hume
#35. I always design the hat with the wearer in mind; otherwise, it's an inanimate object.
Philip Treacy
#36. Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.
Dejan Stojanovic
#37. I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.
Peter Benchley
#38. What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such - of what lies beyond the human and the made - and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
Susan Sontag
#39. Strange the affection which clings to inanimate objects - objects which cannot even know our love! But it is not return that constitutes the strength of an attachment.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#40. The similarities among animals that are on the surface very different are no coincidence. In fact, animal locomotion is no different than other flows, animate and inanimate they all develop in space and in time such that they optimize the flow of material.
Adrian Bejan
#41. The bottom line is that people dont have the right to manipulate or to breed dogs and cats ... If people want toys, they should buy inanimate objects. If they want companionship, they should seek it with their own kind,
Ingrid Newkirk
#42. I don't say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, as worms are in cheese.
Gottfried Leibniz
#43. There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work.
Aristotle.
#44. Only upon death does an organism reach equilibrium with its inanimate environment.
Reginald H. Garrett
#45. How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. It's amazing how these little guys can say things that a mortal human could never get away with. There's some sort of unspoken license ... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.
Jeff Dunham
#47. Music is one of the only inanimate things we have left. It can still be mystical, magical and awe-inspiring
Nelly Furtado
#48. [He] had insisted that inanimate objects couldn't have malignant motivations, but Emma had extensive proof to the contrary.
Lauren Willig
#49. It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.
Patti Smith
#50. Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
Edith Stein
#51. When we say disparaging things, even about inanimate objects, they can stick, so use discernment as to what you put out to the universe.
Russell Eric Dobda
#52. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world.
Neal Stephenson
#53. Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.
Loren Eiseley
#54. Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturning brave.
Lord Byron
#56. In my experience even inanimate objects have a will of their own, and they won't be found until they want to be, until they're good and ready, she says.
Menna Van Praag
#57. In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. Since the introduction of inanimate mechanism into British manufactories, man, with few exceptions, has been treated as a secondary and inferior machine; and far more attention has been given to perfect the raw materials of wood and metals than those of body and mind.
Robert Owen
#59. So you do know!" I shouted. My phone lay there like a genie's bottle, inanimate and yet containing the ability to grant me wishes and knowledge. "Girl, spill before I come over and dye your hair a natural color.
Atom Yang
#60. -when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#61. Any object, whether animate or inanimate, will have a size. Airplanes, boats, or musical string instruments vary in size just like animals and plants, and in all cases, their size and their material construction are totally different matters even though they affect one another.
John Tyler Bonner
#62. Most notable distinction between living and inanimate beings is that the former maintain themselves by renewal.
John Dewey
#64. Unless you've touched a corpse before, you can't comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother's face.
Elan Mastai
#65. People look at a chair and say, "It's just a chair," but I like to think it's more than a chair. I like to seek deeper meaning in things, even inanimate things. I know this makes me sound like a complete nutcase, but (a) I swear I'm not, and (b) it's just an example.
Connor Franta
#66. My biggest fear? My biggest fear would be turning into an inanimate object.
Darren Criss
#67. Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. I've read that things inanimate have moved, and, as with living souls, have been inform'd, by magic numbers and persuasive sound.
William Congreve
#68. The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life.
Joseph Joubert
#69. Pronouns really don't matter in a song - 'I' or 'he' or 'she' or even subscribing a lyric to an inanimate object.
Conor Oberst
#70. Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.
Terence McKenna
#71. As the shell, the pith and the kernel of the fruit are all produced form one parent seed of the tree, so from the one Lord is produced the whole of creation, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material.
Ramakrishna
#72. To me, respect for human life begins with making it more difficult to obtain an inanimate object that is designed to snuff it out.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
#73. It was just a book. An inanimate object. The only power it held was what she chose to give it. It could only be important in her life if she made it such.
Of course, that didn't explain why she half expected it to glow in the dark every time she peered into her satchel.
Julia Quinn
#74. From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.
Max Beerbohm
#75. There is no such thing as inanimate matter ... there is God or divinity in all matter and it is all living energy.
Jay DeFeo
#76. our ancestors have told stories of war, love, mysteries, and the miraculous performances of lower animals and inanimate objects.
Lemuel Arthur Pittenger
#77. I look upon you as so many pawns, as inanimate pawns.
Anton Chekhov
#79. That lucky fucking inanimate animal. "I want to grow up to be a stuffed crocodile.
Lauren Blakely
#80. It's wrong for kids to be angry about something inanimate.
Michael Laws
#81. There's nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.
Valeria Luiselli
#82. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#83. The process by which the inanimate becomes animate seems to the audience to be a real miracle.
Sergei Obraztsov
#84. Things inanimate have always been more difficult to change than things animate. Their souls are older and stupider and harder to persuade.
Neil Gaiman
#85. Together, "Light and Knowledge" are Inanimate, Intangible, and Inseparable.
William Bailey
#86. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.
Andrea Dworkin
#87. He bumped into a pay phone and said, 'Excuse me, miss,' on our way in," said Julian.
"It's polite to apologize," said Mark with the same small voice.
"Not to inanimate objects.
Cassandra Clare
#88. People often found themselves assenting to inanimate objects in the Moonlite All-Nite.
Joseph Fink
#89. Inanimate objects are harmless indeed, Mr. Mortmain. But one cannot always say the same of the men who use them.
Cassandra Clare
#90. We take pleasure in truth and it amazes the eye of the viewer to see in stone, in canvas, or in wood an inanimate thing that seems to move.
Lodovico Dolce
#91. It crouches like a spider, waiting for us ti get close enough, pretending to be inanimate.
Kendare Blake
#93. While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.
William Butler Yeats
#94. Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
George Orwell
#95. To Nick's mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space.
Stephen King
#96. Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
Joseph Conrad
#97. English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.
Tomson Highway
#98. Come on sweetheart, wet your whistle, my little inanimate hussy." ~Steve
Lucian Bane
#99. That's one reason why today meeting in bars or in the neighborhood is far less common among LGBT couples than it used to be, and why nearly 70 percent of LGBT couples meet online. (BLT couples - bacon, lettuce, and tomato couples - are inanimate objects and are not engaging in romantic pursuits.)
Aziz Ansari
#100. K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.
Ed Viesturs
