Quotes About Sense And Nonsense

#1. Nonsense, when earnest, is impressive, and sometimes takes you in. If you are in a hurry, you occasionally mistake it for sense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#2. Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless ... (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#3. Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

David Hume

#4. Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Other call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

Lao-Tzu

#5. GUIL: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder then a man talking nonsense not to himself.
ROS: Or just as mad.
GUIL: Or just as mad.
ROS: And he does both.
GUIL: So there you are.
ROS: Stark raving sane.

Tom Stoppard

#6. Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

Pope Francis

#7. A lot of what I do - I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them.

Rory Bremner

#8. This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Vladimir Nabokov

#9. When the doubters tell you it can't be done and all kind of tragedies will come your way, I say nonsense. If you can get to the very root of who you are and make something happen from it, my sense tells me you are going to surprise yourself.

Vidal Sassoon

#10. I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding.

Tanith Lee

#11. A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

Anthony Hecht

#12. See human nonsense as nonsense and save years of trying to make sense out of it.

Vernon Howard

#13. Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

Lewis Carroll

#14. Lovers, it is well known, carry the art of tautology to its utmost perfection, and even the most impatient of them can both bear to hear and repeat the same things times without number, till the sound becomes the echo to the sense or the nonsense previously uttered.

Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

#15. Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.

Charles Caleb Colton

#16. Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.

Allan Watts

#17. Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.

Iain Banks

#18. She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.

Jeannette Walls

#19. You have but to hold forth in cap and gown, and any gibberish becomes learning, all nonsense passes for sense.

Moliere

#20. Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.

John Dryden

#21. Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

James Thurber

#22. Once you have the cap and gown all you need do is open your mouth. Whatever nonsense you talk becomes wisdom and all the rubbish good sense.

Moliere

#23. Perhaps we don't always discriminate between sense and nonsense.

George Eliot

#24. Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

Dr. Seuss

#25. Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

David Bohm

#26. That is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#27. The realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole - this was the central message of Dada.

Hans Richter

#28. I've become addicted to playing poker because you're constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Jason Calacanis

#29. Love is not the expression of words and really you no need to show that when you act for them your sudden unconditional decision, work, non-sense, care shows everything ... that make them special one of your world ... Bharat Bhushan

Bharat

#30. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

C. G. Jung

#31. Netherling logic resides in the hazy border between sense and nonsense.

A.G. Howard

#32. Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

Brian Froud

#33. There are realms of life where the concepts of sense and nonsense do not apply.

Gregory Galloway