Signifying Nothing Quotes

#1. The beauty of merism is that it's absolutely unnecessary. It's words for words' sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.

Mark Forsyth

#2. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound & query signifying nothing

William Shakespeare

#3. Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Glen David Gold

#4. Such is life, my fellow-mummers-just like a poor player that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blanky, signifying-nothing.

Joseph Furphy

#5. With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

Timothy Noah

#6. To the modernist, "myth," like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

Bradley J. Birzer

#7. Now it was our little joke, signifying nothing.

M. Pierce

#8. Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales - Full of sound and fury
- signifying nothing - he said no word at all.

Thomas Hardy

#9. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species.

Anonymous

#10. If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)

Roland Barthes

#11. Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.

Jonathan Swift

#12. Blacks concede that hurrawing, jibing, jiving, signifying, disrespecting, cursing, even outright insults might be acceptable under particular conditions, but aspersions cast against one's family call for immediate attack.

Maya Angelou

#13. Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.

Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.

(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")

Cameron Awkward-Rich

#14. He's as old as some trees.

Pat Burns

#15. Therefore the words in Psalm 72:7: "In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth," must not be explained as signifying such earthly peace as the world enjoyed under Caesar Augustus, as many believe, but "peace with God," or spiritual peace.

Martin Luther

#16. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.

Helen Keller

#17. We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.

James M. Barrie

#18. MACE, n. A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent.

Ambrose Bierce

#19. To the distinguished female author's left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom.

Ben Lerner

#20. I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.

Rashid Johnson

#21. For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality ...

Jean Baudrillard

#22. The slugs are ascending this steep city staircase that leads up to a huge Catholic church, essentially signifying their slow crawl towards death. The work reminds us of religion, mortality, natural decay, and the slow suffocation of commercialized societies.

Florentijn Hofman

#23. My tutors at drama school commended and criticised my use of comedy in my acting for a long time at drama school. They said I had a tendency to somehow perform the most tragic of scenes in a slightly flippant way.

John Bradley-West

#24. ...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....

The New York Times

#25. With various readings stored his empty skull, Learn'd without sense, and venerably dull.

Charles Churchill

#26. Villains are usually the worst casuists, and rush into crimes to avoid less. Henry VIII. committed murder to avoid the imputation of adultery; and in our times, those who commit the latter crime attempt to wash off the stain of seducing the wife by signifying their readiness to shoot the husband.

Charles Caleb Colton

#27. Some of the bravest and the best men of all the world, certainly in law enforcement, have made their contributions while they were undercover.

Thomas Foran

#28. Atheist, in the strict and proper sense of the word, is one who does not believe in the existence of a god, or who owns no being superior to nature. It is compounded of the two terms ... signifying without God.

Richard Watson

#29. Canada is said to have got its name from the two Spanish words aca and nada, signifying 'there is nothing here.'

Goldwin Smith

#30. Up is never where you are now.

David Belasco

#31. We'll never again be the boys we once were, Tomas. But we've become so much more than we dreamed.

Raymond E. Feist

#32. There Adam slept, and God formed the body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet like a slave, and also that he should love her as his own flesh.

Christine De Pizan

#33. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

Robert Pinsky

#34. I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.

Dick Gephardt

#35. When the Bible speaks of God's love for us and the kind of love we are to have for him and for other people, the word is always apage, signifying a commitment to act.

Rick Warren

#36. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes.

Edward M. Purcell

#37. The Bible has no doubt had much influence in its time, but it provides very few laughs. None, in fact.

Arthur Smith

#38. Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land, ... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.

Henry David Thoreau