Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. — Robert Smithson
The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum. — Charles Caleb Colton
One feels 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible. — Ernest Shackleton
Value is the most invincible and impalpable of ghosts, and comes and goes unthought of, while the visible and dense matter remains as it was. — William Stanley Jevons
Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it. — Hannah More
A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones. — Lord Chesterfield
With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich. — Seneca
Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire brings a small amount of heat. — Napoleon Hill
Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue. — Confucius
Inconsequential Quotes
No man can always be right. So the struggle is to do one's best, to keep the brain and conscience clear, never be swayed by unworthy motives or inconsequential reasons, but to strive to unearth the basic factors involved, then do one's duty. — Sayings
There is no such thing as a simple act of compassion
or an inconsequential act of service.
Everything we do for another person has infinite consequences. — Caroline Myss
We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys. — Eric Hoffer
We have already seen evidence that, notwithstanding the addition of substantial resources, we are experiencing great stress in recruiting and not inconsequential retention problems. — John M. McHugh
For people to judge a man's worth and his very manhood according to the way he feels about sport, and not to recognize it for the piddly, inconsequential goings on that it really is. — Robin Green
Okay listen, you think I'm so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value - to you I say, I'm not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you. — Sidney Poitier
Life is so great in its opportunities and possibilities, that you should rise confidently above the inevitable trifles incident to daily contact with the world. Life is too precious to be sacrificed for the nonessential and transient. . . . Ignore the inconsequential. — Grenville Kleiser
God designed it this way; He intended that His great power, wisdom, and love should become visible in very ordinary and otherwise inconsequential people. — Ray Stedman
As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places. — A. Bartlett Giamatti
Be sure to remember that nothing in your daily life is so insignificant and so inconsequential that the Lord will not help you by answering your prayer. — Ole Hallesby
The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. — H. P. Lovecraft
The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet. — Vikram
A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course. — Susan Hill
No dish changes quite so much from season to season as soup. Summer's soups come chilled, in pastel colors strewn with herbs. If hot they are sheer insubstantial broths afloat with seafood. In winter they turn steaming and thick to serve with slabs of rustic, crusty bread. — Florence Fabricant
Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible. — Hosea Ballou
I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains. — Carlo Rovelli
The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial. — Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music. — Sayings
Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate. — Sun Tzu
Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? — Euripides
Those in public office who do not love the people are thieves stealing salaries. Those who teach but do not themselves practice what they teach are mere talkers. Those who try to do successful work without considering development of character will find it insubstantial. — Zicheng Hong
I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas. — Patrick Stewart
Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. — Robert Genn
Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis. — Muriel Spark
The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. — Audrey Niffenegger
From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters. — Sharon Salzberg
A goal that is not in writing is like cigarette smoke: It drifts away and disappears. It is vague and insubstantial. It has no force, effect, or power. But a written goal becomes something that you can see, touch, read, and modify if necessary. — Brian Tracy
I take pop culture really seriously, I think it's really important, and the stuff that I make...I don't want it to be insubstantial, even if it's about something wacky, like sharpening pencils. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who are really interested in pencils and I owe it to anybody to do my due diligence and give them something real. — David Rees
Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under. — Walter Lippmann
Weak arguments are often thrust before my path; but although they are most insubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion with a sword. — Richard Whately
The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body. — R. D. Laing
We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings--animals and plants--are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory beccause they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Dasein (literally being-the-there)...Man as man is present...in a manner wholly different from...inanimate things. — Medard Boss
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. — William Shakespeare
You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and unsubtantiated, beliefs. — Michael Eric Dyson
You can feel small, insignificant and insubstantial, but knowing the universe is in your tiny body should be enough to make you happy. — Agapi Stassinopoulos
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. — Penelope Lively
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice. — Joyce Carol Oates
According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe. — Gary Zukav
I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming "uh-huh, yes? — Fran Lebowitz
There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks. — John Kenneth Galbraith
Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts - that is how you know it's the dream. — Frederick Lenz
Attraction and aversion create a sense of self. There is no self. They are just thoughts. They are insubstantial. When you die, all the ideas of self will go away. — Frederick Lenz
In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home. — Barbara Hurd
There are those who will seek to block you. There are also non-physical forces. To win in the world of enlightenment, it is necessary to be able to will away these forces, to see they're insubstantial. — Frederick Lenz
At the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is; and they are the affection and understanding of his family. Anything and everything else he creates are insubstantial; they are ships given over to the mercy of the winds and tides of prejudice. but the family is an everlasting anchorage, a quiet harbor where a man's ships can be left to swing to the moorings of pride and loyalty. — Richard E. Byrd
The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream. — David Ben-Gurion
The softest of stuff in the world, penetrates quickly the hardest, insubstantial, it enters where there is no room. — Lao Tzu
Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without. — Eckhart Tolle
I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow. — Sophocles
The friendly smile, the word of greeting, are certainly something fleeting and seemingly insubstantial. You can’t take them with you. But they work for good beyond your power to measure their influence. It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most. — James Cash Penney
My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads? — Hideo Kojima
Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost. — Hari Kunzru
She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in. — Maggie O'Farrell
All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water. — Jeffrey Eugenides
And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again. The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch. — Stephen Fry
In Conclusion
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