quotations about nonsense
Although nonsense is rooted in our own minds, nonsensical art in a "frozen" state serves to show us how we rope-walk inside our cranium. The history of culture, however, does not limelight so many artists that have seriously played with nonsense. For who will stake credibility?
HENDRIK VAN LEEUWEN
"The Liaison of Visual and Written Nonsense", Explorations in the Field of Nonsense
You are hurrying to the sweet place,
To the nonsense chasing your spirit
And in the nonsense you look for answers.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
Circling: 1978-1987
In nonsense is strength.
KURT VONNEGUT
Breakfast of Champions
Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
MAX BEERBOHM
"An Inquiry into a Convention", Saturday Review, December 19, 1903
Nonsense is not an absence of sense, but rather a frustration of expectations about sense, and that is also why it allows for the expression of "total poetry". Like all verbal art, but perhaps more literally, nonsense is a world of words come to life, which does not so much antagonize the real world ... as ignore it.
WIM TIGGES
"An Anatomy of Nonsense", Explorations in the Field of Nonsense
As Charms are nonsense, Nonsence is a Charm.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734
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
Letters of David Hume
If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Defendant
I talk nonsense at times, because sense is monotonous.
LORD ACTON
letter to Mary Gladstone, September 21, 1880
If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
"Of Vanity", The Essays
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pnin
A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
REX STOUT
The League of Frightened Men
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
CHARLES LAMB
The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb
Nonsense is of not in comedy, as I will argue, its discovery is a central pleasure of the genre. What is lost when comedy is interpreted is precisely this discovery of nonsense. If interpretation is the discernment of consequence in an utterance or action, that mode which deprives utterances and action of their consequence -- namely, the mode in which nonsense is found -- is its opposite. The choice of interpretation excludes that option, and in that exclusion, comedy experiences its central loss.
STEPHEN E. KIDD
Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy
The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it "nonsense" if you like,' she said, 'but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'
LEWIS CARROLL
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.
JAMES JOYCE
Finnegans Wake
Whenever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
THORNTON WILDER
Our Town
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.
DAVID MAMET
Three Uses of the Knife
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Investigations