quotations about nonsense
Are fifteen generations of puppet masters to end with a harlot of a dirty dog who uses his art to tell nonsense? Don't speak! I know this is the new world and the atomic age, but I know that what has taken three hundred years to make does not lose its value in a few weeks.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
Fortune, My Foe and Eros at Breakfast
Nothing is capable to being well set to music that is not nonsense.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, March 21, 1711
Any bit of nonsense can be computerized--astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching--but that doesn't make the nonsense any more valid.
JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Innumeracy
Mackle grackle! Mackle grackle korpal fie! Korpal fie!
WALTER WYKES
The Father Clock
There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Child Psychology and Nonsense
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
MAX BEERBOHM
Going Back to School
Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.
LAURENCE GONZALES
Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.
GELETT BURGESS
The Romance of the Commonplace
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Lothair
His nonsense suits your nonsense.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
The Cornish Trilogy
One man's nonsense is another man's sense.
PETER CAMERON
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
The nonsense that charms is close to sense.
MASON COOLEY
City Aphorisms
Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
NORTON JUSTER
The Phantom Tollbooth
Nonsense and beauty have close connections -- closer connections than Art will allow.
E. M. FORSTER
The Longest Journey
A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.
ROALD DAHL
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
How does the world of nonsense, of the Quangle-Wangle and the Snark, relate to this complex philosophical and literary maze? Part of the answer involves the fact that nonsense is, in a unique and special way, a world of words come to life, a world whose insistently self-defined reality is almost completely linguistic. In nonsense, words often exercise a creative power similar to that granted to language in some primitive cultures.
LISA EDE
"An Introduction to the Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll", Explorations in the Field of Nonsense
A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
TOM STOPPARD
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
SAMUEL BUTLER
The Note-books of Samuel Butler
If nonsense is a dream, it must be a dream stripped of all its symbolism -- not a wish-dream, nor a day-dream or a nightmare.
WIM TIGGES
"An Anatomy of Nonsense", Explorations in the Field of Nonsense