Disinterest Quotes

1. "Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion."
Author: Albert J. Nock

2. "Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do."
Author: Aldous Huxley

3. "Freedom from activity is never achieved by abstaining from action. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. In fact, nobody can ever rest from his activity even for a moment. All are helplessly forced to act. . . .A man who renounces certain physical actions but still lets his mind dwell on the objects of his sensual desire, is deceiving himself. He can only be called a hypocrite. The truly admirable man controls his senses by the power of his will. All his actions will be disinterested. Activity is better than inertia. Act, but with self-control. If you are lazy, you cannot even sustain your own body."
Author: Anonymous

4. "Nobody gives a crap about hockey down here - nobody. I coach kids' hockey down here and you can start to see the disinterest in the game here with the kids."
Author: Bobby Hull

5. "The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack."
Author: C.S. Lewis

6. "If philosophy had the power to establish incontrovertible truths, immune to doubt, and if philosophers were as a rule wholly disinterested practitioners of their art, then it might be possible to speak of progress in philosophy. In fact, however, the philosophical tendencies and presuppositions of any age are, to a very great degree, determined by the prevailing cultural mood or by the ideological premises generally approved of my the educated classes. As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion. It is as possible today to be an intellectually scrupulous Platonist as it was more than two thousand years ago; it is simply not in vogue."
Author: David Bentley Hart

7. "When principles are so absurd and so destructive of human society, it may safely be averred, that the more sincere and the more disinterested they are, they only become the more ridiculous and the more odious."
Author: David Hume

8. "For a time Emerson politely endeavored to conceal his boredom - like most men, he is profoundly disinterested in all children except his own - ..."
Author: Elizabeth Peters

9. "First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

10. "Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization."
Author: G. M. Trevelyan

11. "Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness."
Author: Hans Urs Von Balthasar

12. "It is not seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in hisown plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderfulas it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to themfor some reinforcement for his own faltering mind."
Author: Herman Melville

13. "Methinks I could write a volume to you, but all the language on earth would fail in saying how much and with what disinterested passion I am ever yours."
Author: Ika Natassa

14. "Has she glanced you way yet?"Twice," Nick said on a note of satisfaction.Meaning?"Nick glanced at him. "She's not completely disinterested."I see Moreland. That makes it an even half dozen hanging out for a rich wife. Four looking for their second. Rossman, the old satyr, certainly isn't likely to be much competition. What in the hell does he think he's doing anyway? He must be sixty."Basking, I should think. She hasn't given him the cold shoulder yet," Nick responded coolly."
Author: Jaide Fox

15. "I can easily believe it. Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to. Such varieites of human nature as they are in the habit of witnessing! And it is not merely in its follies, that they are read; for they see it occasionally under every circumstance that can be most interesting or affecting. What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation-- of all the sacrifices that ennoble us most. A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes."
Author: Jane Austen

16. "John Dalton was a very singular Man: He has none of the manners or ways of the world. A tolerable mathematician He gained his livelihood I believe by teaching the mathematics to young people. He pursued science always with mathematical views. He seemed little attentive to the labours of men except when they countenanced or confirmed his own ideas... He was a very disinterested man, seemed to have no ambition beyond that of being thought a good Philosopher. He was a very coarse Experimenter & almost always found the results he required.—Memory & observation were subordinate qualities in his mind. He followed with ardour analogies & inductions & however his claims to originality may admit of question I have no doubt that he was one of the most original philosophers of his time & one of the most ingenious."
Author: John Dalton

17. "Have you seen them?" he asked. Arrow looked at him disinterestedly. Will frowned.Not talking, eh?" he said. "Maybe you're a little hoarse."He cackled breifly at his own wit."
Author: John Flanagan

18. "The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher -- in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician."
Author: John Maynard Keynes

19. "Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. That identification means that serious theological discussion seems to accomplish little more than to erect a division between the shouters and the disinterested. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me neither option is worth pursuing. Yet even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible or to those who want to be freed finally from premodern ideas that no longer make any sense."
Author: John Shelby Spong

20. "Trusting in Christ, we may boldly join in the combat, and enlist ourselves among that disinterested band, who fight not for human ambition, or human praise, but for the honour of our Saviour, and the salvation of men."
Author: John Strachan

21. "Behind him there's still the mirror…a bit of infinity, which in its disinterest still holds their reflections safely in it."
Author: Laura Kasischke

22. "It's a tough job being somebody's personal assistant. You have to anwser their phone, manage their correspondence, run their errands, pay their bills, arrange their schedule, and basically do whatever tasks, menial to major, they are too busy or self absorbed or distranted or pampered or disinterested to do themselves."
Author: Lee Goldberg

23. "The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception."
Author: Leon Trotsky

24. "I was disinterested in everything, even in Ethan. Even, I was ashamed to admit, in Ella. I didn't know where else I wanted to be but I knew it was anywhere except on this earth, in my body, living my life."
Author: Leslie A. Gordon

25. "Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora's most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements."
Author: Leszek Kołakowski

26. "Chris tilted his head to study her. "You're getting red.""I am not embarrassed about any of this."He rolled his eyes. "I meant from the sun. You need sunscreen if you're going to be down here. The water reflects everything, and you're fair-skinned.""Oh." She looked at her shoulders with disinterest. Indeed, they were already turning pink."
Author: Lori Foster

27. "Ronan didn't sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

28. "His posture spoke of condescension, his expression disinterest. He was all brambles and icicles as he strode closer to her cage."
Author: Marissa Meyer

29. "We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing tisk-tisk-tisk of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat."
Author: Marya Hornbacher

30. "Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing "selves" that are worth expressing."
Author: Matthew Kelly

31. "There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups."
Author: Milton Friedman

32. "Gonzo stares after the Rolls-Royce. He has heroismus interruptus. He was ready, right then, to coordinate four or five hundred terrified civvies, lay down his life, kill for them, make a legend of disinterested soldiering. It's not that he resents what has happened, but he's having trouble changing gear. He was expecting to take charge. Instead he is struggling to keep up with a sexagenarian Mystery Man with an Errol Flynn grin who commands a legion of pirate-monk rally drivers and sweeps formidable older women from their feet in a could of cologne and Asian-Monarchic style."
Author: Nick Harkaway

33. "Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves."
Author: Oliver Goldsmith

34. "Yet,'said Maturin, pursuing his own thought, 'there is a quality in dogs, I must confess, rarely to be seen elsewhere and that is affection: I do not mean the violent possessive protective love for their owner but rather that mild, steady attachment to their friends that we see quite often in the best sort of dog. And when you consider the rarity of plain disinterested affection among our own kind, once we are adult, alas - when you consider how immensely it enhances daily life and how it enriches a man's past and future, so that he can look backward and forward with complacency - why, it is a pleasure to find it in brute creation."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

35. "You put up this steel armor around yourself in the form of hostility and disinterest—whichever works to shield you best at the moment, but that's not who you are."
Author: Pauline Creeden

36. "Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's "uses base" for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler."
Author: Plato

37. "The Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother's love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested."
Author: Richard Gere

38. "What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants."
Author: Robert Hughes

39. "His stride was long, tall, and proud. He wore a mask of proprietary disinterest, as though everything before his eyes belonged to him and his whimsy. He looked arrogant. He fit right in."
Author: S.G. Night

40. "True sleep eluded me. Morpheus is a capricious god; he comes easily to some and only with greatest difficulty to others. To lure him, it is best to pretend disinterest. Engage the mind in some pursuit unrelated to what is truly desired and allow no distraction from it. For me, nothing works so well as a walk through Rome."
Author: Sara Poole

41. "I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less' and ‘fewer', and between ‘uninterested' and ‘disinterested' and ‘infer' and ‘imply', but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,' I wrote there, you'll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on "none of them is of importance". Well I'm glad to say I've outgrown that silly approach to language"
Author: Stephen Fry

42. "When he squirmed away from her, I felt the strangest mix of emotions. First, I wanted to jump into Joshua's arms and give him a series of grateful kisses—rewards for his apparent disinterest in her. Next, I wished I was substantial enough to tackle this stranger and pull out her pretty hair"
Author: Tara Hudson

43. "To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was."
Author: Thomas Hardy

44. "Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge."
Author: Thomas Mann

45. "A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
Author: Virginia Woolf

46. "Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us."
Author: Walter Pater

47. "The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness."
Author: Wilkie Collins

48. "Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth--one with a long history--is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful disgestion for the rich."
Author: William Sloane Coffin Jr.

49. "Etymologically, "compassion" means to suffer together. "Together," however, is different from "identically." Compassion is not the same as selflessness, and not really the opposite of selfishness. Rather, it provides a basis for helping other people that is materially disinterested but emotionally self-regarding. As Rousseau wrote in Emile, "When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself..." Or, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, "Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs."
Author: William Voegeli

50. "Back then, living hadn't had any meaning. Every so often, without any warning or any real reason, he'd even caught himself thinking, 'Maybe I'll try dying.' He'd had one foot in the world of the dead, and yet the other foot had been chained to the world of the living, and he couldn't pull it out; he'd just looed on disinterestedly, sort of like it was all happening on the other side of some window, as the dull, vague world passed him by. Never making any more to walk out into it himself. Somewhere along the way, though, he'd stopped thinking about trying to die. He wondered when that had happened."
Author: Yukako Kabei

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