Worthlessness Quotes

To believe that is we could but have this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness. (Eric Hoffer)
We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness. View quote
Margaret Fuller
I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating. View quote
Sebastian Faulks
It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. View quote
Hu Shih
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. View quote
Norman O. Brown
it is a most important social act; nay, at bottom, the one important social act. Given the men a People choose, the People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunkey people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not happy. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing. View quote
Iris Murdoch
Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. View quote
William Congreve
Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness. View quote
John D. MacDonald
Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a sdifferent environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty. View quote
Hu Shih
In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness. View quote
Peter Abrahams
To love, to be beloved again, and know A gulf between us:-aye, 'tis misery! This agony of passion, this wild faith, Whose constancy is fruitless, yet is kept Inviolate:-to feel that all life's hope, And light, and treasure, clings to one from whom Our wayward doom divides us. Better far To weep o'er treachery or broken vows,- For time may teach their worthlessness:-or pine With unrequited love;-there is a pride In the fond sacrifice-the cheek may lose Its summer crimson; but at least the rose Has withered secretly-at least, the heart That has been victim to its tenderness, Has sighed unechoed by some one as true, As wretched as itself. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Hatred is a thing of the heart, contempt a thing of the head. Hatred and contempt are decidedly antagonistic towards one another and mutually exclusive. A great deal of hatred, indeed, has no other source than a compelled respect for the superior qualities of some other person; conversely, if you were to consider hating every miserable wretch you met you would have your work cut out: it is much easier to despise them one and all. True, genuine contempt, which is the obverse of true, genuine pride, stays hidden away in secret and lets no one suspect its existence: for if you let a person you despise notice the fact, you thereby reveal a certain respect for him, inasmuch as you want him to know how low you rate him - which betrays not contempt but hatred, which excludes contempt and only affects it. Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it. View quote
Virginia Woolf