Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about indifference, individual or collective behavior that does not lead to making any decision between one or more alternatives deemed irrelevant to change something or simply devoid of any emotion for events that have occurred or are still in progress.
Quotes about indifference
- Indifference, for me, is the personification of evil. (Elie Wiesel)
- The universe is neither hostile nor friendly. It is simply indifferent. (John Haynes Holmes)
- There are two great ways for the poor in this world to die, both with the general indifference of his fellow men in peacetime, and with the murderous passion of the same when the war comes. (Louis Ferdinand Céline)
- Freedom is indifference. (Louis Scutenaire)
- Politics tells me nothing. I don't like people who are insensitive to truth. (Boris Pasternak)
- As if that great anger had purged me from evil, freed from hope, before that night full of signs and stars, I was opening myself for the first time to the sweet indifference of the world. In finding him so similar to me, finally so brotherly, I felt that I had been happy, and that I still was. (Albert Camus)
- This is the story of a loser, there are many, unfortunately, who dream of a home, a family, instead they find abandonment, despair. They are not the victims, it's me, it's us, because we don't realize the indifference. (Don Andrea Gallo)
- Perhaps the misguided moral passions are better than the confused indifference. (Iris Murdoch)
- He didn't give a damn about anything, and that would have guaranteed him a long life without depression. (Nick Hornby)
- When you think that the other does not consider you enough, it means that you are tied to him and, because of this bond, you are not independent. The less you expect, the more you receive. (Etty Hillesum)
Recommended readings- Travel phrases: aphorisms for those who have to leave
- Human rights phrases: aphorisms and short quotes
- Phrases about being yourself: quotes, aphorisms
- Phrases about indifference: aphorisms, quotes
- Formal excuses: sentences to apologize
- The worst sin against our fellow men is not hatred but indifference; this is the essence of inhumanity. (George Bernard Shaw)
His anxiety ceased, at least so it seemed to him, and it became a feeling of deep and deadly offense. But it was not a stable sensation, it disappeared and for some reason it turned into a proud indifference, but instead it was a presentiment of the eternal quiet. (Mikhail Bulgakov)
- Indifference is the worst of all attitudes. By behaving in this way, we lose one of the essential components of the human. One of its indispensable qualities: the ability to be indignant and the commitment that follows. (Stephane Hessel)
- Believe in contempt, mockery, fear, discouragement, shame, panic, hatred. Feel free to believe all this. But never believe in indifference. (Irvin D. Yalom)
- I am only interested in making sure that those who are slaves to an individualistic, indifferent and selfish mentality can free themselves from those unworthy chains and achieve a more human, noble, more fruitful lifestyle and thought that gives dignity to their passage on this earth. (Pope francesco)
- Indifference and contempt do more harm than hatred. (J.K.Rowling)
- Desire is half of life; indifference is half the death. (Khalil Gibran)
- I learned to keep my tongue in check and to transform my face into a mask of indifference, so that nobody can read my thoughts. (Suzanne Collins)
- Traveling, one realizes that the differences are lost: each city resembles all the cities, the places are exchanged form order distances, a shapeless dust invades the continents. (Italo Calvino)
- The death of democracy will not be the work of a lurking assassin. More likely it will be a slow extinction caused by apathy, indifference and malnutrition. (Robert Maynard Hutchins)
- Of all the sins of psychology, the most deadly is his indifference to beauty. (James Hillman)
- There is no stench to which the sense of smell does not end up getting used to, there is no noise to which hearing cannot become accustomed, nor monstrosity that man has not learned to consider with indifference. (Lev Tolstoj)
- Doctors would be able to study the causes of all human diseases and instead never study anything, but they continue to always and in any case maintain that attitude of amazement due to their laziness and their absolute lack of interest in of all diseases. (Thomas Bernhard)
- Shame, infamy, dishonor, offenses, harm to the extent that they make us suffer. For those who do not take it, they are not even bad. What does it matter if everyone whistles, if you applaud? That this is possible is due to Madness alone. (Erasmus of Rotterdam)
- Be wary of the man who likes everything, of the one who hates everything and, even more, of the one who is indifferent to everything. (Johann Kaspar Lavater)
- In my opinion, 'no' means nothing. I have no opinion about indifference, and I don't care. (Pablo Picasso)
- To say that you are not interested in the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you are not interested in freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. (Edward Snowden)
- In the war of the sexes indifference is the power of the male, revenge is that of the female. (Spiny)
- This world has always been cruel, the strong have always oppressed the weak and everyone pretended not to notice it. (Marina Inoue)
- The best way to insult someone is to pay no attention to their insults. (William Hazlitt)
- Insensitivity is never progress, it is hardly a help. (Christa Wolf)
- The sun was rising: the pure, colorless vastness of the sky stretched up there, indifferent to him and his sufferings. (J.K.Rowling)
- The cry of the poor goes up to God but does not reach man's ears. (Félicité De Lamennais)
- Indifference works powerfully in history. It works passively, but it works. It is fatality; it's what you can't count on; it is what upsets the programs, which overturns the better constructed plans; it is the brute matter that rebels against intelligence and chokes. (Antonio Gramsci)
Aphorisms on indifference
- If you don't want something, just don't think about it, just pass over it with indifference. It will automatically disappear from your life. To throw something away from one's life is not to avoid but to ignore. (Vadim Zeland)
- Nobody noticed that she was asleep, that she wasn't there, that she hadn't been anywhere for two years now. (David Grossman)
- The simplest solutions are the ones that are generally overlooked. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
- It is from this pasta that we are made, half of indifference and half of malice. (José Saramago)
- The world is not threatened by people who do evil, but by those who tolerate it. (Albert Einstein)
- If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take such suffering into consideration. (Peter Singer)
- A burning passion combined with absolute detachment is the key to any success. (Mahatma Gandhi)
- If you don't care what happens, you become responsible for it. (Ken Follett)
- It is invulnerable not those who are not hit, but those who do not feel hurt. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- Life is vulgarized when there is no elementary consideration for others by people. (Bernard Malamud)
- Human life is like the Olympic games: some earn on it; others think of gaining glory by fighting; others are simply spectators. (Pythagoras)
- A man said to the Universe, 'Lord, I exist!'. "Anyway," replied the Universe, "The fact does not arouse any form of obligation in me." (Stephen Crane)
- They were seized with an acute attack of non-curiosity. (Douglas Adams)
- It is not the events that are indifferent, it is we who are unable to take away from them the habit of being indifferent. Life is grim with those who pout. (Emmanuel Mounier)
- Those who look at misery with indifference are the most miserable. (Paulo Coelho)
- The indifferent gaze is a perpetual farewell. (Malcom De Chazal)
- There are only two divine drugs that can help us endure the poison of reality without we die of it prematurely: reason and indifference. (Sandor Marai)
- There are times and places where being nobody is more honorable than being someone. (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
- The man of mass society is characterized by anonymity, by the lack of social ties, by indifference to the other and, due to his cultural uprooting, by impotence and vulnerability to evil, with all its tragic consequences, of which the most inhuman will be the Holocaust. (Ryszard Kapuscinski)
- Friendship, mercy, gladness and indifference pacify the mind. (Patanjali)
- It is hard to be alone, harder to share one's loneliness with indifferent or ungrateful people. (Georges Bernanos)
- Do everything with a mind that can let go. Don't expect any reward or prize. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom. Your battles with the world will come to an end. (Ajahn Chah)
- Unlimited and arbitrary freedom self-delegates; either she can't stand herself, surrendering herself to the law, or she dissolves into a state of boredom and self-destructive indifference, culminating in suicide. (Fedor Michajlovic Dostoevskij)
- We sleep in separate rooms, each one having dinner for his own affairs, we make holidays each on his own: in short, we do everything to keep the wedding together. (Rodney Dangerfield)
- The advantages that we have already realized, immediately become obvious, are forgotten, we lose consciousness and finally they are no longer taken into consideration, until we remain without them. (Abraham Maslow)
- There is a big difference between those who go blind to the world of the sick despite their open eyes, and the certainty of a clear perception that springs from the sensitivity of those who participate. (Karl Theodor Jaspers)
- When you have suffered a lot in the past, any further pain is unbearable and at the same time irrelevant. (Yann Martel)
- In my opinion we have not gone blind, in my opinion we are, Blind who see, Blind who, although seeing, do not see. (José Saramago)
- The addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is aware of what surrounds him, but the environment is for him devoid of emotional characteristics and consequently also of interest. (William S. Burroughs)
- There would be only one way to get rid of that widespread madness: to recognize it openly as such, and to that end to convince ourselves that, in their majority, people's opinions are usually completely false, distorted, wrong and absurd, and therefore, in themselves, they do not deserve any attention. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- The sun is vital for everyone's life, plants, animals and fish, and we take it for granted. (Danny Boyle)
- The theoretical indifference to the idea is a prediction of the cynicism of the practice. (Max Horkheimer)
- Passing without listening to the pain of our people, without taking root in their life, in their land, is like listening to the Word of God without letting it take root within us and be fruitful. A plant, a story without roots, is an arid life. (Pope francesco)
- All politics is based on the indifference of the majority. (James Reston)
Phrases about indifference
- The globalization of indifference makes us all "unnamed", responsible without name and without face. (Pope francesco)
- The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil things but because of those who observe without doing anything. (Albert Einstein)
- How many deserts, even today, the human being must go through! Above all, the desert that is within him, when there is no love of God and for others, when there is no awareness of being the custodian of all that the Creator has given us and gives us. (Pope francesco)
- More than repression, I suffer from the silence of the world. (Martin Luther King)
- We are no longer carefree, but excruciatingly indifferent. We could perhaps live in the sweet land: but what life? Abandoned as children, disillusioned as old, we are rough, sad, superficial. I think we are lost. (Erich Maria Remarque)
- Just as pains are provoked or exaggerated by giving them importance, in the same way they disappear when attention is diverted. (Sigmund Freud)
- The world does not see your soul, which does not care for it an accident of the hopes, dreams and pains that hide beyond the skin and bones. It was like this: simple, absurd and cruel. (Khaled Hosseini)
- What scares me is not the violence of the bad guys; is the indifference of the good guys. (Martin Luther King)
- I hate the indifferent also for what annoys me their whining of eternal innocents. (Antonio Gramsci)
- Alive, I'm a partisan. So I hate those who don't side, I hate the indifferent. (Antonio Gramsci)
- To achieve certain purposes, one must learn to abandon them. (Margaret Mead)
- Lucky those who can still hate! The real contempt lies in not giving value to anything anymore. (Georges Bernanos)
- Any form of poverty you suffer from is a scandal. And the scandal becomes unbearable when it is discovered that such situations of misery are the result of the freedom of individuals and nations, perverted in selfishness, in dominant power, in behaviors of indifference and exclusion. (Pope John Paul II)
- Indifference is the revenge that the world takes on the mediocre. (Oscar Wilde)
- The perfect behavior arises from complete indifference. (Cesare Pavese)
- The price paid by good people who are not interested in politics is to be governed by worse people. (Plato)
- The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. Hate, on the other hand, is really similar to love. Consuming oneself for hatred towards a person is basically equivalent to loving them since time and intensity are identical. (Marylin Manson)
- Let me teach you something about humans ... If you park a mysterious blue cabin in the middle of their city, what will they do? Absolutely nothing, they will move on. (Christopher Eccleston)
- The best of men is the one who blushes when you praise him and remains silent when you defame him. (Khalil Gibran)
- Indifference is the eighth capital vice. (Don Andrea Gallo)
- Our life begins to end the day we become silent on the things that matter. (Martin Luther King)
- The older I get, the sooner I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do. (Andrew Carnegie)
- Throughout history, it has been the inactivity of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known more than others; the silence of voices when they were most important; which made the triumph of evil possible. (Negus Hailè Selassiè)
By nature there is only indifference by nature; but among women, by nature, there is enmity. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- Madness is like heaven. When you get to the point where you don't give a damn about what others can say ... you're close to heaven. (Jim Hendrix)
- If your daily life seems poor, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, that you are not a poet enough to evoke his wealth; because for a creator there is no poverty or poor and indifferent places. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
- In general, I accept everyone's chatter without problems and I leave them alone without problems. (Charles Bukowski)
- The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of art is not ugly, it is indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it is indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it is indifference. (Elie Wiesel)
- Our lives end when we keep silent in front of really important things. (Martin Luther King)
- Show that their words can hurt you, and you will no longer be free from derision. If they really want to give you a name, accept it, make it your own, so that they can never use it again to harm you. (George R.R. Martin)
- Learn to play the card of indifference. It is the most shrewd of revenge. Because there are many of whom we would have known nothing if some of their known enemies had not mentioned it. There is no revenge like oblivion, which buries the unworthy under the dust of its nullity. (Baltasar Gracian)
- Our feelings became colorless and dull, because we felt as if we were lost between wickedness and equally inhuman virtues. (Italo Calvino)
- Obstacles are those scary things you see when you take your eyes off the goal. (Henry Ford)
- There are only two wonderful medicines to help us endure the poison of reality and prevent it from killing us prematurely and these are intelligence and indifference. (Sandor Marai)
- Whoever can no longer feel awe and wonder is already dead and his eyes are unable to see. (Albert Einstein)
