Quotes About Relevance

Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.

As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.

I mean, don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

By contrast, Andrew Kehoe's appalling deed—an unholy blend of school massacre, terrorist bombing, and suicide attack—was seen not as a symptom of societal breakdown but as a sheer aberration, the singular act of a midwestern madman. As such, it provided the public with a brief frisson of horror before being relegated to obscurity. Decades would pass before its true relevance became clear, as a precursor of our own era's worst nightmares.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

Product distinctions, the historic centerpiece of product marketing, exist only briefly—and in the prospects' minds, often not at all.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

But I think that what you'll discover more and more as you get older is that most people aren't thinking about you at all.

If you don't hear this kind of music [pop] at the right time, can it ever make sense to you?

What first occurs to us on remembering the dream/reading the text may be the most important thing.

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.

Nature is a big influence on my work. That's where the cosmic element comes in, an awareness of the relevance of what we do as a species, why we do it, and its implications.

The future and the past are equally meaningless because they are nebulous entities, times that do not exist, containing events which have no echo because they are gone, or which hold no import because they are yet to happen. What is important is the here and now, and now, and now, and the spaces between the nows.

He told me it didn't really matter if it was true, it was what the story MEANT that was so important.

You're ancient history, Vince. A has-been lining up for four p.m. dinner at the retirement home. You're not employable as a director anymore.

also have electricity and running water," Garvey said. "You really are a dinosaur. If you aren't on social media, you might as well be dead.

It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.

If you think you're too old for rock 'n' roll, then you are.

Countless writers express countless ideas on so many bits of paper, and at some unknown moment some specific book, even some specific sentence, will be the right one for the right person. We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment.

Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future.