Quotes About Superfluity

I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose.

One who seeks what he does not need is devoid of the pure delight God reserves for those who seek him undividedly...The pursuer of superfluity quite completely lacks the fulfilling joy and the rest that Jesus promises to the burdened who come to him.

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts.

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

supererogation.

Almost from the moment votes are counted, lame-duck chief executives invariably recede into superfluity, but Lincoln's hapless predecessor, James Buchanan, made procrastination into an art form. He could not have excused himself from responsibility at a more portentous moment, or left his successor with graver problems to address once he was constitutionally entitled to do so.

In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity;

Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity.

I do tend to overdo everything.

Civilization is the art of creating useless needs.

The monster is bigger than the human. It represents abundance—overabundance. ... It has lots of eyes, extra arms, too many teeth. Everything about it is too many and too much.

Lnq is too much.

Nausea's very subject is the randomness, the contingency, the superfluity, of the world; where better to begin than with Roquentin's own randomness, his contingency as an invented character?

How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don't want the change in the little ashtrays. Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them,

Too much engenders too much.

She tried to persuade them to confine their tributes to flowers and sweets, which had at least the merit of mortality; but she was never successful, and the house was gradually filled with a collection of foot-warmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers and vases, a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.