48 Quotes On Indifference

In a world brimming with passionate voices and fervent opinions, indifference can often seem like a silent but powerful force. The absence of emotion or reaction can speak volumes, shaping destinies and altering the course of history just as much as passionate involvement does. If you've ever wondered about the profound impact of not caring, you've come to the right place. In this blog post, we'll delve into a curated collection of the top 48 quotes on indifference, shedding light on this oft-overlooked yet highly influential human trait. From philosophers to poets, these voices explore the many dimensions of indifference, offering insights that are both thought-provoking and enlightening.

1. “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” - Elie Wiesel

2. “Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.” - Helen Keller

3. “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” - Richard Dawkins

4. “I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.” - Woody Allen

5. “Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

6. “So many men treat their wives badly, or indifferently, or with barely contained impatience. Josh doesn't mind-- no that's not right--he insists on openly showing his love and respect for me.” - Lynn Morris

7. “She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.” - Susan Wiggs

8. “Politeness is organized indifference.” - Paul Valery

9. “Tu as tout à apprendre, tout ce qui ne s'apprend pas: la solitude, l'indifférence, la patience, le silence. Tu dois te déshabituer de tout: d'aller à la rencontre de ceux que si longtemps tu as côtoyés, de prendre tes repas, tes cafés à la place que chaque jour d'autres ont retenue pour toi, ont parfois défendue pour toi, de traîner dans la complicité fade des amitiés qui n'en finissent pas de se survivre, dans la rancoeur opportuniste et lâche des liaisons qui s'effilochent.” - Georges Perec

10. “Tu n'as rien appris, sinon que la solitude n'apprend rien, que l'indifférence n'apprend rien: c'était un leurre, une illusion fascinante et piégée. Tu étais seul et voilà tout et tu voulais te protéger: qu'entre le monde et toi les ponts soient à jamais coupés. Mais tu es si peu de chose et le monde est un si grand mot: tu n'as jamais fait qu'errer dans une grande ville, que longer sur quelques kilomètres des façades, des devantures, des parcs et des quais. L'indifférence est inutile. Tu peux vouloir ou ne pas vouloir, qu'importe! Faire ou ne pas faire une partie de billard électrique, quelqu'un, de toute façon, glissera une pièce de vingt centimes dans la fente de l'appareil. Tu peux croire qu'à manger chaque jour le même repas tu accomplis un geste décisif. Mais ton refus est inutile. Ta neutralité ne veut rien dire. Ton inertie est aussi vaine que ta colère.” - Georges Perec

11. “He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.” - Gustave Flaubert

12. “He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself - was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

13. “He has always been politely indifferent. But what's the Chinese word that means indifferent because you can't see any differences?” - Amy Tan

14. “A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.” - Lisa Kleypas

15. “Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference. ” - William Sloane Coffin

16. “You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.” - W. Somerset Maugham

17. “The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.” - Wilhelm Stekel

18. “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.” - Bruno Schulz

19. “And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:"Master, what is it that I hear? Who arethose people so defeated by their pain?"      And he to me: "This miserable wayis taken by the sorry souls of thosewho lived without disgrace and without praise.      They now commingle with the coward angels,the company of those who were not rebelsnor faithful to their God, but stood apart.      The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —even the wicked cannot glory in them.” - Dante Alighieri

20. “Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.” - Kahlil Gibran

21. “You can't be neutral on a moving train.” - Howard Zinn

22. “But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

23. “Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …” - Samuel Butler

24. “But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.” - Lionel Shriver

25. “Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.” - James Jones

26. “Confidential matters are not dealt with over the telephone, you'd better come here in person. I cannot leave the house, Do you mean you're ill, Yes, I'm ill, the blind man said after a pause. In that case you ought to call a doctor, a real doctor, quipped the functionary, and, delighted with his own wit, he rang off.The man's insolence was like a slap in the face. Only after some minutes had passed, had he regained enough composure to tell his wife how rudely he had been treated. Then, as if he had discovered something that he should have known a long time ago, he murmured sadly, This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.” - José Saramago

27. “The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.” - Rudyard Kipling

28. “Familiarity makes the lion more dangerous.” - Jocelyn Murray

29. “Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?I try to smile. What's the difference, really.” - Will Christopher Baer

30. “He's going on and on, and I can't be bothered. I just can't be fuckin well arsed saying something like: Solaris shites all over 2001, and then listening to him arguing vehemently against it. Or, alternatively, waiting for him to say it, and then being expected to argue engingly, as if to agree, even if we do, is a sign that we're effete proofs. I can't be bothered with it and I can't even be bothered to tell him that I can'be be bothered.” - Irvine Welsh

31. “I never thought meeting you would be this boring. I thought we'd put our Italian emotion into gear and scream the place down. I never expected indifference.” - Melina Marchetta

32. “Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.” - Dan Simmons

33. “Indifferentism is the worst kind of disease that can affect people.” - Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

34. “Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.” - Randy Alcorn

35. “That's the hardest thing of all--never to become cynical, never to lose faith, never to become indifferent.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

36. “A questão é: você já reparou como nós esmagamos uma barata numa boa e não sentimos remorso nenhum, apesar de estarmos na realidade exterminando uma vida? Pois é. Fazemos isso porque não nos identificamos com a barata. Porque ela é muito diferente de nós. [...] Pensando por esse lado, acho que algumas pessoas às vezes tendem a fazer do mesmo jeito com relação a outras. Ou seja, elas veem com distanciamento aqueles com quem não se identificam logo de cara, entende? É como se o estranho, que não faz parte do mesmo grupo que nós, fosse visto como um ser inferior... Quase uma barata!” - Camilo Gomes Jr

37. “Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable.” - Dave Eggers

38. “The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.” - Philip Gourevitch

39. “But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?""Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.” - Joan D. Vinge

40. “Since the basic cause of man’s anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backwards to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision—indeed, the very choice of indifference is itself a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of forces that resist death, so, too, man’s will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, “How shall we escape it we neglect so great a salvation” (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life, we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an “indifferent” soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it. The talents that are unused are taken away, and the Scriptures tell us that, “But because though art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16).” - Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D.,D.D.

41. “She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.” - Edith Wharton

42. “A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.” - Gustave Le Bon

43. “Uzunca bir süre kendine sığınaklar kurup yıktın: düzen ya da eylemsizlik, başıboş sürüklenme ya da uyku, geceleyin devriye gezmeler, yansız anlar,gölgelerin ve ışıkların kaçışı.Daha uzun bir süre kendine yalan söylemeyi,kendini sersemleştirmeyi,kendi oyununa gelmeyi sürdürebilirsin belki.Ama oyun bitti,büyük şenlik,ertelenmiş yaşamın yalancı sarhoşluğu bitti.Dünya yerinden kıpırdamadı ve sen değişmedin. Kayıtsızlık seni farklı kılmadı.” - Georges Perec

44. “Kayıtsızlık dili geçersiz kılıyor,işaretleri anlaşılmaz hale getiriyor.Sabırlısın ama beklemiyorsun, özgürsün ama seçmiyorsun,müsaitsin ama hiçbir şey seni harekete geçirmiyor. Hiçbir şey istemiyor,hiçbir şey talep etmiyor, hiçbir şeyi dayatmıyorsun.Hiç dinlemeden duyuyor,hiç bakmadan görüyorsun.” - Georges Perec

45. “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.” - Cesare Pavese

46. “The difference between men and women is this--if you catch a woman butt-naked, she tries to cover the private parts with her hands. A man will sit there just like you found him even if he doesn't have much to be proud of.” - Deb Baker

47. “Break free from the chains which shackle each soul through the binding links of fear, greed and indifference?” - Bryant McGill

48. “If anyone thinks he has faith and yet is indifferent towards this possession, is neither cold nor hot, he can be certain that he does not have faith. If anyone thinks he is Christian and yet is indifferent towards his being a Christian, then he really is not one at all. What would we think of a man who affirmed that he was in love and also that it was a matter of indifference to him?” - Kierkegaard, Søren