Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Source: Bridget Jones's Diary
Source: Fair Game
“I remember that my mother had once told me that the opposit of love isn't hate, it's indifference.”
Variant: I remember that my mother once told me that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.
Source: Something Borrowed
“Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.”
Source: The Judges
Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
US News & World Report (27 October 1986)
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”
Source: The End of the Affair
Katniss Everdeen, p. 5
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)
“She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.”
Source: Summer by the Sea
“I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.”
J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
Variant: I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
“Have you any other objection than your belief of my indifference?"
- Elizabeth Bennet”
“Good, bad, and indifferent - It takes all sorts to make a world.”
Variant: It takes all sorts to make a world.
Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 4
Context: The Wild Wood is pretty well populated by now; with all the usual lot, good, bad, and indifferent — I name no names. It takes all sorts to make a world.
“They say that death kills you, But death doesn't kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.”
“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
Carr, Act I
Source: Travesties (1974)
“His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.”
Source: Daughter of Fortune
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”
Robert Frank, "Statement, 1958"; republished in: Vicki Goldberg. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present https://books.google.nl/books?id=U3qXOp1iT6QC&pg=PA401, 1981, p. 401
Variant: Life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference and it is important to see what is invisible to others.
Context: I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.
My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.
“He managed to convey indifference, contempt, and boredom in the one word.”
Source: The Lady of the Rivers
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”
“The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.”
Source: Black Blood
Source: Strength to Love
“Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.”
Source: Far from the Madding Crowd
“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
Source: If Beale Street Could Talk
Source: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”
Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", sermon at the National Cathedral, 31 March 1968, published in A Testament of Hope (1986)
1960s
Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
Source: Devil in Winter
"The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement" (1972) http://www.shalomctr.org/node/61; later included in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996)
Context: There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.
The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Letter to John Adams (17 June 1782)
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 72.
"Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals," Thought and Action (Fall 2006), p. 64
“We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.”
from an undated speech on Civil Rights; as cited in Hope and Fear in Margaret Chase Smith’s America, Gregory P. Gallant, Lexington Books (2014), p. 309 : ISBN 0739179861
“At length the morn and cold indifference came.”
Act i, scene 1. Compare: "But with the morning cool reflection came", Sir Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, chap. iv. Scott also quotes this in his notes to "The Monastery", chapter iii, note 11; and with "calm" substituted for "cool" in "The Antiquary", chapter v.; and with "repentance" for "reflection" in "Rob Roy", chapter xii.
The Fair Penitent (1703)
“The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.”
The Immortals (2009)
Anwar Shaikh (1998). Anwar Shaikh's Islam, the Arab imperialism. Cardiff: Principality Publishers.
Eighth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 9
Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)
1920s, Lecture on Dada', 1922
"Love" [Yêu], as quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, pp. 86–87, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), p. 162
Variant translation by Huỳnh Sanh Thông:
To love is to die a little in the heart,
for when you love can you be sure you're loved?
You give so much, so little you get back—
the other lets you down or looks away.
Together or apart, it's still the same.
The moon turns pale, blooms fade, the soul's bereaved...
They'll lose their way amidst dark sorrowland,
those passionate fools who go in search of love.
And life will be a desert bare of joy,
and love will tie the knot that binds to grief.
To love is to die a little in the heart.
Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to nl:Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9
1970's
Variant: It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)
“Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.”
"On Wit and Humour" http://books.google.com/books?id=XPchAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Wit+is+in+fact+the+eloquence+of%22&pg=PA23#v=onepage
Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 37 “The Grotto” (p. 211)
Letter to Fanny Knight (1817-03-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters
Equity.
Table Talk (1689)
February 7, 1754 (Letter to Lord Chesterfield)
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
On a meeting with a young artist, Mr. J. B. Kidd, Ch. X, p. 140
The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (1868)
Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Translated from the 2d German ed. by E.B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson: the translation edited by E.B. Speirs. Published 1895 p. 49-50
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)
Le prestige, qui constitue la force plus qu'aux trois quarts, est fait avant tout de la superbe indifférence du fort pour les faibles, indifférence si contagieuse qu'elle se communique à ceux qui en sont l'objet.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 168
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)
Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)
Quoted from the Progressive February 2002
Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 85
1950s
Part 2 “Aleph”, Chapter 2 (p. 51)
Against Infinity (1983)
