Quotes about indifference
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“When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos…”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

Source: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Cats, Sleep

“Valentine's Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway. Matter of supreme indifference to me.”

Helen Fielding book Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

“He had lived a very long time, and only since he gained Anna had he learned to fear. He’d discovered that he had never been brave before—just indifferent. She had taught him that to be brave, you have to fear losing something.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

Fear, Learning, Time

“I remember that my mother had once told me that the opposit of love isn't hate, it's indifference.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Variant: I remember that my mother once told me that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.
Source: Something Borrowed

Love, Hate

“Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Source: The Judges

Soul

“I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Life, Women, Men, Fight

“Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”

David Rakoff (1964–2012) writer

Source: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

Love, Hate, Books, Reading

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Life

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Time, Forgetting

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Way, History, Freedom, Suffering

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

People, Thinking, Change, Time

“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. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

US News & World Report (27 October 1986)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“I thought you might need a ride.'

'The headmaster's office called me a car.'

He shrugged, indifferent but amused. 'And here I am in a submarine.”

Ally Carter book Heist Society

Source: Heist Society

Cars

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Books, World, Music, Color

“I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Source: The Seventh Seal

World, Dreams, Feeling, Heart

“Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.”

Joan D. Vinge The Snow Queen

Source: The Snow Queen

Love, Hate, Universe, Chance

“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 book The Street of Crocodiles

Source: The Street of Crocodiles

“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 250

Hostility, Universe

“So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen, p. 5
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Learning, Reading

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

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Source: Summer by the Sea

Love, Pain, Hate

“I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

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.

Wisdom, Wise

“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Fate, World

“Advice for a human

86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Love, Hate, Disease, Art

“There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

Stupidity, Feeling, Forgiveness

“My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Passion, Parting

“None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy.”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Sadness, Learning, Joy

“Have you any other objection than your belief of my indifference?"

- Elizabeth Bennet”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

“Good, bad, and indifferent - It takes all sorts to make a world.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

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.

World

“They say that death kills you, But death doesn't kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.”

Iggy Pop (1947) American rock singer-songwriter, musician, and actor

Death

“The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

Source: Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

Night

“There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Afro-Asian Conference (1965)

Death, World, Victory, Country

“As civilisation advances, so does indifference.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

The Humans

“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

“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 (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

“An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.”

Tom Stoppard Travesties

Carr, Act I
Source: Travesties (1974)

Universe

“Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

God, Heart

“His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.”

Isabel Allende book Daughter of Fortune

Source: Daughter of Fortune

Justice

“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

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.

Life

“He managed to convey indifference, contempt, and boredom in the one word.”

Charlaine Harris (1951) American writer

“If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.”

Helen Oyeyemi book The Opposite House

Source: The Opposite House

Personality

“The wheel of fortune […] tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.”

Philippa Gregory book The Lady of the Rivers

Source: The Lady of the Rivers

Wisdom, Learning, Victory

“The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.”

Sherwood Smith (1951) American fantasy and science fiction writer

Nature, Passion

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Love, Fate, Sadness, Sense

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Love, Hate, Deep, Inspirational

“God, as a loving Father, will stretch our souls at times. The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched…. God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference!”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Love, God, Music, Soul

“The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: Black Blood

Love, Hate, Deep, Inspirational

“… there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.”

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) American author and social activist

Life, Way

“Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. book Strength to Love

Source: Strength to Love

Love, Hate, Joy, Selfishness

“Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.”

Robert Creeley (1926–2005) American poet

Love, Happiness, Lie

“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.”

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

People, Feeling

“Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

Despair

“Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Fate

“I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you… Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Love

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

James Baldwin If Beale Street Could Talk

Source: If Beale Street Could Talk

Love

“The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Source: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Parting

“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 book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

“Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Light, Evil

“As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Pain

“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Hate

“That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Life, Death, People, Fear

“Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, World, Courage

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"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

People, Silence, Time, Waiting

“Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Marriage, World

“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 (1964) American writer

Source: Devil in Winter

Thinking, Silence

“… 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.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"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.

Feeling, Suffering, Evil

“Patriotism in the female s*x is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Adams (17 June 1782)

Age, Law, Sex, History

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)

Life, World, Feeling, Reality

“Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. … An opposite conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 72.

World, History, Knowledge, Learning

“Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life. This is a form of education, as Howard Zinn notes, where scholars “publish while others perish.” Even many leftist and liberal academics have retreated into arcane discourses that offer them the safe ground of the professional recluse.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

"Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals," Thought and Action (Fall 2006), p. 64

Life, Education, Suffering, Learning

“We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.”

Margaret Chase Smith (1897–1995) Member of the United States Senate from Maine

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

“All sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Life, Fate, Reality, Sense

“At length the morn and cold indifference came.”

Nicholas Rowe The Fair Penitent

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.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

The Immortals (2009)

Music, Cars

“India is yet another major victim of Islam. The day Muhammad bin Qasim, entered Sindh as a conqueror, must rank as the most ominous, odious and outrageous moment in the history of India, whose proud, pious and powerful traditions have been the torch-bearer of world civilisation. The Indians, used to enjoying the warmth of ahinsa, were stunned by the violence that the Arab raiders displayed in robbing the rich and seducing the indigenous damsels. Yet the irony was that they did all this in the name of the Most Compassionate and Just Allah, who counts these felonies as acts of fairness when they are committed to torture the unbelievers. Then, this land that had become indifferent to the vicissitudes of history owing to a very long period of prosperity and plentitude, was attracted by more Islamic predators, who rushed in through the Khaiber Pass to loot her wealth, dishonour her daughters and crush her ethos that had stood the test of time despite its proneness to physical comforts and spiritual mirages such as ahinsa.”

Anwar Shaikh (1928–2006) British Pakistani writer

Anwar Shaikh (1998). Anwar Shaikh's Islam, the Arab imperialism. Cardiff: Principality Publishers.

World, History, Time, Daughters

“Everyone can see that philosophy can have her belief in a millennium, but her millennarianism is not Utopian, since the Idea can help, though only from afar, to bring the millennium to pass. The only question is: Does Nature reveal anything of a path to this end? And I say: She reveals something, but very little. This great revolution seems to require so long for its completion that the short period during which humanity has been following this course permits us to determine its path and the relation of the parts to the whole with as little certainty as we can determine, from all previous astronomical observation, the path of the sun and his host of satellites among the fixed stars. Yet, on the fundamental premise of the systematic structure of the cosmos and from the little that has been observed, we can confidently infer the reality of such a revolution.
Moreover, human nature is so constituted that we cannot be indifferent to the most remote epoch our race may come to, if only we may expect it with certainty. Such indifference is even less possible for us, since it seems that our own intelligent action may hasten this happy time for our posterity. For that reason, even faint indications of approach to it are very important to us.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Eighth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Happiness, Confidence, Star, Intelligence

“Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 9

Fools, Thinking

“[In casual conversation] The reason why I feel relatively indifferent to [the Anglican Church of England] is it's lost its power, and it's so desperately keen to solicit support that they're willing to throw God out of the window in order to retain it. God for the many of the Anglicans is nothing more than a sort of awkward geriatric relative, kept upstairs, who might be embarrassingly coming downstairs, incontinently, and cause trouble.”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

God, Feeling, Support

“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1920s, Lecture on Dada', 1922

Religion, Nature, Passion

“Love is just a little bit of death in the heart,
For how often can one love in certainty that love will be returned?
Giving so much love, and receiving so little of it;
Because people are fickle, or indifferent? Who knows?
During moments together as in hours apart,
I'm mindful that the moon fades, flowers wither, souls pass away…
They wander lost in the somber darkness of sorrow,
Those fools who follow the footprints of love.
Because life is an endless desert,
And love is an entangling web.
Love is just a little bit of death in the heart.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

"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.

Love, Life, Death, People

“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

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.

Idea, Painting

“For evil to take place, the acts of a few people are not sufficient; the great majority also has to remain indifferent. That is something of which we are all quite capable.”

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

People, Evil

“Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"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)

“Never having had either positive cruelty or kindness shown to her by her parents, but only an indifference, she was not conscious of what it was that she missed—affection.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 37 “The Grotto” (p. 211)

Parent

“Many thanks for your kind care for my health; I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was very poorly. I have had a good deal of fever at times, and indifferent nights; but I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough — black and white, and every wrong colour. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again. Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Fanny Knight (1817-03-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Life, Health, Time, Dependency

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 39
Watt (1943)

Lie, Secret, Flowers, Bird

“Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. 'T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a "foot" a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. 'T is the same thing in the Chancellor's conscience.”

John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law

Equity.
Table Talk (1689)

Law

“Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

February 7, 1754 (Letter to Lord Chesterfield)
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Life, Water, Help

“I took down my portfolio, to select a drawing to copy in oil. He had never seen my works before, and appeared astonished as his eyes ranged over the sheets. He expressed the warmest admiration, and said, "How hopeless must be the task of my giving any instruction to one who can draw like this?" I pointed out to him that nature is the great study for the artist, and assured him that the reason why my works pleased him was because they are all exact copies of the works of God, — who is the great Architect and perfect Artist; and impressed on his mind this fact, that nature indifferently copied is far superior to the best idealities.”

John James Audubon (1785–1851) American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter

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)

God, Nature, Study, Appearance

“The Church has consistently and justly refused to allow that reason might stand in opposition to faith, and yet be placed under subjection to it. The human spirit in its inmost nature is not something so divided up that two contradictory elements might subsist together in it. If discord has arisen between intellectual insight and religion, and is not overcome in knowledge, it leads to despair, which comes in the place of reconciliation. This despair is reconciliation carried out in a one-sided manner. The one side is cast away, the other alone held fast; but a man cannot win true peace in this way. The one alternative is, for the divided spirit to reject the demands of the intellect and try to return to simple religious feeling. To this, however, the spirit can only attain by doing violence to itself, for the independence of consciousness demands satisfaction, and will not be thrust aside by force; and to renounce independent thought, is not within the power of the healthy mind. Religious feeling becomes yearning hypocrisy, and retains the moment of non-satisfaction. The other alternative is a one-sided attitude of indifference toward religion, which is either left unquestioned and let alone, or is ultimately attacked and opposed. That is the course followed by shallow spirits.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

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)

Peace, Faith, Religion, Way

“The prestige which constitutes three-fourths of might is first of all made up of that superb indifference which the powerful have for the weak, an indifference so contagious that it is communicated even to those who are its object.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

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)

Communication

“I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)

Life, Faith, Law, Understanding