Apathy Quotes

It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.

~ George Eliot

Choose empathy over apathy.

~ Mango Wodzak

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

~ Clint Catalyst

Surrender is a choice, it is never a calling.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.

~ Osamu Dazai

To be poor is to suffer. It's the kind of suffering that freezes the heart stone cold.

~ A Que

A lot of you cared, just not enough.

~ Jay Asher

If your success is not amazing to your critics, it disturbs, infuriates, and frustrates them, and if they're not careful; may go hang themselves and go to hell.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.

~ Neil Gaiman

Gray.The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain drifting around resembled transparent molten steel, the pavement looked like it was about to burst into disconsolate tears, even the air itself was gray, so ultimate and ubiquitous that colour was everywhere around me.Gray...

~ Simona Panova

Apathy is, too often, a result of overexposure to stressful, highly emotional situations. To rekindle empathy, sometimes we need some space. It's okay to walk away so that you can feel love for someone again. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes forever.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

~ Albert Einstein

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

~ Hannah Arendt

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

Apathetic people sit back and wait for things to get better before they move. Radical people make things get better, by how they move.

~ Shannon L. Alder

When all that's left mediocrity and each day just bleeds into the next.

~ Andy Carrington

When sweet lullabies are whispered into the sky, my heart is filled with with the sorrow of time. So when the kiss of a midnight moon ends, drop sweet nothings to fill my ear. Too many years to be sincere, and too many lost favorites that were never there.A tear or two, and maybe three; apathy is-and may not be me.

~ Melody Aurora

We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!

~ Paddy Chayefsky

I think that certain emotions can compromise you when you’re at war. If you stop to mourn the dead, or even to breathe in what you’ve done, you’ll be dead as well. Your brain goes to a primitive region, one inaccessible to feelings beyond pure anger and pure fear. Your brain is reduced to two impulses: fight or flight. Kill or be killed. No room for more delicate feelings. No room for a soul. All you’re thinking about is how to maneuver your body in space so it will survive.

~ Willa Strayhorn

Nobody wants to know how you feel, yet, they want you to do what they feel.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

...you want things to remain the same, which they never can, and so you’re wounded by your own feelings & resentful others don’t seem to care...

~ John Geddes

Hate isn’t the opposite of love, apathy is. Hating doesn’t free you from feeling anything. You have to carry it around, using every scar, every little memory like a building block. Like a stone in a wall, until you’ve created a new person, a new life that you can live with.

~ Rasmenia Massoud

I don't know how to hate, It requires the same force as love for me. APATHY is the answer I find.

~ Anshika Verma

Indifference is the worst kind of response when love is expressed. Hate is not the antithesis of love; it’s the nonexistence of feeling, a pervasive apathy. When hate is present, so is love. It’s passion gone sour and fueled by pain, but, nonetheless, it’s passion and love is apparently still alive. Yet when indifference seeps into our spirits, an emotional numbness and permitted scotoma takes the place of any passion – whether it’s love or hate – and resigns in a new state of being.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos.

~ Tadeusz Konwicki

The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

We're walking with our eyes on everyone else, ignoring the screams that come from the people buried alive underneath our feet. Yet we say we're here for each other and say we care. And we hypocritically wonder why everyone is walking passed our own screams as though we don't do the same.

~ Caitlyn Paige

Religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, however, animal activists ask people to see things they can prove. When Christian animal and environmental activists finally demand that their church be better stewards over the world, we will see change. Until then, one percent of sermons will teach parishioners about the importance of being stewards over our animals in a year. Mega churches and corporate religious empires will continue to own stock in companies that pollute our earth and exploit our animals. Ignorance and hypocrisy will continue to corrupt the pureness of the Gospel. From here, we will not be truly “saved” because we choose not to save ourselves.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

And remember, silence is all it takes to validate evil and remember, indifference is all it takes to endorse it.

~ Adeosun Olamide

Life has always been a series of the same choices: enslavement, apathy or freedom.

~ Shannon L. Alder

A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last upper step to the most complete faith (he may or may not take that step), while the indifferent one has no faith, apart from a bad fear.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One response was given by the innkeeper when Mary and Joseph wanted to find a room where the Child could be born. The innkeeper was not hostile; he was not opposed to them, but his inn was crowded; his hands were full; his mind was preoccupied. This§ is the answer that millions are giving today. Like a Bethlehem innkeeper, they cannot find room for Christ. All the accommodations in their hearts are already taken up by other crowding interests. Their response is not atheism. It is not defiance. It is preoccupation and the feeling of being able to get on reasonably well without Christianity.

~ Billy Graham

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum qtd. in Halter)

~ Ken Wytsma

We may not choose apathy, but when we choose anything other than love and empathetic justice, we get apathy by default.

~ Ken Wytsma

At the end of the day--of almost any day, regardless of what we have done or left undone--apathy tells us that it's perfectly acceptable to live with illusions of our own justice.

~ Ken Wytsma

A subtle reason for apathy is that justice rarely has much to do with our lives. Unless we've personally been victims of injustice, we can take for granted that life is generally fair.

~ Ken Wytsma