A Quote by Mel Torme

To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace.

Mel Torme

Quote Topics

Commonplace Me Mindless More Nostalgia Nothing Past Than

Quote Author

Mel Torme
American - Musician
September 13, 1925 - June 5, 1999

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

Don DeLillo

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

Mal Peet

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

Philip Roth

The issue is Kinkade's ideology, and particularly his nostalgia; his paintings endlessly trumpet a nonexistent past when times were simpler and morality more pure. There's nothing wrong with this, but it stands at odds with a contemporary art world that looks to the future for inspiration. We value complexity and innovation, and distrust saccharine pictures of the past.

Paddy Johnson

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

Mignon McLaughlin

The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Murray Bookchin

Nothing fires the warrior’s heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowels or guts but from one’s discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions.

Steven Pressfield

Some Queen of the Pipes, I thought. I'd believed I was better than a mindless drone. But I was the mindless one, hiding away. Even now I referred to them as if I didn't belong.

Maria V. Snyder

Comedians could do mindless things - and by mindless, I mean the easy jokes and things that you already agree with - but I find it more interesting, more of a reward, for people to feel something. I like to make a human connection, and that involves speaking emotionally, a bit more intellectually, or with a bit more moral complexity.

Jerrod Carmichael

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male "culture," in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our "society" are raving sex maniacs.

Valerie Solanas

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa

Celebrity is this thing that's unattainable. This unattainable lifestyle. This unattainable social status. But there's nothing more commonplace than dying from hot sauce.

Sean Evans

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The longer I live the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.

Charles R. Swindoll

Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. Toimitate me is to punish me.