Just because you say something that no-one understands, including you, does not necessarily make it profound.
This includes all the “famous” quotes that people just go ‘hmmmm’ at but have no idea what it means, but then pass it on in the hopes of looking intelligent.
“Only the insane have the strength to prosper, and only the prosperous can judge what is sane.” [maybe a misquote] written on a notice board.
"When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you. "
"He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions. "
"You must be like wolf pack, not six-pack. "
"When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack. "
…a cookie to whoever can name who made these “profound” quotations, and another to the one who can name the only guy in the movie who found the profound quotes “non-sensical”
Mystery Men was the movie and Ben Stillers’ character ‘Mr.Furious’ was the one who saw through these ‘pearls of wisdom’.
I love that movie.
…gives Smam a cookie 
Half a cookie. The character making these statements was “The Sphinx.”
Yeah, yeah, he never asked for that little titbit so unhand my cookie.
I thought this thread was going to be about quotes from James Joyce. Meaningless word-hash which makes my head hurt.
“No matter where you go…”
Are you trying to tell me my sig isn’t profound?
All time is lost time.
What do ya’ll think of my new, temporary sig? Not really all that profound.
Overheard in the public restroom: “That’ll leave a skidmark all the way to the treatment plant!”
Hegel is a great source for this kind of stuff:
“The analysis of the beginning would thus yield the notion of the unity of being and nothing — or, in a more reflected form, the unity of differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness, or the identity of identity and non-identity.” — Science of Logic, Book I
“Truth is beauty; beauty, truth;
That is all you know in life and all you need to know.”
Hey, lay off the J-man. You don’t think “the heaventree of stars, hung with humid nightblue fruit” is a beautiful phrase? Sure they’re made-up words, but if it’s good enough for Shakespeare (“this hand would rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine”) and Homer (“the wine-dark sea”, although that’s an inaccurate translation), it’s good enough for me.
Uh, wow.
First of all, it’s "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. " Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
And, uh, it’s something that shook my brain like a thunderclap the first time I heard it. I meditate upon frequently. There’s a reason that people have been quoting it for almost two hundred years.
For someone of obvious learning and intelligence to dismiss it so . . .
staggers away, stunned and forlorn.
Upon observing the convoluted, complicated bowel-like structure of myoglobin, Max Perutz groaned:
“Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral an object?”
Podkayne:
Yeah, sorry to have screwed up the quote, I was going from memory. But in the category of profound but non-sensical, it’s high on the list. It sounds very profound, but when you analyze it, it’s nonsense. The first line is totally circular and thus meaningless. It’s attempting to define one philosophical concept as equal to the other, and then the second as equal to the first.
Second, asserting that all one knows is some metaphysical loop, and that is all one NEEDS to now? What total BS.
The thread was for stuff that sounds profound when you first encounter it – and this is a line that usually knocks teens for a loop, with the “Oh Wow!” that you mention. However, a little cold reflection, and it’s meaningless jibberish.
“Hoooow do you aaaaaahsk a maaaaaaaaahn to be the laaaaaaahst maaaaaahn to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie in Viet Naaaaaaahm?”
Well, it’s a nice, poetic phrase and all, but it’s completely and utterly wrong.
For one, the truth, while sometimes beautiful, is also often quite ugly.
Also, beauty cannot be truth, because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (Now, that’s a quote that makes sense). If everyone has a different sense of what is beautiful, then beauty can’t be truth, since truth, as a quality that exists independent of the human mind, can not change from one person to the next.
Perhaps meditating does not easily lend itself to the actual analysis of quotes.
One bit of nonsense that irritates me is “Those who don’t know history will repeat it”.
History does a lot of repeating, whether you know anything about it or not.
Firstly, most ‘profound’ quotes are gross generalisations. Eg. I don’t know about anyone else, but if I say “beauty is truth” I mean that often you can sense which explanation is better as it is more elegant, or rather, that I don’t know if you can in general, but you can in this case.
Secondly, some quotes just SOUND good.
Thirdly, but yes, it annoys me when someone presents as profound something that isn’t.
Shade
“What if the Hokey Kokey really IS what it’s all about?”