Top 35 Superfluous Quotes

The way the media tends to cover fashion is as this superfluous, vacuous industry. They focus on models and shows, but behind all that is a massive global industry.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.

In the 20th century alone, there have been 1,600 books about the circus. My adding one more would be superfluous unless I do something totally new and different.

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid – in which case all comment is superfluous – or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

Sideline reporting may look insidious, superfluous, or just a total waste of airtime from where you sit – probably on a couch or a recliner, perhaps on a bar stool in your local brewery – but let me assure you, if you’re one of the handful who take it as seriously as some of my colleagues do, it is anything but.

However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.

I think, when I was younger, I was cooking to impress. Sometimes the dish would have 15 things on the plate. That’s cooking only for yourself. As you get more mature, you take all the superfluous things away, and you get the essential flavor. Now I cook for people, not for myself.

The problem is the following, black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

My writing tends to become very dense, so I have to keep some cushion. Sometimes, words that seem superfluous are actually essential for the overall effect.

I love the idea of 3D, but it’s completely superfluous to most stories.

Laughter relieves us of superfluous energy, which, if it remained unused, might become negative, that is, poison. Laughter is the antidote.

Foreign players are great for Serie A if they add something extra, but a lot of them are superfluous.

I think it’s a mistake to think, ‘Am I going to write a young adult book, or do I desperately want to write a book for adults?’ I think the better ambition is to try to write someone’s favorite book, because those categorizations of adult, young adult, become kind of superfluous.

Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated.

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

Through your life, most people peel away the junk that’s not useful, that’s superfluous. You are determined to peel that away. I do one thing at a time. One man at a time. One car. One house. One child. One job.

If your attention is on superfluous aspects that are not part of the story, then you can’t be concentrating on the human realities of the piece.

Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

Modeling is a lonely business… You don’t speak. You don’t really portray anything but an image… the business is so superfluous about dealing with the outside, it messes with your mind.

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, ‘What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?’

Art is a mind-game that we do to make our lives easier. If it isn’t for that, it becomes superfluous.

I don’t live in Los Angeles and I don’t do a lot of superfluous press.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what’s true.

It’s a good thing I was born in this century, when superfluous television seems to be part of the economy.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous.

Let us assume that the ideal were reached; let us imagine a state of international life in which the danger of war no longer exists. Then no one would dare to demand a penny for obviously completely superfluous armaments.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.