Aimless meaning

Adjective: aimless

Pronunciation:(eym-lus)

Aimless meaning:

• Aimlessly drifting

Synonyms: adrift, afloat, directionless, planless, rudderless, undirected

• Continually changing especially as from one abode or occupation to another

Synonyms: drifting, floating, vagabond, vagrant
Quotations:

1. Jonathan Safran Foer – He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
2. Jess C. Scott – Maybe you could be mine or maybe we’ll be entwined or aimless in this sexless foreplay.
3. Anton Chekhov – Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable. They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don’t make a scandal when they leave. 2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. 3) They respect other people’s property, and therefore pay their debts. 4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don’t tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don’t put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don’t show off to impress their juniors. 5) They don’t run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don’t play on other people’s heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted … that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it’s vulgar, old hat and false. 6) They are not vain. They don’t waste time with the fake jewelry of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar. They regard phrases like ‘I am a representative of the Press!!’  the sort of thing one only hears from very minor journalists as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing’s work they don’t pass it off as if it were 100 roubles’ by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don’t boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren’t allowed in. True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight. As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. 7) If they do possess talent, they value it. They take pride in it, they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on others rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. 8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility. Civilized people don’t simply obey their baser instincts. And so on. That’s what civilized people are like. Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.
4. Susan Cain – Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you’ll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off.
5. Rob Liano – If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it.If you don’t know what you deserve, you’ll always settle for less.You will wander aimlessly, uncomfortably numb in your comfort zone, wondering how life has ended up here. Life starts now, live, love, laugh and let your light shine!
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald – There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
7. Catherynne M. Valente – And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
8. O. Henry – The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.
9. Rick Riordan – The main thing about ghosts most of them have lost their voices. In Asphodel, millions of them wander around aimlessly, trying to remember who they were. You know why they end up like that? Because in life they never took a stand one way or another. They never spoke out, so they were never heard. Your voice is your identity. If you don’t use it, Nico said with a shrug, you’re halfway to Asphodel already. He hated when his own advice applied to himself.
10. Colleen Hoover – I am translucent, aquatic. Drifting, aimless. She is an anchor, sinking in my sea.

Sample sentences:

1. So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: I was a beautiful girl Pleased on go I too believe my body is made of glass-I’ve never loved anyone I think of myself as funny Forgive me.There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string. The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.
2. Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous!Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile.Other people have what they need;I alone possess nothing.I alone drift about,like someone without a home.I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.Other people are bright;I alone am dark.Other people are sharp;I alone am dull.Other people have purpose;I alone don’t know.I drift like a wave on the ocean,I blow as aimless as the wind.I am different from ordinary people.I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.
3. You feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay That’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four.
4. A wind that blows aimlessly is no good to anyone.
5. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.
6. Patience Patience and Love agreed to meet at a set time and place; beneath the twenty-third tree in the olive orchard. Patience arrived promptly and waited. She checked her watch every so often but still, there was no sign of Love. Was it the twenty-third tree or the fifty-sixth? She wondered and decided to check, just in case. As she made her way over to the fifty-sixth tree, Love arrived at twenty-three, where Patience was noticeably absent. Love waited and waited before deciding he must have the wrong tree and perhaps it was another where they were supposed to meet. Meanwhile, Patience had arrived at the fifty-sixth tree, where Love was still nowhere to be seen. Both begin to drift aimlessly around the olive orchard, almost meeting but never do. Finally, Patience, who was feeling lost and resigned, found herself beneath the same tree where she began. She stood there for barely a minute when there was a tap on her shoulder.
7. Now, this pair,” he waved the shoes he held, “are new. They haven’t been walked a mile, and for new shoes like these I charge a talent, maybe a talent and two.” He pointed at my feet. “Those shoes, on the other hand, are used, and I don’t sell used shoes.”He turned his back on me and started to tidy his workbench rather aimlessly, humming to himself. I knew that he was trying to do me a favor, and a week ago I would have jumped at the opportunity for free shoes. But for some reason I didn’t feel right about it. I quietly gathered up my things and left a pair of copper jots on his stool before I left.Why? Because pride is a strange thing, and because generosity deserves generosity in return. But mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, and that is reason enough.
8. What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian’s. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.I found myself in a strange deserted city an old city, like London underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors. There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below.I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple click click click the Pyramids the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment.’I thought I’d find you here,’ said a voice at my elbow.It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple.I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. ‘You know,’ I said to him, ‘everybody is saying that you’re dead.’He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum click click click the Pantheon. ‘I’m not dead,’ he said. ‘I’m only having a bit of trouble with my passport.”What?’He cleared his throat. ‘My movements are restricted,’ he said.’I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.’Hagia Sophia. St. Mark’s, in Venice. ‘What is this place?’ I asked him.’That information is classified, I’m afraid.’1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor.’Is it open to the public?’ I said.’Not generally, no.’I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn’t time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.’Are you happy here?’ I said at last.He considered this for a moment. ‘Not particularly,’ he said.’But you’re not very happy where you are, either.’St. Basil’s, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch.’I hope you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I’m late for an appointment.’He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.
9. His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn’t got anything to say yet and shut it again. His brain then started to contend with the problem of what his eyes told it they were looking at, but in doing so relinquished control of the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control of his left hand which then wandered around in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and simultaneously tried to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground.
10. Yet if there’s no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children’s answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
11. Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.
12. This is why Paul upholds the teaching of the gospel in such a forceful way Seeing such an example and such a picture of man’s great weakness and fickleness, Paul states that the truth of the gospel must supersede anything that we may devise he is showing us that we ought to know the substance of the doctrine which is brought to us in the name of God, so that our faith can be fully grounded upon it. Then we will not be tossed about with every wind, nor will we wander about aimlessly, changing our opinions a hundred times a day; we will persist in this doctrine until the end. This, in brief, is what we must remember.
13. Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water.
14. Not a breath, not a sound except at intervals the muffled crackling of stones that the cold was reducing to sand disturbed the solitude and silence surrounding Janine. After a moment, however, it seemed to her that the sky above her was moving in a sort of slow gyration. In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually towards the horizon. Janine could not tear herself away from contemplating those drifting flares. She was turning with them, and the apparently stationary progress little by little identified her with the core of her being, where cold and desire were now vying with each other. Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. At the same time, she seemed to recover her roots and the sap again rose in her body, which had ceased trembling. Her whole belly pressed against the parapet as she strained towards the moving sky; she was merely waiting for her fluttering heart to calm down and establish silence within her. The last stars of the constellations dropped their clusters a little lower on the desert horizon and became still. Then, with unbearable gentleness, the water of night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the hidden core of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans. The next moment, the whole sky stretched out over her, fallen on her back on the cold earth.
15. It should have been, but that’s the weather for you. For every mad scientist who’s had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.
16. Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill,To pangs of nature, sins of will,Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy’d, Or cast as rubbish to the void,When God hath made the pile complete;That not a worm is cloven in vain;That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,Or but sub serves another’s gain. Behold, we know not anything;I can but trust that good shall fall At last far off at last, to all,And every winter change to spring.So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night:An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
17. At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
18. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.
19. If we would give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
20. Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story.
21. Englishman Steve Way was overweight and aimless until he found the marathon runner lurking inside the couch potato.
22. High-school students who take gap years before college aren’t just aimless drifters, an expert says.
23. We should not be surprised that United’s increasingly aimless players did not prove us wrong.
24. New research proves young sea turtles aren’t aimless drifters, but active swimmers.
25. They have been rather aimless at times but credibility has arrived in Europe.
26. A roadtrip that aims for relational insight but winds up simply aimless.
27. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.
28. May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.
29. An aimless wanderer wears away his legs.
30. D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle will come off the bench for the foreseeable future, another surprising development in an aimless season.