Frivolous Quotes - Page 5

• The frivolous work of polished idleness.

  James Mackintosh

  Work, Polished, Idleness

  James Mackintosh (1872). “On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy: Chiefly During the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries”, p.232

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• Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them.

  Michael Frayn

  Simple, Thinking, Play

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• Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

  David Lehman

  Hands, Your Side, Ideas

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dog, Sight, Cynical

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.407

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• I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Graves

  Sebastian Faulks (2007). “Engleby: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• Fashion is an illusion. It's a multibillion-pound industry that has to appear frivolous. Designers work and work and work, all night sometimes.

  Philip Treacy

  Fashion, Night, Pounds

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• If you have to design something, choose things that we need as opposed to frivolous things that we might just want for a month or two for bragging rights.

  Saul Griffith

  Rights, Two, Design

  "Built to Last". Good Magazine Interview, www.good.is. January 14, 2010.

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• My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Children, Sensual, Adults

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• Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

  Bernard Malamud

  Book, Would Be, Matter

  BERNARD MALAMUD (1979). “DUBLIN'S LIVES”

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• The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

  Victor Hugo

  Sleep, August, Paris

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

  Alan Bradley

  Children, Father, Book

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• To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Wish, Firsts, Serious

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• I make 98% of my collection in New York City and am generating jobs, so fashion isn't just frivolous for me. I understand levity about it. I also understand the depth of it.

  Prabal Gurung

  Fashion, Jobs, New York

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• Require nothing unreasonable of your officers and men, but see that whatever is required be punctually complied with. Reward and punish every man according to his merit, without partiality or prejudice; hear his complaints; if well founded, redress them; if otherwise, discourage them, in order to prevent frivolous ones. Discourage vice in every shape, and impress upon the mind of every man, from the first to the lowest, the importance of the cause, and what it is they are contending for.

  George Washington

  Men, Order, Mind

  George Washington (1989). “Maxims of George Washington: Political, Military, Social, Moral, and Religious”, Mount Vernon Ladies Assn of the

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• But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

  Bill Ayers

  Boys, Mind, Fool

  William Ayers (2009). “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist”, p.59, Beacon Press

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• Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that create the wants.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Want, Bizarre, Made

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.33, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A man's heart must be very frivolous if the possession of fame rewards the labor to attain it. For the worst of reputation is that it is not palpable or present - we do not feel or see or taste it.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Heart, Men, Rewards

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• Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous.

  Lillian Hellman

  War, Struggle, Ties

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• One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

  Susan Sontag

  Play, Serious

  Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.174, Macmillan

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• Dreams, puns, elisions, plays on words and similar tricks that we ordinarily think of as frivolous, all play a surprising and somewhat disconcerting role in the communication of important and serious feelings.

  Milton H. Erickson

  Dream, Communication, Thinking

  Milton H. Erickson, Ronald A. Havens (1992). “The Wisdom of Milton H. Erickson: Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy”, p.63, Ardent Media

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• Do not be frivolous with the gift of a day. Right now it's all you have. Yesterday is history.

  Robert Genn

  Time, Yesterday, Right Now

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• Nirvana is very funny. It's not sincere particularly. It's rather frivolous, actually.

  Frederick Lenz

  Enlightenment, Sincere

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• Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Country, Games, Joy

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.

  Jacques Barzun

  Mirrors, Feelings, Gadflies

  "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" by Jacques Barzun in "The Kenyon Review", Volume 5, No. 3 (pp. 321-345), Part II, www.jstor.org. Summer 1943.

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• Vanity is a desire of personal glory, the wish to be appreciated, honoured, and run after, not because of one's personal qualities, merits, and achievements, but because of one's individual existence. At best, therefore, it is a frivolous beauty whim it befits.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Running, Personal Qualities, Vanity

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.134, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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