Triviality Quotes

• We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

  Charles Bukowski

  Love, Death, Novelists

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “The Captain is Out to Lunch”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

  W. H. Auden

  Funny Friendship, Funny Best Friend, Differences

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• The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

  Quentin Crisp

  Relationship, Marriage, Successful

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• I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Believe, Mind, Habit

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.418, Simon and Schuster

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• You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Life Lesson, People, Rise Above

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• Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Memories, Not Good Enough, Persons

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• The Law of Triviality... briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Mean, Law, Agendas

  Parkinson's Law ch. 3 (1957)

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• I do not doubt but the majest and beauty of the world are latent
  in any iota of the world;
  I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects,
  vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse than
  I have supposed.

  Walt Whitman

  Weed, Doubt, World

  Walt Whitman (1861). “Leaves of Grass”, p.217

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• Not till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"-above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." shall we have it.

  Marianne Moore

  Real, Garden, Imagination

  'Poetry' (1935)

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• I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.

  Alain de Botton

  Mean, Connections, Needs

  Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.73, Penguin UK

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• The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

  David Riesman

  May, Novelty, Preoccupation

  David Riesman (1955). “Selected essays from Individualism reconsidered”

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• There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.

  Bertrand Russell

  Darkness Within, Vastness, Splendor

  Bertrand Russell (1998). “Autobiography”, p.393, Psychology Press

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• We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Focus, Vision

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.186, Courier Corporation

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• All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.

  Ernest Rutherford

  Science, Engineering, Understanding

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• Souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally with delight and rejoicing, and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.

  Jean-Pierre de Caussade

  Life, God, Soul

  Louis Lallemant, Jean Pierre de Caussade, Claude De La Colombiere, Jean-Pierre Lafouge (2006). “For God's Greater Glory: Gems of Jesuit Spirituality”, p.81, World Wisdom, Inc

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• We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Teacher, Book

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• They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Firsts, Steps, Common

  D. H. Lawrence (2016). “Sons and Lovers”, p.197, D. H. Lawrence

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• We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

  Charles Bukowski

  Circus, Dies

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “The Captain is Out to Lunch”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• As no darkness can be seen by anyone surrounded by light, so no trivialities can capture the attention of anyone who has his eyes on Christ.

  Gregory of Nyssa

  Eye, Light, Darkness

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• In presenting a mathematical argument the great thing is to give the educated reader the chance to catch on at once to the momentary point and take details for granted: two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse). The unpractised writer, even after the dawn of a conscience, gives him no such chance; before he can spot the point he has to tease his way through a maze of symbols of which not the tiniest suffix can be skipped.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Two, Giving, Add

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• But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

  E. M. Forster

  Character, Fighting, Artist

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.151, Stanford University Press

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• When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

  Aldo Leopold

  Growing Up, Children, Mind

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.151, Library of America

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• Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them.

  Emily Post

  Doe, Manners, Made

  Emily Post (2007). “Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home”, p.2, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I think every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality.

  Judy Cannato

  Thinking, Discovery, Environmental

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• Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia. ...Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities...In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines.

  J. Paul Getty

  Dark, Pressure Groups, Focus

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