Triviality Quotes - Page 2

• Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Life, Book

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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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• To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

  Nevil Shute

  Airplane, Climbing, Flying

  Nevil Shute (1954). “Slide rule: the autobiography of an engineer”

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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 hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality, from 'sensation' alone.

  Burton Silverman

  Hope, Art, Bridges

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• We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

  Oscar Wilde

  Serious Things, Sincere, Should

  Oscar Wilde (2004). “The Best of Oscar Wilde: Selected Plays and Writings”, p.23, Penguin

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• Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Roots, People, Principles

  Millicent Fenwick (1948). “Vogue's book of etiquette: a complete guide to traditional forms and modern usage”

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• The marvellous instinct with which women are usually credited seems too often to desert them on the only occasions when it would be of any real use. One would say it was there for trivialities only, since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.

  Ada Leverson

  Real, Men, Intuition

  Ada Leverson (1962). “The little Ottleys: Love's shadow. Tenterhooks. Love at second sight”

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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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• We believe that arithmetic as it has been taught in grade schools until quite recently has such a meagre intellectual content that the oft-noted reaction against the subject is not an unfortunate rebellion against a difficult subject, but a perfectly proper response to a preoccupation with triviality.

  Lynn Steen

  Believe, School, Intellectual

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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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• The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.

  George Henry Lewes

  Artist, Phrases, Use

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical.The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men's continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.

  Mary Blakely

  Crush, Daughter, Home

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• Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more actively than he loves me (having realized that nobody will ever love me in that overabundant, overexpressive, overthoughtful, overhuman way I love people), and so I will wait for him. So I ask taxi driver to drop me at the Galeries Lafayette, where I begin to look for a new hat and to shop for Christmas. Pride? I don't know. A kind of wise retreat. I need people too much. So I bury my gigantic defect, my overflow of love, under trivialities, like a child. I amuse myself with a new hat.

  Anais Nin

  Wise, Children, Pride

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• Nothing is more needed among preachers today than that we should have the courage to shake ourselves free from the thousand and one trivialities in which we are asked to waste our time and strength, and resolutely return to the apostolic ideal which made necessary the office of the diaconate. We must resolve that we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the Word.

  G. Campbell Morgan

  Prayer, Should Have, Office

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• He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

  E. M. Forster

  Order, Two, Perfection

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• I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time, should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual.

  Henry R. Luce

  Epic, Should, Factual

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• It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge.

  George Eliot

  Men, Joy, Forever

  George Eliot (1873). “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life”, p.148

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• Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.

  Erich Fromm

  Mean, Men, Psychics

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• The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

  Alan K. Simpson

  Training, Mind, Spirit

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• When one writes, there’s the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Writing, Horror, Discovering

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• Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.

  Anne Bronte

  Real, Moving, Thinking

  Anne Bronte (2016). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Diversion Illustrated Classics)”, p.98, Diversion Books

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• Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Greatness, Mind, Matter

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• There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth

  Niels Bohr

  Spiritual, Opposites, Two

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• This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

  Anna Funder

  Dream, Real, Together

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