Triviality Quotes - Page 3

A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.

Walter Gropius

Lying, Design, Building

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What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard

Dying, Persons

Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.82, Canongate Books

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The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

Elizabeth Drew

Sympathy, Gossip, Grace

Elizabeth Drew (1964). “The Literature of Gossip”

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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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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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Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.

Maurice Samuel

Two, Differences, Years

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In one sense what may pass between the pope and myself may be trivialities. In another sense the fact of talking trivialities is itself a portent of great significance. But the pleasantries which we exchange may, as one church leader said, be pleasantries about profundities.

Geoffrey Fisher

Talking, Leader, Church

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Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely.

Henry Hazlitt

Champion, Rubbish, Firsts

Henry Hazlitt (1971). “Man Vs. the Welfare State”, p.210, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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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; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.

Emily Post

Attitude, Character, Personality

Emily Post, Elizabeth L. Post (1984). “Emily Post's Etiquette”, HarperCollins Publishers

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In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

Henry James

Art, Drama, Essence

Henry James (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry James (Illustrated)”, p.13640, Delphi Classics

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Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

Edward Bernays

Writing, Data, Mind

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I pity the babies whose mothers are busy texting trivialities instead of playing with their children; I pity the children who are tethered to their cell phones instead of playing ball; I pity the adolescents who are wasting their best years holding one of those artefacts instead of the hand of another young person.

Mario Bunge

Mother, Baby, Children

Source: deutsche-denker.de

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The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.

Christopher Morley

Kindness, Book, Lovely

Christopher Morley (1933). “Christopher Morley's omnibus: an excursion among the books of Christopher Morley”

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... those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena - care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!

Herbert Spencer

Queens, Men, Heaven

Herbert Spencer (1866). “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical”, p.83

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To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)

Charlotte Bronte

Eye, Heart, Character

Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.213, Penguin

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Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Philosophy, Religion, Today

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Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

Max Beerbohm

Inspiration, Matter, Nonsense

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I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world... Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.

G. H. Hardy

Differences, Creating, Escaping

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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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The event of falling in love... in one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.

C. S. Lewis

Falling In Love, Wall, Events

C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.126, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities; in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.

Soren Kierkegaard

Taken, Risk, Too Much

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To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.

William Plomer

Honesty, Appetite For Life, Effectiveness

Robert Francis Kilvert, William Plomer (1969). “Kilvert's diary: selections from the diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1 January 1870-[13 March 1879]”, Jonathan Cape

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The less one remembers about the day before, the more the new day will be unfettered by triviality.

George Benson

Memories, New Day, Remember

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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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Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality.

Harold Rosenberg

Notebook, Art, Future

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