Banal quotes:

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Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution. -- Sol LeWitt
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. -- Robert Smithson
Twitter has to be about art. It can't be about banal things. Banal things and art are two different worlds. -- Alex Scally
Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal. Interesting people can find something interesting in all things. -- Idries Shah
The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics. -- Asger Jorn
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. -- Mary McCarthy
To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable. -- Annette Funicello
A lot of things trigger my inspiration. It can be the most banal things. -- Manolo Blahnik
Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it. -- Aidan Chambers
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life. -- Anne Michaels
It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. -- Guy Debord
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not. -- Raoul Vaneigem
To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they've known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is. -- Christina Ricci
I never represented glam. That's the thing, you'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it. I find it trivial and banal and boring. -- Jamie Lee Curtis
L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card. -- Geoff Mulgan
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies. -- Edward Norton
Music is as integral to me as my own DNA. My life has become a continual soundtrack, with music underscoring the most powerful and even the most banal moments of my life. -- Danielle de Niese
People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important. -- James Gleick
I think of myself as a very ordinary person. I like writing about the juxtaposition between people: the beauty of them at times and then the banal, everyday context in which we find ourselves. -- Rachel Joyce
If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day. -- Alexander Payne
As a child, the person I admired most in the world was Lana Turner! She seemed the epitome of glamour, and her glitzy surroundings so enviable, the opposite of my mother's extremely banal taste. -- Lee Radziwill
I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that. -- J. Tillman
There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them. -- Peter Weir
You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child's heart. -- Hilary Mantel
Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. -- Seth Shostak
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. -- John Updike
There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal. -- Kate Braverman
The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten. -- Rob Sheffield
One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. -- Ira Glass
Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage. -- Gustave Flaubert
How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean. -- David Foster
There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal. -- Edward Abbey
Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence. -- Anthony Giddens
I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects. -- Josef Sudek
Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life'; banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'. -- Criss Jami
The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted. -- Miuccia Prada
Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. -- Frank Gehry
In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. -- Milton Glaser
Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal. -- Jesse Ball
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened. -- Jean Baudrillard
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? -- Joyce Carol Oates
You'll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be just a wave (...) Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth -- Karen Marie Moning
A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within. -- Katharine Whitehorn
Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in conceptâ?¦ The plastic asshole of the world. -- William Faulkner
We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. -- Werner Herzog
I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting. -- George Saunders
There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter. -- Julia Child
The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity. -- Deepak Chopra
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines. -- Edward Abbey
The thing about filming is that it can be the most banal experience because it's slow and there's a lot of waiting around. -- Tom Burke
I'm a total atheist, and for me it's just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living. -- Myla Goldberg
Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting. -- Iain Banks
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal. -- Leslie Jamison
The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. -- Frank Herbert
You'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it; I find it trivial and banal and boring. -- Jamie Lee Curtis
I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary. -- Bryan Magee
What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life. -- Ezra Furman
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. -- Henry Miller
The deviant that does not observe the trivial uses of the language is a poet, a deviant who violates the banal customs of society is a criminal. -- William C. Brown
I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream. -- Salman Rushdie
Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be. -- Marcus Aurelius
No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin. -- David Nicholls
I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. -- Christopher Hitchens
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows. -- Doris Lessing
To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder. -- Jane Jacobs
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. -- Zadie Smith
I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday - the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness - is where success, let alone happiness, emerges. -- Joshua Waitzkin
Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'Ã©tat, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way. -- John Ralston Saul
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the â??Oh how banal.â?? -- David Foster Wallace
If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day, -- Alexander Payne
It's nice that I can go down the road of obsessing over this smiley-face bullshit so maybe I can get free from it and think about something else-it's so banal and yet so crazy! -- Nate Lowman
Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that's boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let's say that an artist deals with banality. I don't care what the discipline is. -- Garry Winogrand
Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies. -- Alan Dean Foster
The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed. -- Charlotte Cotton
Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal ... yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently. -- Lucio Russo

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