Banality quotes:

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There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art. -- Douglas Sirk
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches. -- Eugene Ionesco
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. -- Nathalie Sarraute
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. -- Christopher Lasch
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 passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love. -- Francois Pinault
Banality is sometimes striking. -- Marguerite Duras
In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it. -- Machado de Assis
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. -- Anton Chekhov
He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities. -- Boris Pasternak
Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world. -- Diana Vreeland
u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality. -- Glenn Gould
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. -- Gustave Flaubert
I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition. -- Doug Aitken
There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons. -- Stephanie Mills
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
Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate. -- Perry Anderson
[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. -- Hannah Arendt
She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure. -- Thrity Umrigar
My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. -- Max Beckmann
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. -- Susan Sontag
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
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else. -- Alice Munro
The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead. -- Michael Jackson
First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. -- Philip Zimbardo
My life is short. I can't listen to banality. -- V. S. Naipaul
There is no community service in 'Seinfeld.' But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it. -- Jason Alexander
The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success. -- Richard Flanagan
You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.' -- Bono
... love is banality to all outsiders. -- Mae West
The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality. -- Dag Hammarskjold
Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality. -- Jean Baudrillard
Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them. -- Christian Marclay
Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality? -- Studs Terkel
Iâ??ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me, -- Chris Marker
We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not. -- Frank Gehry
I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality. -- Lori Nelson
My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life. -- Carl Jung
Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened. -- Thrity Umrigar
It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish. -- James Joyce
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no community service in Seinfeld. But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it. -- Jason Alexander
Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not. -- Edwin Newman
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. -- Teju Cole
It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror. -- Jean Lorrain
It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality. -- Jean Baudrillard
Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. -- Nelson Goodman
Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions. -- Perry Brass
Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth. -- Emile M. Cioran
Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. -- Barry N. Malzberg
Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that. -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars. -- Andre Gide
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

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