Triviality quotes:

Send

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
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. -- W. H. Auden
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
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
Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil. -- Theodor Adorno
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? -- Annie Dillard
To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities. -- Nevil Shute
A scrap of knowledge about sublime things is worth more than any amount about trivialities. -- Thomas Aquinas
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. -- Neil Postman
When we blather about trivial things, we ourselves become trivial, for our attention gets taken up with trivialities. You become what you give your attention to. -- Epictetus
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
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
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
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
Allow me, whom Fortune always desires to bury, lay down my life in these final trivialities. Many have freely died in longlasting loves, among whose number may the earth cover me as well. -- Propertius
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
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
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
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
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
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. -- John Piper
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
If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions. -- Nevil Shute
... 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
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person? -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Despite the absurdity and the silliness and the triviality of the entire campaign experience, there is also something, as non-cynical as this sounds, kind of uplifting and strange about watching democracy unfold. -- Michael Hastings
Books are a triviality. Life alone is great. -- Thomas Carlyle
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality. -- Eugene Ionesco
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? -- Annie Dillard
The less one remembers about the day before, the more the new day will be unfettered by triviality. -- George Benson
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend. -- Aleksandar Hemon
Science is an organized pursuit of triviality.Art is a casual pursuit of significance.Let's keep it in perspective. -- Vera Nazarian
You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster -- Quentin Crisp
I think every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality. -- Judy Cannato
We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality. -- Oscar Wilde
I hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality, from 'sensation' alone. -- Burton Silverman
--
Content may by trivial. But I do not think that any person may pronounce either upon the weight or upon the triviality of an idea before its execution. -- Ben Shahn
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

Send