Quotes About Triviality

You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

People don't talk about anything." "Oh, they must!" "No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell!

Perhaps it's not a matter of unimportant sites, but unimportant archaeologists.

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation

Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

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

Trivial Pursuit means that you've got nothing going on in your life. Trivial Pursuit is more than a board game. It is the way most people live. Their lives are trivial pursuits.

We pride ourselves on nothing but the courage to be trivial. For a person is simple in his striving for truth, and it is honest to admit this openly.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

I can't kill myself, I thought. I'm too insignificant. I'm nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the first-floor window of a skyscraper, a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea along with millions of tons of raw sewage, a squirrel eating a nut as a car bore down on him.

The reason all of this is so horrible," McVries said, "is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities.

That's great. Except for the fact that it's completely unimportant.

You speak an infinite deal of nothing.

the most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that's even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that.

The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.

The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

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.

All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.

The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams.

Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.

As Kierkegaard sums it up "The loss of possibility signifies either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial. Actually, in the extreme of depressive psychosis, we seem to see the merger of these two. Everything becomes necessary and trivial at the same time, which leads to complete despair.

The reality from my vantage point was that 50 billion years from now, when the earth is nothing but an ice ball, my problems of today will be too insignificant to have been recorded. Indeed, there would undoubtedly not even be a record of the entire century in which I had lived most of my life.