Quotes About Banality

I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality.

The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is. The worst thing that we can tell you at a place like Princeton is that you can have it all." He scanned the small group around him and brushed the leathery buttons holding his vest tightly over his large body. "Well," he said. "You can't.

They didn't understand that evil could grow if planted in a field of banal cruelty.

There seemed no particular object in avoiding banality from the start, as the evening showed every sign of developing into a banal one.

Mi dica, dottore, a cosa serve avere determinate facoltà se non c'è modo di impiegarle? Il delitto è banale, la vita è banale, e soltanto le qualità banali hanno ormai una funzione sulla terra.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion...Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality -- a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life

The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?… Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clichés.

Les grands moments de l'existence, les naissances, la maladie, la mort ont le don de vous ramener à l'extrême banalité et de vous faire monter aux lèvres ces expressions toute faites, nées de la sagesse populaire, et qui traduisent mieux qu'un langage savant les réactions viscérales (47).

When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

As?l sorun tam da Eichmann gibi onlarca insan?n olmas?ndan, onlarcas?n?n ne sap?k ne de sadist olmas?ndan; ne yaz?k ki hepsinin eskiden de, ÅŸimdi de dehÅŸet verici biçimde normal olmas?ndan kaynaklan?yordu. s.281

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.

... love is banality to all outsiders.

Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For 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 popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.

There is no community service in 'Seinfeld.' But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it.

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.

The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.