Banalities Quotes

What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it. ~ Christian Wiman

Even when there are banalities, they're usually kind of benign banalities. ~ Michael McKean

In the face of death, he had nothing to lose by speaking of the intimacies of love. Yet, in the face of life, he could speak only of its banalities. ~ Gerard Brooker

The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude. ~ Francine Prose

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or ~ Robert Lane Greene

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.
In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly). ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried," she said, "was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all. ~ Shirley Jackson

Dan: Thats what I love about music.
Gretta: What?
Dan: One of the most banal scenes
is suddenly invested...
with so much meaning.
All these banalities.
Theyre suddenly turned into these...
these beautiful, effervescent pearls.
From music. ~ Begin Again

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

Between the tragedies and heroics there are the everyday banalities of war. ~ Ada Maria Soto

In 1939 I wrote my first article ("Intime banaliteter" [Intimate banalities] in the journal Helhesten ) in which I expressed my love for sofa painting, and for the last twenty years I have been preoccupied with the idea of rendering homage to it. Thus I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection. Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting. ~ Asger Jorn

For one of the peculiarities about prejudice is that it seems always to speak from the heart; it seems, in some daring way, to be speaking the truth, to be saying what others secretly believe, but do not have the courage to say themselves. And the man who speaks against prejudice can often come to seem like the peddler of shopworn banalities, while the voice of prejudice can seem bold and original; a lone voice with the power to drown out others, the power to subdue. ~ Aatish Taseer

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas? ~ Paul Cezanne

His words are not the uncompromising utterances of politicians or the sanctimonious banalities that try to appease everyone's good conscience. Rather, ~ Jose Angel N.

So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality that we carry. We don't know that we're alive as long as we haven't encountered death: these are the banalities that have been erased. And is isan act of grace. ~ Helene Cixous

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

When we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleeping, that I heard the footsteps of the long-dead; I have held conversations with them, and with the blank-faced people I was yet to meet, conversations that seemed of unbearable poignancy, though when I woke I could remember only a few words, and those not words that possessed, waking, any emotional significance to me. It is said that this is because content is divorced from emotion in sleep, as though the sleeping mind read two books at once, one of tears and lust and laughter, the other words and phrases picked up from old newspapers, from grimy handbills blowing along the street and conversations overheard in barbershops and bars, and the banalities of radio. I think rather that we have forgotten on waking what the words have meant to us, or have not learned as yet what they will mean. But the worst thing is to wake and remember that we have been talking to the dead, having never thought to hear that voice again, having never any expectation of hearing it again before we ourselves are gone. ~ Gene Wolfe

That's what I love about music ... all these banalities suddenly turn into these beautiful, effervescent pearls. ~ Mark Ruffalo

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities. ~ Boris Pasternak

He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing
so it was my duty to loathe him instead. ~ Jonathan Lethem

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

Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon ~ Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. ~ Tom McDonough

In fact, she rather liked it, and found that their mutual lack of language skills freed them from the banalities of conversation. ~ Violet Kupersmith

That's what I love about music.
- What?
- One of the most banal scenes
is suddenly invested
with so much meaning, you know?
All these banalities,
they're suddenly turned
into these...
these beautiful, effervescent pearls.
From music.
I've got to say, as I've gotten older,
these pearls are just...
...becoming increasingly
more and more rare to me.
More string than pearls?
Yeah. You've got to travel
over a lot more string
to get to the pearls.
This moment is a pearl, Gretta.
It sort of is, isn't it?
All this has been a pearl. ~ Begin Again

English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities. ~ Elspeth Huxley

The fact that nine-tenths of all the smutty literature, artistic tripe and theatrical banalities, had to be charged to the account of people who formed scarcely one per cent. of the nation - that fact could not be gainsaid. It was there, and had to be admitted. ~ Adolf Hitler

Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life. [Spirituality for the Skeptic] ~ Robert C. Solomon

Nonetheless, the bigger problem has little to do with any particular product or industry, but with the way we look at risk. America takes the Hollywood approach, going to extremes to avoid the rare but dramatic risk
the chance that minutes residues of pesticide applied to our food will kill us, or that we will die in a plane crash ...
... On the other hand, we constantly expose ourselves to the likely risks of daily life, riding bicycles (and even motorcycles) without helmets, for example. We think nothing of exceeding the speed limit, and rarely worry about the safety features of the cars we drive. The dramatic rarities, like plane crashes, don't kill us. The banalities of everyday life do. ~ Michael Specter