Trivialities Quotes

He was also glad that Wainwright was late, for that would give him a slight moral advantage when the interview opened. Such trivialities played a greater part in human affairs than anyone who set much store on logic and reason might wish. ~ Anonymous

To see you is to forget my name.
To forget this tight collar
and that delayed train.
To forget the conflict with the landlady
and the worry that my students won't like me.
These trifles lose themselves
in the valleys of your brows
and the seas of your hair.

To see you is to forget my name.
To forget if it matters what I do
and whether what I do matters.
To forget who I think I am
and who I think I ought to become.
To forget every past moment
and unremember
every moment to come.

To see you is to forget my name.
To forget myself
and forget the world.
These trivialities drown themselves
in the dark eyes that stare back at me.
Because to see you is to see
you.
Only you. ~ Kamand Kojouri

In presenting a mathematical argument the great thing is to give the educated reader the chance to catch on at once to the momentary point and take details for granted: two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse). The unpractised writer, even after the dawn of a conscience, gives him no such chance; before he can spot the point he has to tease his way through a maze of symbols of which not the tiniest suffix can be skipped. ~ John Edensor Littlewood

Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. ~ Edward Bernays

The conversations rests uneasily; one doesn't expect good-byes to be burdened by such trivialities. This is not how it is in the books, he thinks, or in the theater, and he feels the need to speak of mission, of duty, of love. They reach home and close the door and he doesn't drop her hand. Where speech fails, touch compensates. ~ Daniel Mason

In the face of a threat to the survival of the species, all these planetside trivialities are put aside until the crisis passes. ~ Orson Scott Card

Man's condition ought to impel him to seek to discover whether there is a God and a solution to his predicament. But people occupy their time and their thoughts with trivialities and distractions, so as to avoid the despair, boredom, and anxiety that would inevitably result if those diversions were removed. ~ William Lane Craig

The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Soon the two men were chattering away sounding excited, they could only be discussing trivialities yet their voices, their gestures might lead the observer to suppose they were arguing about life and death. Such was the Greek manner of conversation. ~ Margaret Yorke

Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia ... Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities ... In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines. ~ J. Paul Getty

Pilate's Admonition, is made up of tiny details, 'trivialities a thousand times repeated'. The face of each figure 'with so much searching, so many faults and corrections, he had evolved with its own character, each representing so much pain and pleasure, and all of them so often placed and replaced to obtain harmony'. Yet ~ Leo Tolstoy

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life ... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be. ~ Emily Post

A scrap of knowledge about sublime things is worth more than any amount about trivialities. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Nothing by chance, nothing is random, nothing is in vain, nothing is trivial ~ Miguel El Portugues

When I came here, I was deeply depressed. Now I'm proud to say I'm insane. Outside I'll behave exactly like everyone else. I'll go shopping at the supermarket, I'll exchange trivialities with my friends, I'll waste precious time watching television. But I know that my soul is free and that I can dream and talk with other worlds that, before I came here, I didn't even imagine existed. ~ Paulo Coelho

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. ~ Quentin Crisp

He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension. ~ Thomas Hardy

Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles. ~ Millicent Fenwick

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians? ~ Peter Berger

Suppose... that you acquit me... Suppose that, in view of this, you said to me 'Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard Anytus and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.' Well, supposing, as I said, that you should offer to acquit me on these terms, I should reply 'Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying, in my usual way, "My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?" And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him; no, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress towards goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone t ~ Socrates

If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical.The hostilities that arise over housework ... are crushing the daughters of my generation ... Change takes time, but men's continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities. ~ Mary Blakely

All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

I do not doubt but the majest and beauty of the world are latent
in any iota of the world;
I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects,
vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse than
I have supposed. ~ Walt Whitman

The marvellous instinct with which women are usually credited seems too often to desert them on the only occasions when it would be of any real use. One would say it was there for trivialities only, since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women. ~ Ada Leverson

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth ~ Niels Bohr

This segregation is confirmed by the common stereotypes of these two disciplines and their representatives. While scientists are perceived as absentminded, casually dressed individuals who live in a refined world of abstract theory with little practical reality, lawyers are usually perceived as formally dressed people who are practically oriented, concentrating mainly on trivialities (such as negotiating their retaining fee) and engaging professionally in all sorts of nitty-gritty social intercourse - the kind of things that normal people, although worried by them, would rather not have to deal with themselves. ~ Fritjof Capra

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge. ~ George Eliot

Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip. ~ Kit Fine

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. ~ H.L. Mencken

You have a case, Holmes?" I remarked. "The faculty of deduction is certainly contagious, Watson," he answered. "It has enabled you to probe my secret. Yes, I have a case. After a month of trivialities and stagnation the wheels move once more. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. ~ Edward L. Bernays

To plunge into passionate dispute over the trivialities of so-called honor is a queerer but not uncommon gambit of men who have just come from putting their lives at stake in serious combat, ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities; in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

To put your life in danger from time to time ... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities. ~ Nevil Shute

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know. ~ Anna Funder

Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more actively than he loves me (having realized that nobody will ever love me in that overabundant, overexpressive, overthoughtful, overhuman way I love people), and so I will wait for him. So I ask taxi driver to drop me at the Galeries Lafayette, where I begin to look for a new hat and to shop for Christmas. Pride? I don't know. A kind of wise retreat. I need people too much. So I bury my gigantic defect, my overflow of love, under trivialities, like a child. I amuse myself with a new hat. ~ Anais Nin

What you are looking for?" I asked him.

He contemplated for few seconds, looked towards a playing child nearby and then replied back in an excited tone, "There is surely a thirst in me, but for what I don't know; there is surely a hunger in me, but for what I don't know and let me assure you it is not related to the trivialities of life - better job, better sex and other luxuries. What attract others may not appeal to me, their passions may appear mundane to me and yet I realize there is a strong bond that connects us all"

"The question still remains the same, what exactly it is?" I asked.

"I wish, I knew that" He replied back.

"In spite of not knowing you still appear pretty much excited about it" I said.

"Hmm" He nodded back in approval. ~ Rabjot Singh

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

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter. ~ Max Beerbohm

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. ~ Richard Bachman

Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely. ~ Henry Hazlitt

One of the most horrible realities about the death of someone closely related, she remembered, was the necessity of going on almost immediately with the trivialities of living. As though nothing of any real significance had changed. ~ Mary Balogh

The starry sky is the truest friend in life, when you first become acquainted; it is ever there, it gives ever peace, ever reminds you that your restlessness, your doubt, your pains are passing trivialities. The universe is and will remain unshaken. Our opinions, our struggles, or sufferings are not so important and unique, when all is said and done. ~ Fridtjof Nansen

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part. ~ Edith Wharton

The significance of each change of season is easily buried in the smallest of life's mundanities and trivialities. Yet, the true consequence of time's passage is there, blaring within the subtle disguise of a whisper for all who would listen. ~ Alpha Four

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

A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities. ~ Walter Gropius

He was empty within. There was no stimulus, no absorbing task into which he could throw himself. But his nervous activity, his inability to be quiet, ... had indeed taken the upper hand and become his master. It was something artificial, a pressure on the nerves, a depressant, in fact ... This craving for activity had become a martyrdom, but it was dissipated in a host of trivialities. ~ Thomas Mann

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

There is a maiden in distress, sir; we have no time for trivialities such as the lack of experience. ~ Nicole Sager

You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves. ~ D.T. Suzuki

So you can't make a living as a novelist - why not try farming or teaching? Or even begging - what difficulties would that present? Were you born into the world to make a living? Or have you another aim, that of becoming a novelist or something akin? If you want to become a novelist but are worried about how you will eat, then let me share my bowl of rice with you (though
I am not as well off as I once was). If, in return, you become a great novelist,
it will be my greatest joy. . . . I do not presume to urge you to become a novelist. I say only this - be firm of purpose and don't worry about trivialities.

And remember the saying: the final tax you pay to achieve your goal is your life. ~ Masaoka Shiki

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

There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one ... ~ Jasper Fforde

Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep
at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking
at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existance, each of us becomes the well where the other one can draw water ... ~ Muriel Barbery