Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
Quotes about banal (15 Quotes)
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
All my life I've been harassed by questions Why is something this way and not another How do you account for that This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.
OfficeMax's turnaround plan focuses on the investment necessary to enhance the productivity of its underperforming assets, banal but essential areas such as infrastructure, logistics and systems. Effective turnarounds focus on these areas, rather than on driving short-term sales.
How banal, yet irrefutable, is the assertion that a person is a mixture of the 'angelic' and the 'demonic.' ... A true politician... can be neither... 'an angel' nor 'a demon... .' Politicians cannot be so if they are to... negotiate with courage and skill on the razor's edge between victory and defeat, life and death.
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
Visible good easily becomes trite visually there is very little material left-you know, you make a sunbeam pass over a character or a situation and it becomes far too pathetic and banal.
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss
There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.
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 nominees have learned not to say very much. They've simply learned in the wake of Bork and now they go through murder boards that have them rehearse every possible question they've learned to say relatively bland or banal things that don't give away very much.
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.
To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.