Quotes about trivialities (13 Quotes)


    I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time, should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual.


    This is where the difficulty lies. We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water. It seldom happens. A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of ev

    The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

    Two sorts of truth trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.



    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.

    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 his successive mouthfuls should be such as can be swallowed at sight in case of accidents, or in case he wishes for once to check in detail, he should have only a clearly circumscribed little problem to solve (e.g. to check an identity 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.

    One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.


    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 knowled

    The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

    No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and even more of national prejudice.



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