Triviality Quotes

Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere.... We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.

Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived -- my breakfast supplied only two ideas -- that the rolls were good and the butter bad.

[On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinnerthan the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously

One likes to hear what is to be going on, to be au fair with the newest modes of being trifling and silly.