Banality Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Life, Thoughtful, Insightful

  Robert C. Solomon (2006). “Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life”, p.12, Oxford University Press

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• Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

  Clifford Geertz

  People, Understanding, Culture

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• Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.

  Umberto Eco

  Poetry, Literature, Outcomes

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• The truth was that I'd been spending years running away from myself. I hid myself in drama, silliness, stupidity, banality. So afraid to grow up. So afraid to involve myself in relationships where I might be expected to give the same love I got - instead of sixth-grade shenanigans. I bored myself with all the when I grow up nonsense, but I was worried it would never happen even as I longed for it.

  Megan Crane

  Running, Growing Up, Drama

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• Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions.

  Perry Brass

  Mass Culture, Realizing, Portions

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.27, Perry Brass

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• Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.

  Irving Stone

  Men, People, Generosity

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• I believe that pain can be a rite of passage into learning. I believe that the worse thing that can happen is the sin of banality and comfort. Those things are in my movies, but also my movies are quite the fruit of somebody who defines himself as an agnostic.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Pain, Believe, Comfort

  Source: hollywoodchicago.com

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• I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not captivated by composition.

  Doug Aitken

  Simple, Ideas, Used

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• There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons.

  Stephanie Mills

  Opposites, Advertising, Claims

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

  Scott D. Anthony

  Clever, Fun, Media

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• ... love is banality to all outsiders.

  Mae West

  Love Is, Outsiders

  Mae West (1959). “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with it: Autobiography”, Chelsea House

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• 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

  Art, Foundation, Depth

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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• Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Voice, Emotion

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• 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

  Responsibility, Reflection, Years

  "On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: the Situationist International, 1957-1972" edited by Elisabeth Sussman, (p. 142), 1989.

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• Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Laughter, Our World, Bombs

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.106, Penguin

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• Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.

  Elsa Maxwell

  Party, Fighting, Fire

  Elsa Maxwell (1955). “I married the world”

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• Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

  Elif Safak

  Appreciation, Art, Creativity

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• Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Laughter, Our World, People

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• Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.

  Christian Marclay

  Statements

  "Music I’ve Seen". Interview with Frances Richard, aperture.org.

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• We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

  Frank Gehry

  Accepting, Inevitable

  Interview with David Sheff, www.playboy.com. March 1, 2011.

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• He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

  Boris Pasternak

  Way, Natural

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• My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Life Is Short, Life Is, I Can

  "Naipaul lets rip at 'banality' of Indian women writers" by Fiachra Gibbons, www.theguardian.com. February 21, 2002.

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• This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pain, Artist, Evil

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.291, Simon and Schuster

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• Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.

  Charles A. Beard

  Destiny, Mirrors, Evil

  "Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science". The American Political Science Review Volume 21, Issue 1, February 1927.

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• These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

  Ian Mcewan

  Memories, War, Sight

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