Top 94 Quotes About Banality
#1. We are asked to orient our "strategies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance.
Murray Bookchin
#2. He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing
so it was my duty to loathe him instead.
Jonathan Lethem
#3. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that." Professor
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#4. Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.
Edwin Newman
#5. Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.
Warren Ellis
#6. Beautiful is another word we tossed around too casually, slopping it over everything from cars to nail polish until the word collapsed under the weight of all the banality. But the world is beautiful. I hope they never forget that. The world is beautiful.
Rick Yancey
#7. One would think America big enough to set aside wilderness preserves for the many of our citizens who seek to escape the incessant crowd, to search for solace in solitude amidst a sanctuary far removed from the banality of beer ads and cigarette commercials.
Frank Church
#8. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)
Clive James
#9. I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,
Chris Marker
#10. Any effort ... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.
Nelson Goodman
#11. It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
Jean Baudrillard
#12. Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good - suggestive of more than just
what it is - it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.
Robert Adams
#13. 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
#14. Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
Michael Pollan
#15. 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
#17. Much of that which passes for conversation these days is the lobbing of small bombs of dogma and little clots of banality at one another.
Dee Hock
#18. 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 Shafak
#19. If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Emil Cioran
#20. Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.
Diana Vreeland
#21. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. 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
#23. Love is banality to all outsiders.
Mae West
#24. There is no community service in 'Seinfeld.' But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it.
Jason Alexander
#25. Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead?
Leslie Jamison
#26. 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
#27. Perfection is, after all, a form of banality.
Elisa Braden
#29. There is no elegy for those who have been dispossessed of their anger
what remains is a future carved out of banality instead of blood.
Brando Skyhorse
#30. The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
Dag Hammarskjold
#31. My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
V.S. Naipaul
#33. My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
Max Beckmann
#34. U201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.
Glenn Gould
#35. There are pigs like me that wallow in their destiny, not drawing away from the banality of daily life because they're enthralled by their own impotence.
Fernando Pessoa
#36. We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
#37. 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
#38. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
#39. Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.
Christian Marclay
#41. At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phase--saying that the whole lot represented 'the banality of evil.' Her long ago words applied well to the man before us.
Michael Morton
#42. You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'
Bono
#43. Insanity is the only real escape from the banality of our lives.
- Clara Bayliss
John Hennessy
#44. It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.
Jean Lorrain
#45. To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.
William Plomer
#46. A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.
George Saunders
#47. Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
Elizabeth Bowen
#48. She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she realized that evil had a domestic side, and its very banality protected it from exposure.
Thrity Umrigar
#49. Quick understanding is only a sign of the banality of what is understood.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#50. The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility. It's so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.
William Sloane Coffin
#51. There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.
Douglas Sirk
#52. Recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;
Adam Nicolson
#53. I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality.
Elizabeth Kostova
#54. She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
Gustave Flaubert
#55. Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars.
Andre Gide
#56. Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
Eugene Ionesco
#57. The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#58. Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
Studs Terkel
#59. Ever since she'd been living alone, she'd gone to bed with the television on; the comforting banality of the murmuring voices and flickering images warded off the feeling of terror that could sometimes overwhelm her.
Liane Moriarty
#60. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions.
Cioran
#61. 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
#62. 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.
Alan Dean Foster
#63. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
Teju Cole
#64. Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
Nathalie Sarraute
#65. Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.
Ervin Staub
#66. The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.
Michael Jackson
#67. It's just like the reviews promised - other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.
Neal Stephenson
#68. So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.
Emily St. John Mandel
#69. Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
Christopher Lasch
#70. Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.
Matt Ridley
#71. Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.
Jamaica Kincaid
#72. 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
#73. I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives.
Kevin Powers
#74. Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.
Perry Anderson
#75. The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love.
Francois Pinault
#76. There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
Anton Chekhov
#77. If there's evil in recklessness, there's also evil in banality.
Robert Draper
#78. Perhaps Lila was right: my book - even though it was having so much success - really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.
Elena Ferrante
#79. Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it.
Barry N. Malzberg
#80. My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.
Carl Jung
#81. The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.
Richard Flanagan
#82. I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
Alice Munro
#83. Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.
Thrity Umrigar
#84. All around, everywhere you look, is dullness and uncertainty. Even something born of beauty soon leads to boredom and banality, commonplace, the human ritual, the tedious rhythm of life.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#85. It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.
James Joyce
#86. 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
#87. I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality.
Lori Nelson
#88. That's what I love about music ... all these banalities suddenly turn into these beautiful, effervescent pearls.
Mark Ruffalo
#89. Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you're having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#90. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.
Milan Kundera
#91. It's easy to dismiss design - to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters - especially now.
Daniel H. Pink
#92. When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the loneliness and all that. Those moments of really feeling in the flow are fleeting ...
Errollyn Wallen
#93. Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.
Jean Baudrillard
#94. Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal.
Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.
Idries Shah
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