It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror. — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage. — Gustave Flaubert Copy Share Image
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot Copy Share Image
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. — Nathalie Sarraute Copy Share Image
Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened. — Thrity Umrigar Copy Share Image
English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities. — Elspeth Huxley Copy Share Image
The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough.… — Asger Jorn Copy Share Image
When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the… — Errollyn Wallen Copy Share Image
She always imagined that evil played out on a large canvas- wars, concentration camps, gas chambers, the partitioning of nations. Now she… — Thrity Umrigar Copy Share Image
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“There seemed no particular object in avoiding banality from the start, as the evening showed every sign of developing into a banal… — Anthony Powell Copy Share Image
Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right… — Charles A. Beard Copy Share Image
To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of… — William Plomer Copy Share Image
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over… — George Saunders Copy Share Image
The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become… — Francois Pinault Copy Share Image
One would think America big enough to set aside wilderness preserves for the many of our citizens who seek to escape the… — Frank Church Copy Share Image
On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking… — John Doe Copy Share Image
“It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out… — Robert W. Chambers Copy Share Image
Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own… — Clifford Geertz Copy Share Image
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
I really like the idea of banality and repetition being used to generate the image, which are simple and unobstructed and not… — Doug Aitken Copy Share Image
There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics… — Douglas Sirk Copy Share Image
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and… — Vincent Van Gogh Copy Share Image
Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope,… — Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins Copy Share Image
One of the reasons Britain escaped the poisonous nonsense of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is the sheer, absolute, middle-of-the-road, tedious banality… — David Starkey Copy Share Image
“The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility. It's so much easier to beat your breast… — William Sloane Coffin Copy Share Image
The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms… — Andre Gide Copy Share Image
Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not. — Edwin Newman Copy Share Image
My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes… — Max Beckmann Copy Share Image
“Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making… — Carlos Ruiz Zafon Copy Share Image
Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born,… — Friedrich Nietzsche Copy Share Image
I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life -… — Elizabeth Kostova Copy Share Image
There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated… — Stephanie Mills Copy Share Image
The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of… — Hunter S. Thompson Copy Share Image
Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so… — Andre Gide Copy Share Image