A Quote by Edith Wharton
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
Related Quotes
We must eschew anything trivial. We must embrace all that is frivolous.... Trivial things take up all your time and dull your senses, whereas frivolity is meaningful, profound, worth living and dying for.... If we devote our lives to frivolity, the world will be a far, far better place. Humanity will be better able to fulfill its primary goal, that of having a good time.
Comedy is such a frivolous world that it can make you addicted to the frivolity, and then a lot of people don't settle down and are still in that non-specific age maturity bracket.
Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.
The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.
Pride is the king of vices...it is the first of the pallbearers of the soul...other vices destroy only their opposite virtues, as wantonness destroys chastity; greed destroys temperance; anger destroys gentleness; but pride destroys all virtues.
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
War is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.
Ageing destroys youth, sickness destroys health, degeneration of life destroys all excellent qualities and death destroys life. Even if you are a great runner, you cannot run away from death. you cannot stop death with your wealth, through your magic performances or recitation of mantras or even medicines. Therefore, it is wise to prepare for your death.
The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.
The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.
The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.
We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.
A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .
Success or failure in business is caused more by mental attitude even than by mental capacity. Banish the fear-attitude; acquire the confident attitude. And remember that the only way to acquire it is-to acquire it.
War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.
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