A Quote by Max Beerbohm

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up. — © Max Beerbohm
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character.
Usually men, usually a guy, a casual fan of maybe the NBA and somebody who then watches the WNBA, their instinct is quick to kind of size us up or put themselves against us.
Character is developed one positive action at a time. Therefore nothing is actually trivial in our lives. To grow in character development, pay attention to seemingly trivial matters. Someone who grows from each minor life event will eventually reach high levels of character perfection.
I don't size up their grades or their board scores. Because in America today, that's just an advantage certain people have. I size up the give and take, the speed of thinking, what I perceive as ambition. I say, 'Tell me about your high school jobs.' And I love people who worked in coffee shops who were waiters and waitresses.
The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
I keep thinking of the gifts of my own upbringing, which I once took for granted: I can read any book I choose and comprehend it. I can write a complete sentence and punctuate it correctly. If I need help, I can call on judges, attorneys, educators, ministers. I wonder what I would be like if I had grown up without such protections and supports. What cracks would have turned up in my character?
a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
It's the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It's the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that's why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It's at the heart of how to live a great life.
Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.
When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.
There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They have got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.
You know what I'm great at? Trivial Pursuit. What good is that gonna do you in life? It has the word 'trivial' in the name. The game is basically telling you that you pursue trivial things. Trivial - as in not important. Trivial - as in maybe you should've gone to grad school.
When you start digging into things like character, though, the notion that people have high character or low character is very strong. What's crazy is that my thinking is not a new insight. The very first large-scale study of character, still one of the largest ever, was done in the early 1900s by Hugh Hartshorne, an ordained minister and a scientist.
People are not impressed by watching interviewees cry. People recognize chat shows with personalities as the trivial things that they are. They're not designed to be deep. Quite frankly, people in show business don't stand up to in-depth scrutiny.
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