Top 199 Banal Quotes & Sayings

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

Adultery ... could be as banal as marriage.

Pop music might seem banal and simple to some people, but it's what it expresses that counts.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

The thing about filming is that it can be the most banal experience because it's slow and there's a lot of waiting around.

As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.

To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

The worst curse to befall anyone is stagnation, a banal existence, the quiet desperation that comes out of a need for conformity.

There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

I have very strongly this feeling that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday - the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness - is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

A lot of things trigger my inspiration. It can be the most banal things.

Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.

A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

I love and admire everyone who is different. I love that. The 'jet set' is banal. 'Good taste' is banal. Eccentricity is chic. Good taste paralyzes. But punk or street fashion or a tattoo-covered body, that is interesting to me, and that I love. I didn't go to fashion school. I learned from watching couture shows on TV and reading magazines. That made me dream.

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.

Perhaps the choice is a negative one, in that I was trying to avoid everything that touched on well-known issues - or any issues at all, whether painterly, social or aesthetic. I tried to find nothing too explicit, hence all the banal subjects; and then, again, I tried to avoid letting the banal turn into my issue and my trademark. So it's all evasive action, in a way.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.

To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they've known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is.

It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.

Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

You'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it; I find it trivial and banal and boring.

It isn't that I don't tackle issues; it's just that they're secondary to giving somebody an escape route from the banal routine of everyday life.

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

'Hymn for the Weekend' mixes cultural and religious practices, commodifying them into a banal but beautiful message of imagined solidarity.

I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

Paris is life-enhancing for all those reasons we know and all those words that have become so banal.

They just talk drivel. Whoever is winning is great, whoever isn't, isn't. It's banal. And also semi-literate at times ... they never criticise in an intelligent way. Anything that isn't banal is said to be an outburst. They've created this cartoon world where everyone talks like Lineker and says nothing.

It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.

Twitter has to be about art. It can't be about banal things. Banal things and art are two different worlds.

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

Marco Polo has been kind of buried under this cloud of rather banal historical dust, when the true story is so much more exciting.

Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.

A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.

How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.

The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.

Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.