Top 93 Banality Quotes & Sayings

The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.

There is no community service in Seinfeld. But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it.

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.

Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?

Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.

Banality is sometimes striking.

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.

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.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

... love is banality to all outsiders.

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.

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.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

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.

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.

In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.

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.

... In contrast to the "banality of evil," which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the "banality of heroism," which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil.

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.

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.

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.'

Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.

Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.

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.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

There is no community service in 'Seinfeld.' But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it.

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.

I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.

But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

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.

The 2007 Labor campaign was the most presidential in Australian history, with a slogan - Kevin07 - exceeded in its banality only by its success.

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.

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.

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.

[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

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.

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.

Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

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.

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.

I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality.

Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that's boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let's say that an artist deals with banality. I don't care what the discipline is.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

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 of the House of Windsor. I don't want my politics to be passionate.

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.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Life happened. In all its banality, brutality, cruelty, unfairness. But also in its beauty, pleasures and delights. Life happened.

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.

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.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

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.