The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.
Alan K. Simpson
Some of the most important determinants of life paths arise through the most trivial of circumstances.
Albert Bandura
For me, reworking the past over and over again is a way not to trivialise the garments and not to obsess over hem lengths. What I am interested in, as a matter of fact, is telling a story and, if someone sees fragments of other stories in it, be my guest. I don't have to justify myself. What is urgent for me is what I want to say.
Alessandro Michele
Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.
Alexandra Fuller
I loved Dad more for treating the biological reality as trivial, irrelevant. He loved me no less than his other three children.
Allegra Huston
The most important in the history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa. The plebeian, who is called today the 'man in the street,' can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die.
Ameen Rihani
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
Andrea Dworkin
Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.
Andrew Weil
We live in a society of triviality, and my music and what I'm about kind of starts to break that mold and adds more meaning and dialogue to hip hop.
Andy Mineo
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard
Taxes are not trivial - they're a huge portion of this overall economy. And that's why I focused on them.
Arthur Laffer
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Atul Gawande
In India we are creating mainstream hip hop music, than what real rap music is. The lyrics aren't that personal, since most of the music is catering to Bollywood. It's just trivial. It's a fashion here.
Badshah
I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me - so am I.
Barack Obama
By now, you've heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There's a good chance you ignore them.
Barton Gellman
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell
When I tell children that they are far too dependent on their gizmos, they do not deny it. But they really don't care. This is their real life - texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out - you create your own little trivial world.
Bill O'Reilly
One of the things that happens in my house on the holidays is after dessert, we sit down to a very ambitious men-versus-women game of Trivial Pursuit. It's brutal. And there's a trophy.
Bobby Flay
I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.
Brad Feld
To inspire a singularity of focus, a challenge must be important to you and it must be something you feel you should do now in this moment. If it's trivial or not time-bound, you won't engage. So in selecting your next challenge in life, choose one that is meaningful and will demand your complete concentration.
Brendon Burchard
In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.
The Law of Triviality... briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.
I know this is rather trivial - I will not be very deep about this - but it's great when you call the hottest restaurant in town and ask for a table for five at 8:00 P.M., and they say, 'Okay,' instead of, 'You have to wait two months.'
When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.
I feel like the more serious a life event is that you share on social media, the more ridiculous it sort of becomes, the more you sort of self-trivialize.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
If we want to jack up the tax rates on the really rich, the amounts of money that would bring in are trivial compared to jacking up rates on the middle class.
Fashion is not trivial. It's a huge industry and a big part of our lives. Fashion is about us - how we look and present ourselves, how we can change ourselves, and our perceptions. You can dress up to be quite glorious creatures - it's all a very important part of life.
I've had some painful experiences in my life, but I feel like I'm trivializing them by using them for a scene in a movie. I don't want to do that. It just makes me feel kind of dirty for having done that.
Few bands in hard rock history have been so adept at balancing the awesome and trivial as Van Halen in their prime.
I want politicians to be held to account for their politics and their principles, or lack of them, but I find it irritating that we have a culture where people are more interested in trivial gossip than substantive matters.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
I think the problem with the word 'happiness' is that it sounds fluffy. It sounds like something trivial that we shouldn't be concerned with.
For years and years, I was beset with snide remarks by certain members of the press, where they would turn John Oates into a joke, or they would trivialize what I do, which never really bothered me all that much.
A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat.
Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from us.
John Rogers has an encyclopedic mind. Having John as our showrunner is the gift that keeps on giving. He knows more trivial information than anyone I've ever met in my entire life.
It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.
I didn't grow up reading magazines; I was very much in an environment where that would have been deemed trivial, frivolous.
Everything important always begins from something trivial.
I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
Pundits talk about 'populist rage' as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class.
Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.
I find it quite hard to sum up my relationship in a sound bite. I feel that it trivializes it for other people's pleasure. It's an adventure.
In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.
When you are in deep conflict about something, sometimes the most trivial thing can tip the scales.
