Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Banality. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Banality Quotes And Sayings by 92 Authors including Jons Jacob Berzelius,George Henry Lewes,Charles Baudelaire,Walter Bagehot,Michel De Montaigne for you to enjoy and share.
The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.
No deeply rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse judgment. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic
If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!
What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion.
There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.
The topics which language limits us to aren't much worth discussing in the first place.
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex; or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.
Silence has a sound
The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.
Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.
Existence is in a way so banal, you may as well try and make a kind of grandeur of it
In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness.
...Opinion without a rational process.
Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.
Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
Prejudice for regularity and simplicity is a source of error that has only too often infected philosophy.
No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them. In other words, the disturbing thing about matters of taste is that they are not communicable.
Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse discrimination; a want of such classification and distribution as the subject admits of.
The deep division that exists in the human race, regardless of any other more obvious distinction, between those for whom books are an obsession, and those who are prepared, good-humouredly enough, to tolerate their existence.
Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
This monotonous world around
Seems boring, colorless, and dull.
I just existed till I found
You in my life which was banal.
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.
Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness
More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.
Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved
Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.
Our reason has this peculiar fate that, with reference to one class of its knowledge, it is always troubled with questions which cannot be ignored, because they spring from the very nature of reason, and which cannot be answered, because they transcend the powers of human reason.
Love and hate when stretched to their extremes blind reasoning.
There is a case, and a strong case, for that particular form of indolence that allows us to move through life knowing only what immediately concerns us.
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out ...
The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.
A variety of nothing is superior to a monotony of something.
Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.
Blind and naked ignorance delivers brawling judgments, unashamed, on all things all day long
Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.
Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction; interest and prejudice take away the power of judging.
The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.
Human reason is by nature architectonic."
Critique of Pure Reason
First, I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.
Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.
What bores the listener bores the speaker too.
A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.
Racism - the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them - inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In
ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS
Opinion, whether well or ill-founded, is the governing principle of human affairs
When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.
Simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid.
Banter is often a proof of want of intelligence.
Boldness is a child of ignorance
For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
Because our minds process information solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category.
Universal violence compels the language to be mute ... Silence is not only a metaphor of Hemingway's work; it is also the source of its formal excellence, its integrity.
Silence is an arguement hard to refute
Ignorance is darkness.
Opinions, theories, and systems pass by turns over the grindstone of time, which at first gives them brilliancy and sharpness, but finally wears them out.
Silence is the language of inertia.
Silence is the language of nature and beauty where perception and feelings are the only reality.
Ruling or judging others is considered to be a sentiment that resonates in very low frequencies.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Silence is the wit of fools.
Silence too can be indiscreet.
When one remains without thinking one understands another by means of the universal language of Silence.
Consistency in opinion is the slow poison of intellectual life, the destroyer of its vividness and energy.
Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.
Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something.
Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
Reason speaks and feeling bites
Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.
The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity, reason is the pace ... And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.
Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
Hatred - The anger of the weak.
Those who consider the inessential to be essential
And see the essential as inessential Don't reach the essential,
Living in the field of wrong intention
Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees.
The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling.
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.
Strong and bitter wordes indicate a weak cause.
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
The single most frustrating and saddening aspect of human life is its shocking brevity.
Idleness, simon-pure, from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued ...
the debasement of thought cannot be separated from the debasement of language.
What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
There arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.