80 Banality Quotes

Following is our list of banality quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about what is banality mean.

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Famous Banality Quotes

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

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

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

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

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. — Douglas Sirk

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

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

Boredom is a sign of satisfied ignorance, blunted apprehension, crass sympathies, dull understanding, feeble powers of attention, and irreclaimable weakness of character. — James Bridie

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — Hannah Arendt

Being dull and boring is far more tragic than being tacky. — Thom Filicia

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

Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. — Claude C. Hopkins

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. — Ivan Chtcheglov

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people. — Charles Bukowski

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious. — Charles Baudelaire

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. - Vincent Van Gogh

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. — Vincent Van Gogh

Short Banality Quotes

  • I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. — Chris Marker
  • Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. — T. S. Eliot
  • In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. — Milton Glaser
  • Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world. — Diana Vreeland
  • I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects. — Josef Sudek
  • Even when there are banalities, they're usually kind of benign banalities. — Michael McKean
  • In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it. — Machado de Assis
  • It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish. — James Joyce
  • Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it. — Aidan Chambers
  • ... love is banality to all outsiders. — Mae West

Banality Image Quotes

Banality quote There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality

What Is Banality Quotes

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out? — Alfred Hitchcock

There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person--it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered. — Ivan Turgenev

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

There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities. — Vincent Van Gogh

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." — Frank Gehry

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Ezra Furman

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. — Doris Lessing

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. — Robert Adams

People Writing About Banality

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov
quotes on writing, love and manners

398 4464
Read quotes by Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry
quotes on architecture, power

134 1736
Read quotes by Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson
quotes on education, leadership and religion

46 496
Read quotes by Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk
quotes on life, education and love

32 214
Read quotes by Christopher Lasch

Christopher Lasch
quotes on religion, life and education

40 258
Read quotes by Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens
quotes on education, leadership and culture

22 543

More Banality Quotes

If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful. — Adrian Frutiger

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. — Susan Sontag

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies. — Alan Dean Foster

L'Oreal's slogan 'because you're worth it' has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card. — Geoff Mulgan

[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. — Hannah Arendt

The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead. — Michael Jackson

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

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. — Francois Pinault

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity. — Clifford Geertz

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate. — Perry Anderson

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common. — Roland Barthes

It isn't an easy job to paint oneself - at any rate if it is to be different from a photograph. And you see - this, in my opinion, is the advantage that impressionism possesses over all the other things; it is not banal, and one seeks after a deeper resemblance than the photograph. — Vincent Van Gogh

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day. — Alexander Payne

In a face, look for the main light and the main shadow; the rest will come naturally — it's often not important. And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal. — Edouard Manet

Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible — John Szarkowski

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity. — Louis Aragon

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. — Jane Jacobs

In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe. — Okakura Kakuzo

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. — Henry Miller

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Irving Stone

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. — Asger Jorn

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas? — Paul Cezanne

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

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

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song. — Jonathan Franzen

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

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse. — Alexis de Tocqueville

One would think America big enough to set aside wilderness preserves for the many of our citizens who seek to escape the incessant crowd, to search for solace in solitude amidst a sanctuary far removed from the banality of beer ads and cigarette commercials. — Frank Church

The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing. — Hunter S. Thompson

In Conclusion

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