65 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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Short Banality Quotes
- 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
- Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence. — Anthony Giddens
- Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. — Robert Smithson
- 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
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
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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
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
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry. — Nathalie Sarraute
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
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
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
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — Hannah Arendt
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
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
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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