Inspirational quotes with trivialities.
So you can't make a living as a novelist—why not try farming or teaching? Or even begging—what difficulties would that present? Were you born into the world to make a living? Or have you another aim, that of becoming a novelist or something akin? If you want to become a novelist but are worried about how you will eat, then let me share my bowl of rice with you (thoughI am not as well off as I once was). If, in return, you become a great novelist,it will be my greatest joy. . . . I do not presume to urge you to become a novelist. I say only this—be firm of purpose and don't worry about trivialities.And remember the saying: the final tax you pay to achieve your goal is your life.
I write because the security of your love allows me to develop my craft without concerning myself with trivialities — as if your love could be any more complete. But I write, in the first place,because of you, my muse. I write for your green eyes to glance at my humble words and for the pleasure of hearing you utter them.
The mind is a storehouse with great capacity, but is often filled with dubious knowledge and meaningless trivialities. In truth, much of this - though at times interesting and entertaining - is of insignificant value.
Suppose... that you acquit me... Suppose that, in view of this, you said to me 'Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard Anytus and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.' Well, supposing, as I said, that you should offer to acquit me on these terms, I should reply 'Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying, in my usual way, "My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?" And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him; no, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress towards goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone that I meet, young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen; but especially to you my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship. This, I do assure you, is what my God commands; and it is my belief that no greater good has ever befallen you in this city than my service to my God; for I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls, proclaiming as I go 'Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the State.' ...And so, gentlemen, I would say, 'You can please yourselves whether you listen to Anytus or not, and whether you acquit me or not; you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.
There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one...
Apart from such chaotic classics as these, my own taste in novel reading is one which I am prepared in a rather especial manner, not only to declare, but to defend. My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world. There was a time in my own melodramatic boyhood when I became quite fastidious in this respect. I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was. But we all lose a little of that fine edge of austerity and idealism which sharpened our spiritual standard in our youth. I have come to compromise with the tea-table and to be less insistent about the sofa. As long as a corpse or two turns up in the second, the third, nay even the fourth or fifth chapter, I make allowance for human weakness, and I ask no more. But a novel without any death in it is still to me a novel without any life in it. I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art - for instance, Emma or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michelangelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea - that much more contemptible substance. But on the whole I think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which, all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life.
The general kind and soft customs of Mustang were soon to strike me as exceptional. Apart from occasional disputes between husband and wife, which like family rows all around the world bring raised voices, I never heard a person scream or shout; Even the children had very civilised manners. In fact the only person I knew to consistently angry in Lo Mantang was myself, and Tibetans consider bd temper a Western characteristic. Take for example the reactions of European to missing his train; he will invariably swear under his breath. Who in our can stand frustration without giving vent to anger? I soon had to master my own temper, having raised my voice against one of the innumerable people who stopped to stare at me and my smal party, I was told by a peasant: ‘’I cannot understand; you are a great man, how is it that small things like myself deserve your wrath?’’ After that I learned to be tolerant, realising that by getting mad I was only debasing myself, and that it was stupid to be bothered by trivialities.
And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted.
The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part.
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
In a flash I saw the truth; that my love for this spot is built up of numberless trivialities, of small memories all incommunicable, or ridiculous when communicated...
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.
Less time on trivialities that will mean nothing when you're old. In the end all that will matter is who you helped and how deeply you cared
I have finished Russell's Nightmares and must confess that they did not come up to expectation. No doubt it was my fault for expecting too much, knowing how unsatisfactory I find his philosophical views; but I had hoped that, at least, when he was not writing normal philosophy, he would be entertaining. Alas! I found his wit insipid, and his serious passages almost intolerable—there was something of the embarrassment of meeting a Great Man for the first time, and finding him even more preoccupied with trivialities than oneself.In his Introduction, Russell says 'Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities', and then he proceeds to give us examples of isolated insanities—the Queen of Sheba as Female Vanity, Bowdler as Prudery, the Psycho-Analyst as Social Conformity, and so on. Amongst these, as you noted, is the Existentialist as Ontological Scepticism. Here, Russell's satire is directed partly against what Sartre has called 'a literature of extreme situations'; and this, for an Englishman, is no doubt a legitimate target, since the English do not admit that there are such things—though, of course, this makes the English a target for the satire of the rest of Europe, particularly the French.But what Russell is not entitled to do is to group the insanity of doubting one's existence along with the other insanities, and this for the simple reason that it precedes them. One may be vain or modest; one may be prudish or broadminded; one may be a social conformist or an eccentric; but in order to be any of these things, one must at least be. The question of one's existence must be settled first—one cannot be insanely vain if one doubts whether one exists at all and, precisely, Russell's existentialist does not even succeed in suffering—except when his philosophy is impugned (but this merely indicates that he has failed to apply his philosophy to itself, and not, as Russell would have us believe, because he has failed to regard his philosophy in the light of his other insanities). The trouble really is, that Russell does not, or rather will not, admit that existence poses a problem at all; and, since he omits this category from all his thinking nothing he says concerns anybody in particular.
It is impossible to express the experiences you have below the surface with words, when water gently caresses your face and body, the pulse decreases and your brain relaxes. You are immediately cut off from the stress and hustle of everyday life when you are below the surface – there are no noisy telephones or SMS messages, no inboxes full of mail, no electrical bills, or other trivialities of everyday life taking up time and energy. There is nothing connecting you to the surface but the same withheld breath that connects you to life. There is only you and a growing pressure on your chest that feels like a loving hug and the vibrations from the deep quiet tone of the sea. It is quite possible that this deep quiet tone is none other than the mantra Om, the sound of the universe, trickling life into every cell of your body.
Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?''Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.
Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians?
Aye. 'Tis a free country."Monq had come to check on Elora just as she asked that question."Well, that kind of has to be qualified," he interjected. "You can't come or go without a passport. You can't drive without a driver's license, registration, auto insurance and proof that your vehicle is up to code. You can't work or even get health care without a social security number. You have to pay taxes on everything including air and water. The closest distance between point A and B may involve paying a road toll. There are over three hundred thousand federal laws. You have to educate your children according to legal standards set by someone that's not you. There are laws about who can marry whom. But other than a few more such trivialities, it's a free country.
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