Trivial Quotes & Sayings

As Linda says again and again, the simple life isn't the easy life. Each soul here is enormously courageous. The conflicts in their lives have not been trivial. It's taken most of them a great deal of time, introspection and explanation to arrive at their chosen sanity. They are intrepid explorers, leaving the security of the known for the hoped-for brighter tomorrow. — Linda Breen Pierce

A vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and comfort. — B.F. Skinner

It all seemed so trivial,so embarassing.It all seemed like paper kids having their paper fun. — John Green

Management philosophy: Pay attention to the vital fiew and ignore the trivial many. I could go insane if I obsessed over every little details of all my companies. — John Paul DeJoria

In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work. — Robert Fano

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. — Charlotte Rampling

Finding that she was determined to get to the bottom of what seemed to him a very trivial affair, extricated himself without hesitation or compunction by advising her to apply to Vincent for information, since he was the instigator of the quarrel. Before he could make good his retreat, however, he was incensed and appalled by a command to go immediately to Vincent's room, and to inform him that his mama desired to have speech with him before he went down to breakfast. Since it was the time-honoured practice of the brothers to sacrifice each other in such situations as now confronted Claud, it was not fear of Vincent's wrath at finding himself betrayed which prompted Claud to despatch Polyphant on the errand, but the knowledge that not even a messenger bearing gifts of great price would meet with anything but the rudest of receptions from Vincent at this hour of the morning. — Georgette Heyer

How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Of course it's trivial, but then most things are. — John Malkovich

All important problems (of course, not the unimportant, trivial problems, or problems whose solutions have already been decided after discussion at meetings and need only be carried out) must be submitted to the committee for discussion, — Mao Zedong

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. — Thomas Merton

The only reason i love the courage of these individuals is that they take their family members as astray chicks, and the reason i don't want to belong to this category is because those chicks are far more important to me than trivial wealth and fame. — Michael Bassey Johnson

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. — Simon Schama

Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious thing we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave. — William Shakespeare

Character is developed one positive action at a time. Therefore nothing is actually trivial in our lives. To grow in character development, pay attention to seemingly trivial matters. Someone who grows from each minor life event will eventually reach high levels of character perfection. — Zelig Pliskin

In an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us - children though we were, yet we were descended to literate, town-bred people - it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets we associated with Indians through the hidden and seceret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws ... — William Faulkner

Real philosophy is dense, impenetrable, so esoteric as to be unknown and so obscure as to be irrelevant... Maybe what I do is trivial, the philosophical equivalent of a Big Mac and fries — Jacob M. Held

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority. — Mary Wollstonecraft

The effort to eliminate synthetic pesticides because of unsubstantiated fears about residues in food will make fruits and vegetables more expensive, decrease consumption, and thus increase cancer rates. The levels of synthetic pesticide residues are trivial in comparison to natural chemicals, and thus their potential for cancer causation is extremely low. [Ames believes that "to eat your veggies" is the best way to prevent cancer.] — Bruce Ames

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small. — Maureen Corrigan

When preachers teach biblically and clearly about the judgment of God and the dangers of hell, men begin to see that their greatest need is to be saved from eternal condemnation, and the more "practical" needs of this present age become trivial in comparison. — Paul Washer

You are not trivial. — Cassandra Clare

There is a breeze blowing. I see it in the deep discontent that is being voiced with the threadbare state of the evangelical world, with its empty worship, its market-driven superficiality, and its trivial thought. It is a breeze blowing toward better, deeper, more honest things. I suspect that it is the Holy Spirit who is blowing, that this is his breeze, and that these leaves that are shaking are the signs of better things to come within an evangelical faith that is thus being reformed. Let us all pray that it is so! — David F. Wells

How do you irradiate the humbly trivial - the sneezes and waiting in bus-queues - with the lofty, and at the same time cherish above all in the lofty those things that nourish you here, today, in all your ordinariness? I cannot understand, in other words, what sort of God would bother to count every hair on my head. — Robert Dessaix

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. — Werner Heisenberg

There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters. — James Burnham

To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever. — Carolyn Ives Gilman

It's not that your most important work is meaningless; it's that your most trivial movements are also significant. — David Jeremiah

The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. — Henry David Thoreau

He was sitting in the midst of a children's party at Harold's Cross. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.
But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like a sothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart. — James Joyce

O Lord God, we pray that we may be inspired to nobleness of life in the least things. May we dignify all our daily life. May we set such a sacredness upon every part of our life, that nothing shall be trivial, nothing unimportant, and nothing dull, in the daily round. — Henry Ward Beecher

It has become the custom in our country to expect all Chief Executives, from the President down, to conduct activities analogous to an entertainment bureau. No occasion is too trivial for its promoters to invite them to attend and deliver an address. — Calvin Coolidge

Memory is the mother of the muses, prototype Artist. As a rule picks and highlights what is important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Occasionally, however, is mistaken as all the other artists. Nevertheless it is what I take as a guide page. — Frank Harris

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you? — Vernor Vinge

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death - he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. . . . He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience - from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. . . . He was born in poverty and . . . suffered infinite pain - all for us - and thought it well worth his while.4 Isaiah — Timothy J. Keller

A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat. — David D. Burns

Everything seems so small, so trivial, when you're on the right altitude. — Joyce Rachelle

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. — Noam Chomsky

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives. — Saint Teresa Of Avila

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things. — J. Michael Straczynski

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God. — Albert Camus

I think it'd be disgraceful if a chap wasn't allowed to have a bit of fun in Las Vegas. The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn't misbehave in some trivial way. — Boris Johnson

It is the small trivial things in life that makes a human happy, like opening a pickle jar. — KanyaACoffman

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look ... ), and listening to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, "Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls," and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one's own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness. — Vladimir Nabokov

A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. — George Eliot

It's funny, you know. The times that seem so trivial end up meaning so much. — Jeffrey Blount

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches
it reaches!
for the purity of death. — Frank Lentricchia

Cultivate the habit of zest. Purposefully seek out the beauty in the seemingly trivial. Especially in the trivial. The colors and shapes of the foods you eat. The shadows a vase makes on your table. The interesting faces of the people on the bus with you. — Karen Salmansohn

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music ... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. — Rabindranath Tagore

Intellectuals seemed to think that their life - the life of the mind, the endless self examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people. Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdraw from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.
In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasantly about them. — Orson Scott Card

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men. — Arthur C. Clarke

The issue of who will throw the garbage won't be so trivial when no one is throwing it away, and it starts to stink. When the plates pile up in the kitchen sink, or when the bathroom is grimy and the shampoo ran out. No, it won't be funny then. — Eeva Lancaster

But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. — Neal Stephenson

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. — Delmore Schwartz

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. — Erich Fromm

Reckless. Insatiable. Deceptive. Clingy. Vain. Dismissive. Trivial. Violent. Tactless. Controlling. Impractical. Fearful. Think of one example in your past where you exhibited each of these traits. Whatever memory comes to your mind will usually provide you with a clear illustration. Know that you have the capacity to exhibit all defects. — Alexandra Katehakis

But such a tiny and trivial thing as an umbrella can deprive you of the sight of such a stupendous fact as the sun. — Meher Baba

Trivial, - there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation, - are useful. — Victor Hugo

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary - from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river - at least our parents would not let us. — Mark Twain

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. — Virginia Woolf

The trivial round, the common task,Would furnish all we ought to ask. — John Keble

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action. — Jaron Lanier

A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence. But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decision and action. She either brings her husband round to her way of thinking or goes over to his, and mostly she doesn't know or care which it is. — Dorothy Whipple

Fine." Magnus stood up. "But," he added, pausing by Alec's chair and leaning in close to him, "you are not trivial."
Alec flushed. "If you say so," he said.
"I say so," said Magnus, and he turned to follow Isabelle out of the room. — Cassandra Clare

A warrior takes responsibility for his acts, for the most trivial of acts. An average man acts out his thoughts, and never takes responsibility for what he does. — Carlos Castaneda

Because, as we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it's also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we're not so sure about. — John Cleese

Yet never once in his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was mean to. The only things that he had decided for himself with complete independence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to require no decision making at all. — Haruki Murakami

To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme. — Aldous Huxley

We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we'd had more. I wish we'd walked more. I wish we hadn't sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn't make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?"
"Real life," Harper said. — Joe Hill

It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the 'materials' of an intelligence are essentially trivial. What is not trivial is the capacity to think musically. — Howard Gardner

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty. — Francois Mauriac

In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial. — Marya Hornbacher

Imprisoned in a cage of sound, even the trivial seems profound — John Betjeman

So the professor takes the student's point seriously, and responds with a concise but adequate argument in defence of the disputed equation. The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes it for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin; that the greatest minds can easily make mistakes; and that the most trivial-seeming objection may be the key to a great new discovery. — David Deutsch

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality. — Oscar Wilde

The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality [ ... ] — Neal Stephenson

So let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts. — Seneca.

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

Everything else seemed trivial; like talking about your favourite film while your airplane is falling out of the sky. — Valeria Kogan

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

As C. S. Lewis pointed out, it is not that our desires are too strong (as Stoicism would have it), but that they are too weak. 3 The irony of our lives is that we demand the ephemeral, momentary glories of this fading age, too easily amused and seduced by the trivial, when ultimate joy is held out to us. — Michael S. Horton

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure. — Martin Rees

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn't necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book. — Mark Billingham

Evil is the voltage of good; the urge to goodness, without the potential of evil, is trivial. — James Tiptree Jr.

If string theory is a mistake, it's not a trivial mistake. It's a deep mistake and therefore kind of worthy. — Lee Smolin

He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. — James Joyce

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. — Dorothy L. Sayers

For it is the small temptations which undermine integrity unless we watch and pray and never think them too trivial to be resisted. — Louisa May Alcott

What it means among other things is the more we learn about the nature of the universe, the nature of creation ... if we're not updating what we mean by God ... what we mean by the gospel, we're going to have outdated, misleading and actually trivial understandings of those. — Michael Dowd

Gentlemen should not waste their time on trivial games
they should play go[3] — Confucius

Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him. — Boethius

Regardless of my age, such a trivial thing isn't important, it was upon that decision which my life hung. — Ross Turner

The cup is both half full and half empty; it has never been one or the other. Stop obsessing over the trivial cup and drink the medicine you've been given. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The "professor" group didn't know more than the "soccer hooligan" group. They weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a "smart" frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier - in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked - to blurt out the right answer. — Malcolm Gladwell

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie - no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning. — Jim Corbett

How can something feel so crucial in the moment and then seem completely trivial after the fact? — Paula Stokes

Believe me, nothing is trivial — Brandon Lee

Everyone lives a self-centered life ... whether its trivial like what's for breakfast, or more ambitious, like achieving some lofty goal, a person is constantly on her own mind. — T.M. Goeglein