"Banality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... broadcloth, came easily and cynically to the surface: Imita bene! The stuff is a good match enough! What more do you want? To produce plausible imitations, to save appearances, to amuse the mind with tricks, was the last resort of Catholicism in its warfare against rationalism. And such is the banality of human nature as a whole, that the Jesuits, those monopolists of Brummagem manufactures, achieved eminent success. Their hideous churches, daubed with plaster painted to resemble costly marbles, encrusted with stucco polished to deceive the eye, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that at all worried Gordon just now, and that was the behaviour of the Hazlitt brethren. Mention has already been made of this couple. During their first few terms they gave every promise of developing into the very worst types that banality and athletic success can produce, and these expectations had been abundantly fulfilled. The elder brother had his points, but they were few, the chief one being that he was fairly good at games, which, after all, is but a negative quality. But the younger, ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Thee, Sweet," has some moments of banality, but more of novelty; the harmonic work being unusual at times, especially in the rich garb of the words, "It groweth late." In "I Only Can Love Thee," Hawley has succeeded in conquering the incommensurateness of Mrs. Browning's sonnet by alternating 6-8 and 9-8 rhythms. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... and worn smooth by use. The lyrical phrase, when the first two or three words of it have been pronounced, finishes itself. From Carew's "Ask me no more," with its long train of imitations, to the latest banality of the music-halls, the songs that catch the ear catch it by the same device. The lyric, that is to say, is almost always dependent for its music on easy idiomatic turns of speech. The surprising word occurs rarely; with all the greater effect inasmuch as it is embedded in phrases ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... had met him face to face, and had tried to tell him how moved she was; but in her agitation, and because of a strange shyness that had suddenly come to her, she had ended only in stammering out some flippant banality that had brought to his face merely a ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... the banality. "He left this afternoon. Very well, let us take the seats over there. I rather ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... revealing itself in eternal contrariness to the spirit and to art—not as a vision of bloody greatness and untamed beauty, not as something uncommon does it present itself to us uncommon people. On the contrary, the normal, proper, and lovely is the realm of our longing, is life in its seductive banality! He is far from being an artist, whose last and deepest yearning is for the superrefined, the eccentric and satanical, who knows no longing for the innocent, the simple and living, for a little friendship, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... set his teeth on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw it he had to make an effort to take his eyes from it, and in a sort unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself amid the pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such as Whitwell's low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not give, nor the little red school-house, on the other hand, showing through the naked trees. There should have been really no human habitation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
