A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat.
Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.
In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.
We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.
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.
Of course it's trivial, but then most things are.
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
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.
The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.
Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way.
The evils that arise to us from the structure of the material universe are neither trivial nor few, yet the history of political society sufficiently shows that man is, of all other beings, the most formidable enemy to man.
What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes.
In larger things we are convivial; what causes trouble is the trivial.
On a day-to-day level, I love watching my kids accomplish the little things that seem trivial but are really milestones: seeing my son hit a baseball or watching my daughter draw something that actually looks like what she says she's drawing. Or hearing them say 'I love you.'
Oh man. If I had magic powers... I would hope that I would use them for good. I think I would. But I would do something pretty trivial like making traffic disappear.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
To demonstrate this simultaneity is by no means trivial, because it may for example happen that the product nucleus always forms in an activated state at first.
I know this is rather trivial - I will not be very deep about this - but it's great when you call the hottest restaurant in town and ask for a table for five at 8:00 P.M., and they say, 'Okay,' instead of, 'You have to wait two months.'
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
One of the things that happens in my house on the holidays is after dessert, we sit down to a very ambitious men-versus-women game of Trivial Pursuit. It's brutal. And there's a trophy.
A television chat show is light entertainment, so it is trivial by its very nature. It is hardly the place to get people to reveal their innermost thoughts. Then it becomes sensationalism, and you lower yourself to the level of the popular newspapers.
Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.
In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.
I think the problem with the word 'happiness' is that it sounds fluffy. It sounds like something trivial that we shouldn't be concerned with.
Few bands in hard rock history have been so adept at balancing the awesome and trivial as Van Halen in their prime.
Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.
I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
Housing being a top-order issue for cities is something that's not trivial.
In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.
