Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Holmes preserved the unregenerate spirit he confessed, at 27, to William James: "There are not infrequent times when a bottle of wine, a good dinner, a girl of some trivial sort can fill the hour for me." But that was not the whole of it. On the night of his 70th birthday he picked up his pen: "One learns from time an amiable latitude with regard to beliefs and tastes. Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. . . . Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth...
...England Repertory Company has opened its fifth season with a complex of paradoxes. Most striking of them is the first production, Jean Ferguson Black's "Penny Wise." Despite compounded line muffing and faulty pacing, the Repertory Players manage to make refreshing entertainment of a trivial but sparkling comedy. What plot there is can be summed up as "triangle plus happy ending." The cast, except for a few outstanding Repertory regulars, is distressingly spotty...
From 1600 to 1900 the western world produced many great painters, but very few of them expressed themselves in murals. Those who did usually contented themselves with mere decoration and illustration. If they attempted monumental subject matter they usually failed. Such failures, pretentious and sanctimonious, or cloying and trivial, adorned the walls of many a 19th-Century library and court house...
...Radio's business-as-usual patter. Said he, in the New Republic: "He [the radio advertiser] puts us off guard; he lulls us with a feeling of false security; he invites us to pamper our appetites when we need to be self-denying and hardy. He magnifies the trivial when great efforts are necessary for our survival...
...leaders of our society, is either a paranoid personality, warped by delusions of grandeur and an insatiable lust for power, or a split personality, in which the intellectual, the emotional and the practical sides are divided into watertight compartments. The first type tends to be destructive; the second, trivial or impotent...