There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons.
Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions.
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.
I believe such passion-even passion born of fear and anxiety-is far better than a life of banality.
Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?
Banality is sometimes striking.
He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.
Even when there are banalities, they're usually kind of benign banalities.
Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.
There is no community service in Seinfeld. But rather than lauding that, I think it shows the insane banality of it.
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the loneliness and all that. Those moments of really feeling in the flow are fleeting.
