Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive, Trifle not at thirty-five; For, howe'er we boast and strive, Life declines from thirty-five; He that ever hopes to thrive Must begin by thirty-five.
Alas, how love can trifle with itself!
Passion costs me too much to bestow it on every trifle.
Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifle
She went from opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day. To part her time 'twixt reading and bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o'er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.
Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.
Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
If Christ has died for me, I cannot trifle with the evil that killed my best Friend.
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
