Silly quotes
1.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I respect the social graces enormously. How to pass the food. Don't yell from one room to another. Don't go through a closed door without a knock. Open the doors for the ladies. All these millions of simple household behaviors make for a better life. We can't live in constant rebellion against our parents - it's just silly. I'm very well mannered. It's not an abstract thing. It's a shared language of expectations."
"Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity, or with people we'll never meet again."
"England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly."
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier."
"I'm gonna live forever, or die trying."
"When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."
"My Brilliant Career was beautifully directed, but I had a bit of trouble with myself in it. It was a silly script, based on a book this 16-year-old girl wrote."
"Even now, I'm very superstitious, in silly ways. I always put my left boot on first. Or on set, I always tie my bow tie from right to left."
"No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately."
"Some consider me as a living Buddha. That's nonsense. That's silly. That's wrong. If they consider me a simple Buddhist monk, however, that's probably okay."
"As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?"
"It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin." The Old Man and the Sea"
"The foolish big boys who fight with their toys are so sadly silly."
"The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels."
"A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is."
"But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly."
"I dreamed of being able to share my thoughts and feelings and hopes without thinking they were going to make fun of me and think I was silly, and I have that."
"I had refused to pay any attention to the moral laws upon which all our vitality and sanity depend: and so now I was reduced to the condition of a silly old woman, worrying about a lot of imaginary rules of health, standards of food-value, and a thousand minute details of conduct that were in themselves completely ridiculous and stupid, and yet which haunted me with vague and terrific sanctions. If I eat this, I may go out of my mind. If I do not eat that, I may die in the night."
"* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment."
"It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it."
