These trifle quotes will inspire you. Trifle a thing of little value or importance.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging trifle quotes, trifle sayings, and trifle proverbs.
Motivational Trifle Quotes
- “Silence – Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.” ~ Lord Chesterfield
- “If a weakly mortal is to do anything in the world besides eat the bread thereof, there must be a determined subordination of the whole nature to the one aim no trifling with time, which is passing, with strength which is only too limited.” ~ Beatrice Webb
- “Children are overbearing, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling objects; they bear no pain, but like to inflict it on others; already they are men.” ~ Jean de la Bruyere
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“Though so trifling, the success of our first Buffalo hunt gave us quite a social lift.” ~ Ernest Thompson Seton
- “It chills my blood to hear the blest Supreme Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.” ~ William Cowper
- “Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .” ~ Charles Sanders Peirce
- “At an expense trifling indeed, compared to what she frequently spends upon unprofitable contests, she might place the moral world on a new foundation, and to rise the pinnacle of moral glory.” ~ John Strachan
- “They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.” ~ Aristotle
- “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines – these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.” ~ Henry Miller
- “Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion.” ~ Franklin Pierce
- “Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances.” ~ Livy
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“I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time of need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel. Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or at nine at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at the billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.” ~ Sarah Josepha Hale
- “Solon used to say that speech was the image of actions; . . . that laws were like cobwebs, – for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast; while if it were something weightier, it broke through them and was off.” ~ Diogenes
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“Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “Certain trifling flaws sit as disgracefully on a character of elegance as a ragged button on a court dress.” ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater
- “To the natural philosopher, there is no natural object unimportant or trifling. From the least of Nature’s works he may learn the greatest lessons.” ~ John Herschel
- “Nothing has a greater tendency to lessen the reverence which mankind ought to have for the Supreme Being, than a careless repetition of his name upon every trifling occasion . . . . To prevent this profanation, such passages are selected from scripture, as contain some important precepts of morality and religion, in which that sacred name is seldom mentioned. Let sacred things be appropriated to sacred purposes.” ~ Noah Webster
- “The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “My wife and I went to jail in Selma. The difference when I was back there recently? White folks? No. Black folks who were not scared. I was behind the president this time. When I was a little boy and ran around with trifling dudes, I was the only one scared of dogs. And I was bitten 14 times! Dogs smell scared. And that’s the same thing with people: 50 years ago they smelled fear. There was no fear this time.” ~ Dick Gregory
- “It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.” ~ Aristotle
- “If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.” ~ William Hazlitt
- “When you devote yourself to achieving your goal, you will not be bothered by shallow criticism. Nothing important can be accomplished if you allow yourself to be swayed by some trifling matter, always looking over your shoulder and wondering what others are saying or thinking. The key to achievement is to move forward along your chosen path with firm determination.” ~ Daisaku Ikeda
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“Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.” ~ Anthony Trollope
- “The family is the world’s greatest welfare agency, and the most successful. What the federal government has done in welfare is small and trifling compared to what the families of America do daily, caring for their own, relieving family distresses, providing medical care and education for one another, and so on. No civil government could begin to finance what the families underwrite daily. The family’s welfare program, for all its failures from time to time, is proportionately the world’s most successful operation by an incomparable margin.” ~ R.J. Rushdoony
- “The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance” ~ Jane Austen
- “Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East — to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them — who were above such trifling.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “I seem to you cruel and too much addicted to gluttony, when I beat my cook for sending up a bad dinner. If that appears to you too trifling a cause, say for what cause you would have a cook flogged.” ~ Martial
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“When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?” ~ Mark Twain
- “At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “There are many points in the history of an invention which the inventor himself is apt to overlook as trifling, but in which posterity never fail to take a deep interest. The progress of the human mind is never traced with such a lively interest as through the steps by which it perfects a great invention; and there is certainly no invention respecting which this minute information will be more eagerly sought after, than in the case of the steam-engine.” ~ David Brewster
- “And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Prayer covers the whole of man’s life. There is no thought, feeling, yearning, or desire, however low, trifling, or vulgar we may deem it, which if it affects our real interest or happiness, we may not lay before God and be sure of sympathy.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
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“Phantoms in general are nothing more than trifling disorders of the spirit; images we cannot contain within the bounds of sleep.” ~ Luigi Pirandello
- “What struck me most in England was the perception that only those works which have a practical tendency awake attention and command respect, while the purely scientific, which possess far greater merit are almost unknown. And yet the latter are the proper source from which the others flow. Practice alone can never lead to the discovery of a truth or a principle. In Germany it is quite the contrary. Here in the eyes of scientific men no value, or at least but a trifling one, is placed upon the practical results. The enrichment of science is alone considered worthy attention.” ~ Justus von Liebig
- “I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.” ~ Mark Twain
- “When we consider the incidents of former days, and perceive, while reviewing the long line of causes, how the most important events of our lives originated in the most trifling circumstances; how the beginning of our greatest happiness or greatest misery is to be attributed to a delay, to an accident, to a mistake; we learn a lesson of profound humility.” ~ Arthur Helps
- “Dancing is, in itself, a very trifling and silly thing: but it is one of those established follies to which people of sense are sometimes obliged to conform; and then they should be able to do it well. And though I would not have you a dancer, yet, when you do dance, I would have you dance well, as I would have you do everything you do well.” ~ Lord Chesterfield
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“A lack of patience in trifling matters might lead to the disruption of great project.” ~ Confucius
- “There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.” ~ Allan Bloom
- “Listening doesn’t mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don’t know you know.” ~ Umberto Eco
- “Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” ~ Mark Twain
- “There is no trifling with nature; it is always true, grave, and severe; it is always in the light, and the faults and errors fall to our share. It defies incompetency, but reveals its secrets to the competent, the truthful, and the pure.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“…trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
- “It is often interesting, in retrospect, to consider the trifling causes that lead to great events. A chance encounter, a thoughtless remark – and the tortuous chain reaction of coincidence is set in motion, leading with devious inevitability to some resounding climax.” ~ Patricia Moyes
- “It is so often the odd, the unexpected, the apparently trifling, that stamps itself upon the memory for ever, while much more memorable things pass away like a breath of wind.” ~ Esther Meynell
- “An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “Let us resolve to talk more to believers about the Bible when we meet them. Alas, the conversation of Christians, when they do meet, is often sadly unprofitable! How many frivolous, and trifling, and uncharitable things are said! Let us bring out the Bible more, and it will help to drive the devil away, and keep our hearts in tune. Oh, that we may all strive so to walk together in this evil world; that Jesus may often draw near, and go with us, as He went with the two disciples journeying to Emmaus!” ~ J. C. Ryle
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“Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “King René of Anjou [(1409-80)]was a strange compound of amiable, great and trifling qualities. He was so excellent a sovereign as to acquire the surnom of the Good. He was brave in war, delighted in tournaments and wrote on them, instituted festivals and processions, partly religious and partly burlesque, was a fond husband, a romantic lover, a good painter for that age, and a true philosopher.” ~ Horace Walpole
- “Trifling favors are readily acknowledged, though cheaply esteemed; but important ones are most rarely remembered.” ~ Giovanni Ruffini
- “Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is “faithful in that which is least” is dependable in all the world.” ~ Maltbie Davenport Babcock
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“Who does not feel that Nansen’s account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
- “God’s love gives in such a way that it flows from a Father’s heart, the well-spring of all good. The heart of the giver makes the gift dear and precious; as among ourselves we say of even a trifling gift, “It comes from a hand we love,” and look not so much at the gift as at the heart.” ~ Martin Luther
- “There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard; and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.” ~ Samuel Johnson
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“Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.” ~ William Shenstone
- “God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.” ~ Tom Wolfe
- “Alas! the joys that fortune brings
Are trifling, and decay,
And those who prize the trifling things,
More trifling still than they.” ~ Oliver Goldsmith
