“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

— Wallace Stevens

Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (16 May 1907); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 9

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Wallace Stevens 278

American poet 1879–1955

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

En una alma llena cabe todo y en una alma vacía no cabe nada.
Voces (1943)

“Love can't mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That's the only real path to love.”

Leon Uris book Trinity

Source: Trinity

“Alas! that Christians should stand at the door of eternity having more work upon their hands than their time is sufficient for, and yet be filling their heads and hearts with trifles.”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 255.

“That feeling of terrible emptiness when I touched him was like going into a house that you thought would be full of people you loved, only to find it empty, and even the furniture taken. You walk from room to room, hearing your footsteps echo on the naked floors. Your voice bounces back from the empty walls, where the lines of beloved photos still show like the line around a body at a crime scene. He was gone.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

memories of Princess Meredith about encountering the body of her father, Essus; p. 40
Merry Gentry series, A Stroke of Midnight (2005)

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“People seem to be more motivated by the thought of loosing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”

Robert B. Cialdini (1945) American social psychologist

“Is there a thought can fill the human mind
More pure, more vast, more generous, more refined
Than that which guides the enlightened patriot's toll”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)
Context: Is there a thought can fill the human mind
More pure, more vast, more generous, more refined
Than that which guides the enlightened patriot's toll:
Not he, whose view is bounded by his soil;
Not he, whose narrow heart can only shrine
The land — the people that he calleth mine;
Not he, who to set up that land on high,
Will make whole nations bleed, whole nations die;
Not he, who, calling that land's rights his pride
Trampleth the rights of all the earth beside;
No: — He it is, the just, the generous soul!
Who owneth brotherhood with either pole,
Stretches from realm to realm his spacious mind,
And guards the weal of all the human kind,
Holds freedom's banner o'er the earth unfurl'd
And stands the guardian patriot of a world!

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

“…and then President Robbins began to speak.
After two sentences one realized once more that President Robbins was an extraordinary speaker, a speaker of a—one says an almost extinct school, but how does one say the opposite? a not-yet-evolved school? He did something so logical that it is impossibe that no one else should have thought of it, yet no one has. President Robbins crooned his speeches.
His voice not only took you into his confidence, it laid a fire for you and put your slippers by it and then went into the other room to get into something more comfortable. It was a Compromising voice.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 25

“Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless void between the stars, how everything about us has become lined with it, how it darkly lurks behind each shred of matter. This is your work, envious one! And I hardly think the future generations will bless you for it…”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "How The World Was Saved"
The Cyberiad (1967)

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

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Wallace Stevens 278

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