
“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”
Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)
A Byzantine Nobleman in Exile Composing Verses http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=16&cat=1
Collected Poems (1992)
Context: The frivolous can call me frivolous.
I’ve always been most punctilious about
important things. And I insist
that no one knows better than I do
the Holy Fathers, or the Scriptures, or the Canons of the Councils.
“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”
Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)
The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile is empty of reflexion and stuffed with self-complacency.
"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921
“Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination.”
It’s This Bad http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html(Spring 2006).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 181-182.
“I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing.”
Entry (1952)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights.
The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 50
“To Mr. Benbow,” Political Register (29 November 1817).