“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer
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 <br class="br">Collected Poems (1992) <br class="br">Context: The frivolous can call me frivolous.<br>I’ve always been most punctilious about<br>important things. And I insist<br>that no one knows better than I do<br>the Holy Fathers, or the Scriptures, or the Canons of the Councils.
“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer
Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)
A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet
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.”
Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer
It’s This Bad http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_oh_to_be.html(Spring 2006). <br class="br">City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 181-182.
“I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing.”
Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher
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.
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright
The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 50
“What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?”
Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood
Source: Norwegian Wood
Mark Twain book Pudd'nhead Wilson
Following the Equator (1897)
Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XII
William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist
“To Mr. Benbow,” Political Register (29 November 1817).