“It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously”
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Oscar Wilde 812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900Related quotes
“Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves.”
“People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things.”
"Friend of My Youth", in Friend of My Youth https://books.google.com/books?id=JHO0R0im-WsC&pg=PT94 (1990)
Context: People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong.
“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.”
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
Source: The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Source: Kodokan Judo (1882), p. 23
Context: There are people who are excitable by nature and allow themselves to become angry for the most trivial of reasons. Judo can help such people learn to control themselves. Through training, they quickly realize that anger is a waste of energy, that it has only negative effects on the self and others.
"Neurological Politics"'
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
“I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
As quoted in No Commercial Potential : The Saga of Frank Zappa (1972) by David Walley, p. 4.