“It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously”
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Oscar Wilde812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900Related quotes
“Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves.”
Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general
“People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things.”
Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist
"Friend of My Youth", in Friend of My Youth https://books.google.com/books?id=JHO0R0im-WsC&pg=PT94 (1990) <br class="br">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.<br>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.”
John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
Agatha Christie book The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Source: The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka
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.
Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist
"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.”
David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer
As quoted in No Commercial Potential : The Saga of Frank Zappa (1972) by David Walley, p. 4.