{"quotes":[{"text":"You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.(letter to Scholem from December 1964).","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["banal","depth","evil","shallow-good"],"id":87875,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.","author":"Michael Bassey Johnson","tags":["attention","banal","boring","boring-book","carnal","cruel","cruelty","disease","dog","ego","egoism","egoist","egotist","epidemic","humilation","impolite","impoliteness","improper","insult","insults","lack-of-respect","lackadaisical","lazarus","madness","maltreatment","michael-bassey-johnson","mistake","popularity","pride","readers","rigid","shallow","stupidity","unfeeling","unpopularity","vanity","weird","writers","writing"],"id":125144,"author_id":"Michael+Bassey+Johnson"},{"text":"Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'. ","author":"Criss Jami","tags":["aphorisms","banal","bane","clever","cliche","contradictory","dullness","existence","experience","facts","fruit","funny","funny-but-true","humor","intelligence","ironic","knowledge","lesson","life","morality","originality","overused","paradoxical","platitudes","pop","pop-culture","popular-culture","pure","quotations","quotes","ripe","sayings","trite","truth","unique","unoriginality","wisdom","witty"],"id":235849,"author_id":"Criss+Jami"},{"text":"Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal.Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.","author":"Idries Shah","tags":["attention","banal","depth","present-moment"],"id":407635,"author_id":"Idries+Shah"},{"text":"The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it.","author":"Craig D. Lounsbrough","tags":["banal","bland","blandness","brilliance","common","discernment","insight","live","living","mediocre","miracle","miraculous","mundane","spectacular","uncommon","wonderful"],"id":464262,"author_id":"Craig+D.+Lounsbrough"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":5,"pages":1}}