Those things which now seem frivolous and slight.
Will be of serious consequence to you,
When they have made you once ridiculous. [ Roscommon ]

We laugh but little in our days, but are we less frivolous? [ Beranger ]

The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous. [ Mme. de Stael ]

Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

Possession is the touchstone of love: true love finds new ardor, frivolous love extinguishes itself in it. [ Panage ]

Grief sharpens the understanding and strengthens the soul, whereas joy seldom troubles itself about the former, and makes the latter either effeminate or frivolous. [ F. Schubert ]

Here, in the country, my books are my sole occupation: books my sure solace, and refuge from frivolous cares. Books the calmers, as well as the instruction of the mind. [ Mrs. Inchbald ]

Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us. [ Montaigne ]

We are more jealous of frivolous accomplishments with brilliant success, than of the most estimable qualities without. Dr. Johnson envied Garrick, whom he despised, and ridiculed Goldsmith, whom he loved. [ Hazlitt ]

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds. [ Chapin ]

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times, Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. [ Emerson ]

If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you. But I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself; it puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which might be much better employed. [ Chesterfield ]

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight. [ Emerson ]

Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. [ Addison ]