"Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter"
About this Quote
A sly little provocation disguised as practical advice, Beerbohm’s line flips our moral hierarchy: he’d rather you be lucid about the small stuff than grandiose about the big stuff. Coming from a performer with a satirist’s instincts, it’s not an argument for pettiness so much as a jab at the kind of public seriousness that’s mostly costume.
“Trivialities” here aren’t meaningless; they’re the daily, testable facts of living: how people actually behave, how power really moves, what a room feels like when someone is lying. “Things that matter” are the banners we like to wave - politics, virtue, destiny - the arenas where nonsense thrives because it can’t easily be audited. Beerbohm is warning that high-minded talk often becomes a refuge for sloppy thinking, and that the more sacred the subject, the easier it is to smuggle in sentimentality, tribalism, and self-deception.
The sentence works because it’s both modest and insulting. It flatters the reader’s intelligence (“good sense”) while taking a swipe at the era’s booming industry of importance. In late-Victorian and Edwardian culture, “seriousness” carried social prestige; Beerbohm punctures that prestige by treating seriousness as a stage prop anyone can grab.
It’s also a quiet ethics: competence and clarity in small domains scale. Nonsense at the top doesn’t. When the stakes rise, muddled thinking doesn’t become noble - it becomes dangerous.
“Trivialities” here aren’t meaningless; they’re the daily, testable facts of living: how people actually behave, how power really moves, what a room feels like when someone is lying. “Things that matter” are the banners we like to wave - politics, virtue, destiny - the arenas where nonsense thrives because it can’t easily be audited. Beerbohm is warning that high-minded talk often becomes a refuge for sloppy thinking, and that the more sacred the subject, the easier it is to smuggle in sentimentality, tribalism, and self-deception.
The sentence works because it’s both modest and insulting. It flatters the reader’s intelligence (“good sense”) while taking a swipe at the era’s booming industry of importance. In late-Victorian and Edwardian culture, “seriousness” carried social prestige; Beerbohm punctures that prestige by treating seriousness as a stage prop anyone can grab.
It’s also a quiet ethics: competence and clarity in small domains scale. Nonsense at the top doesn’t. When the stakes rise, muddled thinking doesn’t become noble - it becomes dangerous.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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