W. G. Sebald Quotes

...in life it is often the tiny details that end up being the most important.

… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.

We often plough so much energy into the big picture, we forget the pixels.

Well, anytime I make a movie, I like to load it up with more things than you could ever catch on the first viewing.

I think the success around any product is really about subtle insights. You need a great product and a bigger vision to execute against, but it's really those small things that make the big difference.

Success is the sum of details.

A lot of those little things that I really like doing are just moments of cool articulation, just little moments of phrasing that probably go over everybody's head.

Details create the big picture.

[Military] events are proof that success is not due simply to general causes. Particular factors can often be decisive—details known only to those who were on the spot. There can also be moral factors which never come to light; while issues can be decided by chances and incidents so minute as to figure in histories simply as anecdotes

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally.

I want to talk to the audience. This is what I've been doing in my work in French forever - talking about small things becoming big problems. I notice all the details, all the tiny little things.

I love small things. I love them.

Trifles, trifles are what matter!

Trifles make the sum of life.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

All big things are made up of trifles. My entire life has been built on trifles.

I learned to value the small transactions as well as the large.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!

The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment, we might obtain no valleys at all, or a completely different system. Yet we now stand at the shore line contemplating the fine spacing of valleys and their even contact with the sea. How easy it is to be misled and to assume that no other landscape could possibly have arisen.

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

I read everything I could find: books and online. Sometimes bigger revelations came to me through finer details or something that you wouldn't pick up just by surface reading.