"Claptrap" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fails of happiness because of his insufficient mind, he miscalculates, he stumbles and hobbles, some cant or claptrap whirls him away; he gets passion out of a book and a wife out of the stews, or he quarrels on a petty score; threats frighten him, vanity beguiles him, he fails by blindness. But the knave who is not a fool fails against the light. Many knaves are fools also—most are—but some are ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... illusions; he must have herded with the Tapers and Tadpoles, and prompted Rigby to write slashing articles on his behalf in the quarterlies. He must have felt that his intellect was cruelly wasted in talking claptrap and platitude to suit the thick comprehensions of his party; and the huge dead weight of the invincible impenetrability to ideas of ordinary mankind must have lain heavy upon his soul. How many Tadpoles, one would like to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... reference, of course, only to the time in which it could be achieved; and of Madame Ristori's once fine delineation of the character, which, when I first saw it, atoned for the little merit of the piece itself, nothing remained but the broad claptrap points in the several principal situations, made coarse, and not nearly even as striking, by the absence of due preparation and working up to them, the careless rendering of everything else, and the slurring over of the finer minutiae and more delicate indications ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Heights sat upon a hill, among a grove of pines, the most romantic of all trees. Life, a powerful but clumsy dramatist, does not reject the most claptrap "situations," which a sophisticated playwright would discard as too obvious. For this sandy plateau, strewn with satiny pine-needles, was the very horizon that had looked so blue and beckoning from the little house by the pond. Not far away was the great Airedale estate, which ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... we'd better shet her claptrap once and fer all," he said. "Lon, ye leave me to settle ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology,[50] they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... there," said Kenelm, dryly. "And you seem to me to utter a claptrap beneath the rank of your understanding. However, this warm weather indisposes one to disputation; and I own that a petticoat, provided it be red, is not without the interest of colour ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and all kind was the old vicar; and how attentively he listened with Mrs. Goodheart to the eye-witness of England's great deeds! And then—no, he did not give Joe a claptrap maudlin sermon, but treated him as a man subject to human frailties, and, only hoped in all his career he would remember some of the things he had been taught at ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... Paddy! none of your claptrap with me: I'm too sceptical for it. I'm not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw |
