"Platitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disappointed at finding that French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his ennui in "the eternal platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do not mind I shall grow most ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From the diary of ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... we venture the veriest platitude, May not its grammar be shamefully weak? You, Mr. Punch, can rely on our gratitude, If you will tell us—how ought we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... I answered, grimly. 'There are worse disappointments in store for them in life— Which is a fine old crusted platitude worthy of Aunt Susan. Anyhow, I've decided. Look here, Elsie: I stand to you in loco parentis.' I have already remarked, I think, that she was three years my senior; but I was so pleased with this phrase ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... with an apologetic smile, 'I'm afraid I have taken too much; would you kindly pour some back. My hand is somewhat shaky. Old age, sir, if I may indulge in a platitude, is—' ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... inferior saloon in Stenton, and, with an uncertain wave of his hand, arrested the barkeeper's attention. "I'm here," he articulated thickly, "to see life, understand! And I can see it too—money's power." The other regarded him with a brief, mechanical interest, a platitude shot ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tongues are mute with wonder and fear; till a shout, like the voice of seas, rolls after him, on his wild way. He soars, he dwindles upwards; has become a mere gleaming circlet,—like some Turgotine snuff-box, what we call 'Turgotine Platitude;' like some new daylight Moon! Finally he descends; welcomed by the universe. Duchess Polignac, with a party, is in the Bois de Boulogne, waiting; though it is drizzly winter; the 1st of December 1783. The whole chivalry of France, Duke de Chartres foremost, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... A trite platitude about his not caring to lose her was on his lips, but he refrained from uttering it. Another conclusion he had arrived at was that she was not to be nagged. Continual, or even occasional, reminders of his feeling for her would constitute a tactical ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating platitude. England stands far lower to-day than the level ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... But there is yet another subject for a platitude. Flavour! An impalpable quality, less easily captured than the scent of a flower, the peculiar and most essential attribute of any work of art! It is the thin, poignant spirit which hovers up out of a play, and is as much its differentiating essence as ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and there were long scorings fore-and-aft her decks, showing the paths that our eighteen-pound shot had ploughed up in their destructive passage. But even this was not the worst of it; for when I turned to the young officer and tried to soothe him by the utterance of some platitude having reference to "the fortune of war", he informed me that, although he had that morning been the ship's junior lieutenant, he was now the senior surviving officer; the captain and the other lieutenants being among ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... privilege for which mankind always had to fight. These struggles [Platitude—but push on] fill the pages of history. History records the gradual triumph of the serf over the lord, the slave over the master. The master has continually tried to usurp unlimited powers. Power during the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... bad taste of this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, "Flows ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... and blushed not at the subterfuges and mean, paltry artifices, aye, a full battery of chicaneries that awaited her use, as she crossed the maid's chamber threshold. "'All is fair in love and war,'" she quoted—"'Tis an egregious platitude adopted alike by king ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity, his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... endeavour to a mere sham.' But even allowing the force of that objection, the idea of a 'world in the making,' though it appeals to the popular mind, is not quite free from ambiguity. In one sense it states a platitude—a truth, indeed, which is not excluded from an absolute or teleological conception of life. But if it is implied that the world, because it is in process of production, may violate reason and take some capricious form, the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do, then, was to stand by and hold ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... itself was the oh-quite-informal reception Mrs. Budlong gave to mitigate the ineffable stupidity of Christmas afternoon: that dolorous period when one meditates the ancient platitude that anticipation is better than realization; and suddenly understands why it is blesseder to give than to receive: because one does not have to wear ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... became companions for life. Cowper says they were as mother and son to each other; but Mrs. Unwin was only seven years older than he. To label their connexion is impossible, and to try to do it would be a platitude. In his poems Cowper calls Mrs. Unwin Mary; she seems always to have called him Mr. Cowper. It is evident that her son, a strictly virtuous and religious man, never had the slightest misgiving about ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... girl who bore herself with the air of an acknowledged belle, bowed, with a platitude that sounded original on her lovely lips, and Sally Bassett turned with a ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can make her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elements of morals, learning and hygiene—it is a platitude that such a woman is very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than in any other civilized or semi-civilized country, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... theater of half that size to get it up in, well and good; but seen from a distance, which defies discrimination of objects, a thistle is as good as a rose, and in that enormous frame refinement is mere platitude, and finish of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... has he fed upon cackle and platitude, FURNIVALL sauce to a dish full of dearth, Still, in the favourite FURNIVALL attitude, Grubbing about like a mole ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... dear, but you can help him greatly in it," Miss Jencks instructed placidly (she was invaluable, was Barbara, when it was a matter of proper platitude, which flowed from her lips with the ease of water from a tap—and she believed it, too!) "a man needs a woman in his home. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... natural note in his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely of the litterateur, but of the extremely conventional litterateur. An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals. Greuze's genre is really a genre of his own—his own and that of kindred spirits since. It is as ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... flattering offers to the poet? But then, if he pleased the bourgeoisie so much he was—oh, horror!—a bourgeois himself. That was obvious. How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they never will ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... into the relations of the two men the contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician? Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science; but rhetoric was, at all events, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the Armenian merchant, with whom Lavengro discussed Haik; the victim of the evil chance, who talked nonsense about the star Jupiter and told him that "touching" story of his fight against destiny; the Rev. Mr. Platitude, who would neither admit there were any Dissenters nor permit any to exist; Peter Williams, the man who committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, and Winifred, his patient, constant wife; ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude—a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it—the most effective advertising is advertising that ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... "A platitude merely," he said. "One accepts alms every day, every moment of the day. One goes about the world giving and receiving. It is a small point of view which reckons gold as the only means ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he succeeded in giving a strong impetus to the Haskalah movement, and builded better than he knew. The statement in his address at the dedication of the Riga school,[14] "This hour we may call the hour of the renaissance of the mental education of Israel," which reads like an oratorical platitude, was not entirely visionary. The real history of Haskalah in ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... repeated Commines, finding some comfort and strength in the bald platitude: it was incontrovertible and at least gave him firm ground under his feet. "Nor can treason go unpunished, or how would the throne be safe for a day? But what the father cannot do, though a king, another can and must; and must," he reiterated, steeling himself with a rising emphasis for what ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... successive geological epochs and also at many places remote from each other. The key to the distribution of any group lies in the configuration of land and water of that epoch in which it made its first appearance. Although this sounds like a platitude, it has frequently been ignored. If, for argument's sake, Amphibia were evolved somewhere upon the great southern land-mass of Carboniferous times (supposed by some to have stretched from South America across Africa to Australia), ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... is an idealist is to commit a thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just, while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. With regard to our tradition, it is indisputable. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... these words, to get at the idea in St Paul's mind for which they stand, and have so long stood. It can be no worthless idea they represent—no mere platitude, which a man, failing to understand it at once, may without loss leave behind him. The words mean something which Paul believes vitally associated with the life and death of his Master. He had seen Jesus with his bodily eyes, I ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such a man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or constitutional thing, but springs from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the Anatomy of Wit is taken up with what may be described as the private papers of Euphues, consisting of letters, essays, and dialogues, including A Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers, a treatise on education, and a refutation of atheism, and so amid the thunders of the artillery of platitude the first part of ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... and mask this piece of startled irritability with a vague platitude did not deceive his audience in the smallest degree. Doubt became conviction in Mrs. Barraclough's mind. She did not know in what way this man was connected with her son's affairs but none the less she was certain he represented ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... dead one. It is often those who know the least who are the most anxious to tell it and the medium or automatic writer sometimes gives them the opportunity. Consequently we get many foolish communications and an enormous amount of commonplace platitude is delivered at seances. But it is equally true that unquestionable proof of ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... of describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... platitude and you have the essence of modern fiction," observed Mrs. Ferrall. "Love is a subject talked to death, which explains the present shortage in the market I suppose. You're not in love and you don't miss it. Why cultivate an artificial taste for it? If it ever comes naturally, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... She would smile upon him with intense fondness, when, after wasting hours over a few lines of poetry, he would misplace all the adjectives and barbarously entreat the metre. She laughed with gratification, when, excited by the bright sayings that fell from her lips, the youth put forth some platitude, dim as the lamp in the expiring fire-fly. When he slipped in grammar she saw malice under it, when he retailed a borrowed jest she called it a good one, and when he used —as princes sometimes will —bad language, she discovered in ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... committed to his charge, but absolute sincerity in the small things of life, as in the great, amounted to a mania with him. Occasionally, for instance, someone might remark casually to him that the day was fine, and the result of this unconsidered platitude was calculated to provoke a smile. For before risking a possibly untruthful assent, Honest Jack would turn to the window and reflectively scan the heavens, then, after consideration, would deliver himself of a cautious verdict. "Well," he would pronounce guardedly, "I don't know that you can actually ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... pronounced that Long's hat was dislodged and hurled to the ground. In his shocked sympathy for his friend, Henley was bewildered by noting that Dixie was actually subduing a laugh, her rebellious lips covered with her white-gloved hand. Long secured his hat, drew himself up, and repeated his platitude. ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... creature, and never very grateful unless he expects a continuance of past favors. With him a cessation of favors means a cessation of gratitude. A limited number of the Platitude class still linger about me—principally on account of a long-contracted habit. They are content with whatever they get; they are entirely harmless, always useful in some way, and occasionally ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... succeed in mastering it. It is plain in fact that her supposed parting glance upon them was one of suspicion. But there was no suspicion of Theobald; that he should have devoted his life to his children—why this was such a mere platitude, as almost to go ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... very sacred thing to-day: to enunciate a couple of platitudes and attest them. It is always a solemn moment in life when one can sincerely subscribe to a platitude. Platitudes are the things which people of plain minds shout from the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend; and to discover the truth of a platitude by experience means that you have ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this rare repose. He tasted something of the tranquil self-content which makes life so enjoyable when one has never seen a necessity for shaping original remarks. No one in this room would despise him for a platitude, were it but recommended with a pleasant smile. With the Moxeys, with Earwaker, he durst ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... over and we are not excited. Truth never excites—it is falsehood that excites—until we discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... knowledge as he had. These various causes make Manilius one of the most difficult of authors. Few can wade through the mingled solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... head. "It would be useless," she assured him. "He has a curious business code and will not abandon it. He will only quote some platitude about mixing sentiment ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... of certain common things until the occasion arises for noticing them, or accident forces them upon the attention; then they marvel that the thing should have escaped observation. This is a truism, no doubt, but the force of every platitude does not always present itself to every one. The comparison of handwritings is so essentially a matter of cultivating the powers of observation, that even if turned to no more practical account than that of a hobby its value as a mental ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... however, thought that she looked very like an angel, and accepting the proffered seat, sat down beside her. He uttered some platitude as to this deep obligation for the trouble she had taken, and wondered more and more ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... from the less obvious modes of advertising, you'll agree that this is the age of all ages for the man who can write puffs. 'Good wine needs no bush' has become a trade paradox, 'Judge by appearances,' a commercial platitude. The man who is ambitious and industrious turns his trick of writing into purely literary channels, and becomes a novelist. The man who is not ambitious and not industrious, and who does not relish the prospect of becoming ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... are twain (see Chadband's platitude); War you could summon by your single self, But Peace—for she adopts a stickier attitude— Takes two to mobilise her off the shelf; Unless one side's so weak That, try his best, he cannot raise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... were domestic oceans And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a guarded border, Gantlets—but not to fling, Thousands of old emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order— And tongues, that ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with the supposition that religion must be the truth; and while the former prove that it is not, the latter obstinately maintain that it is; or rather the former cut up and dress the allegory in such a way that it could be true in sensu proprio but would in that case become a platitude. The latter wish to maintain, without further dressing, that it is true in sensu proprio, which, as they should know, can only be carried into execution by inquisitions and the stake. While in reality, myth and allegory ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that it is, probably, the earliest extant poetic drama. We see in it the tendency to grandiose language, not yet fully developed as in the Prometheus: the inclination of youth to simplicity, and even platitude, in religious and general speculation: and yet we recognize, as in the germ, the profound theology of the Agamemnon, and a touch of the political vein which appears more fully in the Furies. If the precedence in time here ascribed to it is correct, the play is perhaps worth more recognition ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... Peregrine and Glenroy, to the noble army of the bores, and they are insipid on the stage; but the association of the sprightly and jocose Pangloss with those drab-tinted and preachy people irradiates even their constitutional platitude with a sparkle of mirth. They shine, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... mixture that he saw; Not wholly good nor ill, but both, With fine intricacies of growth. He pulled the wraps of flesh apart, And showed the working human heart; He scorned to drape the truthful nude With smooth, decorous platitude! ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... little sobered by his glance at the possibility of both of the couple being of one mind on the subject of their betrothal. Desirable as it was that they should be united in disagreeing, it reduced the romance to platitude, and the third person in the drama to the appearance of a stick. No man likes to play that part. Memoirs of the favourites of Goddesses, if we had them, would confirm it of men's tastes in this respect, though the divinest be the prize. We behold ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... name, spare us this alliteration and humbug," Cappy fairly shrieked. "You're driving me crazy. If it isn't platitude, it's your dog-gone habit of initialing things!" He placed his old elbows on his knees and bowed his head in his hands. "If I'm not the original Mr. Tight Wad!" he lamented. "But you must forgive me, Matt. I got in the habit of thinking of expense ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... he went on that he was failing. He had certain arguments at his fingers' ends,—points with which he was, in truth, so familiar that he need hardly have troubled himself to arrange them for special use,—and he forgot even these. He found that he was going on with one platitude after another as to the benefit of reform, in a manner that would have shamed him six or seven years ago at a debating club. He pressed on, fearing that words would fail him altogether if he paused;—but he did ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... was in this generation very definitely established that India, like other great dependencies, must be administered in the interests of its own people, and not in the interests of the ruling race. That seems to us to-day a platitude. It would not have seemed a platitude in the eighteenth century. It would not seem a platitude in modern Germany. And it may safely be said that the enunciation of such a doctrine would have seemed ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... answered musingly. "It's your baby face that does the trick. In the ordinary way I should have known you were pulling my leg, and have shown you the door. As it was, I felt half inclined for the moment to reply with some damned silly platitude that would have set all Fleet Street laughing at me. Why do ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... and women among whom they lived, and whose art, lacking sanity, was therefore incomplete. Yet they at least knew the limitations of their art, while Dickens never knew the limitations of his. When he tries to be serious he succeeds only in being dull, when he aims at truth he reaches merely platitude. Shakespeare could place Ferdinand and Miranda by the side of Caliban, and Life recognises them all as her own, but Dickens's Mirandas are the young ladies out of a fashion-book, and his Ferdinands the walking gentlemen of an unsuccessful company of third-rate players. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... to befriend a man You who were ever the first to defend a man, You who had always the money to lend a man Down on his luck and hard up for a V, Sure you'll be playing a harp in beatitude (And a quare sight you will be in that attitude) Some day, where gratitude seems but a platitude, You'll find ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... see things!" Barbara resumed. "Sometimes one feels one wants a guide, but all one gets is a ridiculous platitude from her old-fashioned code. One has puzzles one can't solve by out-of-date rules. However, since she doesn't see, there's no use ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of sexual purity, both ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... into those vile half-muttered hems and haws by which an Englishman in such a position so generally betrays his timidity. But during the whole time of my remaining in the room he did not give expression to a single thought. He went on from one soft platitude to another, and uttered words from which I would defy any one of his audience to carry away with them anything. And yet it seemed to me that his audience was satisfied. I was not satisfied, and managed to ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... And you might spare me your platitude, Andrew," The Laird replied savagely. "I'm done with the lad forever, for son of mine he is no longer. Andrew, do you remember the time he bought that red cedar stumpage up on the Wiskah and unloaded it on me at a profit ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... to regard Mr. Roosevelt's restatement of obvious, but too often forgotten truth, as platitudinous. "The finest and most beautiful things in life," said this scientist, "the most abstruse scientific discoveries, are based upon platitudes. It is a platitude to say that the whole is greater than a part, or that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and yet it is upon such platitudes that astronomy, by aid of which we have penetrated some of the far-off mysteries of the universe, is based. The greatest cathedrals are built of single ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... known you now a year; you too have known me a year." Westray had thought this poetic insistence gave a touch of romance, and balanced the sentence; but to Anastasia it seemed the reiteration of a platitude. If he had known her a year, then she had known him a year, and to a female mind the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... yet it must be said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, and there are too many swaggering with that expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Voltaire condemns in Corneille,—a temptation to which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... axiom! ... yet almost a platitude, for did not every one occupy themselves exclusively with the Now, regardless of future consequences? Of course! Who but sages—or fools—would stop to question ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a greater piece of absurdity in the world. I thought so when I was a child, and now I know it; and I desire here to brand it as at once a platitude and a falsehood. How ever the idea gained currency that childhood is the happiest period of life, I cannot conceive. How ever, once started, it kept afloat is equally incomprehensible. I should have supposed that the experience of every sane person would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need to have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality with which to test ideals. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... a platitude—a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. It is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. Words are often the most convenient ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... said again with nervous platitude, when once more they had lapsed into the silence he found it so hard to bear; "neither my wife nor myself has any ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... she is within as well as without. What is that sentimental platitude of somebody's (the worst kind of platitude, is it not?) about the sun being to flowers what Art is to Life? It has the further distinction of being untrue. In Florence you learn that what he is to flowers, that he is to Art. For I soberly believe that under his rays Florence has grown open like some ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Mrs Goldsworthy received the well-worn platitude with a laugh. "We don't make anything—we are made. It is just a dance of marionettes, Debbie. Poor puppets of flesh and blood, treated as if they were just wood and nails and glue! Who set us up to make a game of us like this? Who ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... others. For instance, was it not shameful that art should be dishonoured by all those medals, all those crosses, all those rewards, which were so badly distributed to boot? Were artists always to remain like little boys at school? All the universal platitude came from the docility and cowardice which were shown, as in the presence of ushers, so as to ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... which is absurd. Some of his reappearances, recognitions and coincidences must be inventions. The postillion's tale must be largely invention. But it is not fair or necessary to retort as Hindes Groome did: "Is the Man in Black then also a reality, and the Reverend Mr. Platitude? In other words, did Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by Keble's sermon?" For Borrow was unscrupulous or careless about time and place. But it is fair and necessary to say, as Hindes Groome did, that some of the unverities in "Lavengro" and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... would have hated for his birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... as if every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... work is in store for King Friedrich; and Nature will not, by any suggestion of that terrible task, put him out in the one he has. He is nothing of a Luther, of a Cromwell; can look upon fakirs praying by their rotatory calabash, as a ludicrous platitude; and grin delicately as above, with the approval of his wiser contemporaries. Speed to him ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Bland, there may be as many brands of Methodism. If so we unhesitatingly place Mr. Rowell in the evolutionary group. Therefore by personal development he is next thing to a Conservative; and the latest phase of his career proves that in working it out he has practised the fine old platitude ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... that a wife's devotion is a very strong motive power, Jeffries. It will move irresistibly forward in spite of all the barriers you and I can erect to stay its progress. That may sound like a platitude, but it's a ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... at what other people say: Learning's torch I fiercely kindle, with my HAECKEL, HUXLEY, TYNDALL, And all preaching is a swindle, that's the motto of to-day. I'd give the wildest latitude to each agnostic attitude, And everything's a platitude that springs not from my mind: I've studied entomology, astronomy, conchology, And every other 'ology that anyone can find. I am a man of science, with my bottles on the shelf, I'm game to make a little world, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... for word," Norgate admitted. "It's the sort of platitude I could watch framing in his mind before I was half-way through what I had to say. What they don't seem to take sufficient account of in that museum of mummied brains and parchment tongues—forgive me, Hebblethwaite, but it isn't your department—is ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... English butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude, indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which England, and for the matter of that every other European country ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... a bad floor," Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers. After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the night. Hirst ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... soul, the cloud of incense melting upon the mitres and sunsets, and the boys' treble hovering over an ocean of harmony. But although the picture of his future life rose at his invocation it did not move him as heretofore, nor did the scenes he evoked of conjugal grossness and platitude shock him to the extent he had expected. The moral rebellion he succeeded in exciting was tepid, heartless, and ineffective, and he was not moved by hate or fear until he remembered that God in His infinite goodness ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... produced upon him was extraordinary—far more vivid than men of mature years can easily conceive. It is often so in early youth when we listen to the voice of authority; some particular chance phrase will have an unmeasured effect upon one. A worn tag and platitude solemnly spoken, and at a critical moment, may change the whole of a career. And so it was with George, as you will shortly perceive. For as he rumbled along in the Tube his father's words became a veritable obsession within him: he saw their value ramifying in a multitude of directions, he perceived ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... bare solid rock, even if given the starting-point. No—he had got to die of thirst, starvation, and vultures, barring miracles of luck—and he had never had any good luck—for luck existed, undoubtedly, in spite of mealy-mouthed platitude-makers and twaddle about everything being pre-arranged and ordained with care and deliberation ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... notice—this is brought out in the second quotation—that profits directly produced by the war are not limited to the period of the war. This again is really axiomatic, being only another form of the platitude that it takes longer to construct than to destroy: but it means that even a short war of sufficient intensity will ensure a long period of profits, and therefore it noticeably aggravates the conclusions to which I hope ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... particular periodical and had never been paid for—that was the extent of his scribbling. And yet—Margaret might be right. . . . One never knows till one tries: and Vane grinned to himself as that hoary platitude floated through his mind. . . . Then his thoughts passed to the other side of the picture. Margaret, dispensing admonition and pills, in her best professional manner, to long queues of the great unwashed. He felt certain that she would ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... goes, as he asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the mass of manual labourers. To say that labour in its more extended sense is the producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless platitude. It is to say that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr. Wilshire seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that "if he will only cast his ballot intelligently" he will be able to treble his income at the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... "That run of '17' might happen—yes. But it is improbable. They let me win because I was a new player—new players always win at first. It is proverbial, but the man who is running this game has made it look like a platitude. To satisfy myself on that point I am going to play again—until I have lost my winnings and am just square with the game. When I reach the point that I am convinced that some crooked work is going on I ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... thought that she looked very like an angel and, accepting the proffered seat, sat down beside her. He uttered some platitude as to his deep obligation for the trouble she had taken, and wondered more and more who ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the same strangely gross physical misconception. It is all but impossible that two minds without concert or connection should have thought of introducing anything of the kind. Nicodemus makes an objection, and Justin by repeating the same objection, and in a form that savours so strongly of platitude, has shown, I think we must say, conclusively, that he was aware that the objection had ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... great reformers or masters of events can manage to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... grown tired of soft platitude, silly truism and undisputed things said in such a solemn way. So when "The Philistine" stepped into the ring and voiced in no uncertain tones what its editor thought, thinking men and women stopped and listened. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... misfortune as a brave man should, the tears started to his eyes as he explained to me that the capture of the ship would leave him and his frau absolutely penniless in their old age. I endeavoured to soften the blow to him as much as possible by sympathetically murmuring some idiotic platitude about "the fortune of war," but of course it was no good; the poor old fellow simply shook his head and ejaculated—"Ay—the fortune of war! It is all very well for you, young sir, who depend upon war to provide you with a career, to talk like that; but think of the thousands ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... my little notes; you must make allowances for haste, for bad inns, for the perpetual scramble, for ill-humour. Everywhere the same impression—the platitude of unbalanced democracy intensified by the platitude of the spirit of commerce. Everything on an immense scale—everything illustrated by millions of examples. My brother-in-law is always busy; he has appointments, inspections, interviews, ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... say to poor John? I did not for one moment doubt his entire guilt, and so, as people often do on such occasions, I took refuge in a platitude. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... successfully resolves the paradox of combining the sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes "the burning ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... was no longer the stupid dock-party platitude it had been. It was bidding "good-by" with faint hope of "au revoir." Ladies going abroad, even brides, thought little of their deck costumes so long as they included a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... unnecessarily discreet', he remarked in his pompous way when I told him about the arrival, and of course he added his usual platitude ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... printed books. The vaster proportion of what is printed is not literature. It may be statements of fact and items of information; it may be sound science and unimpeachable record; it may be truism; it may be platitude; it is often sheer bathos or doggerel. We do not count these things as literature. A good deal of singing, piano-beating and tin-whistling is not music. It is only in virtue of a certain fine quality that books are literature. According ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant. Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common sense tone, that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... to the planning of the children's room, may give the impression that the room is of more importance than the librarian. It is a platitude, however, to say that the ideal children's librarian, with every material condition against her, will do a thousand times more than the ideal room with the wrong person in it. The qualifications necessary to make the right sort of a disciplinarian ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... the creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them. There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... confronted with the platitude that the world must be made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... flaws, Or waste my pity when some fool Provokes her measureless ridicule. Strong-minded is she? Better so Than dulness set for sale or show, A household folly, capped and belled In fashion's dance of puppets held, Or poor pretence of womanhood, Whose formal, flavorless platitude Is warranted from all offence Of robust meaning's violence. Give me the wine of thought whose head Sparkles along the page I read,— Electric words in which I find The tonic of the northwest wind; The wisdom which itself allies To sweet and pure humanities, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... model city—a pioneer—and the splendour of its municipal buildings is as the justice of Aristides. But if an ugly woman does not dress well, who should? With all its civic spirit, Glasgow remains grey, prosaic, intolerable—the champion platitude of commercial civilisation. Aberdeen would have been a far finer example of the schematic city of which theorists dream. There is something heroic about the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... hast ever read what's writ in holy pages, How blessed the peace-makers are, God's children of the ages? Perhaps you think the promise sweet was nothing but a platitude; 'Tis clear that you have no concern in that ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... if a nation, too long borne in By hard wrongers,—comprehending in such attitude That God had spoken somewhere since the morning, That men were somehow brothers, by no platitude,— Cried exultant in great wonder and ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But poor ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... British nation, he threw himself on their hospitality. He had made his way through a network of blockade when he returned from Egypt and Elba, and looking at the facts as they are now before us, it is preposterous to adhere to the boastful platitude that he was so hemmed in that he had no option but to ask Captain Maitland to receive him as the guest of England aboard the Bellerophon, and it may be taken for granted that the resourceful sailors knew ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... upon the raveled platitude that clothes do not make the man. Pennington shook his head, still examining his trousers. "That will do in a copy-book, but not in life," said he. And then looking up as Taylor moved toward the door, he asked: "Are ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Rev. Mr. Platitude visits author, Borrow leaves early; walks N. for two hours; buys Slingsby's pony and cart; afternoon travels N.W.; late at night arrives at a dingle ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... are no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education. All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the distinctions ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... expression, remind one of a turned-on tap. What is within pours forth in an immediate, spontaneous rush. Her utterly unliterary style has at least the merit of being a vehicle exactly suited to her thoughts and feelings; and even the platitude of her phraseology carries with it a curiously personal flavour. Undoubtedly it was through her writings that she touched the heart of the public. Not only in her "Highland Journals" where the mild chronicle of her private ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... very articulate in proving what to all readers with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words? We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages. A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... unseldom from lips which Science ought to have taught more caution, that the Future Life of Christianity is simply a prolonged existence, an eternal monotony, a blind and indefinite continuance of being. The Bible never could commit itself to any such empty platitude; nor could Christianity ever offer to the world a hope so colourless. Not that Eternal Life has nothing to do with everlastingness. That is part of the conception. And it is this aspect of the question that first arrests ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... be independent, may he! And you will escape with that fine platitude, and with that bitter mockery! And never think that the author's independence is but the fine phrase for your ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... the country should live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in the towns. God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact, though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the worst places for Man's heavenly spirit ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... inanity, is carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier reproduces admirably the particular life that he sees, because it is the very medium in which he moves. He has no wide horizon; the absolute bourgeois hems him in, and he is a bourgeois himself, without ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... that could be answered by no general platitude,—by no weak words of hopeless consolation. Coming from him to her, it demanded either a very substantial answer, or else no answer at all. What was he to do about Sarah and the children? Perhaps there came a thought across her mind that Sarah and the ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... fed, and innumerable working men should die starved, were it not best to end it; to have done with it, and restore it once for all to the Joetuns, Mud-giants, Frost-giants, and Chaotic Brute-gods of the Beginning? For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it may be well enough; but it is a Platitude which Men should be above countenancing by their presence in it. We pray you, let the word impossible disappear from your vocabulary in this matter. It is of awful omen: to all of us, and to yourselves ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of July 14, 1849. Stanley stood over the cradle of his son, looking worshipfully down at the tiny sleeping face. Inez Stanley, busied with the varied tasks of motherhood, came and stood for a moment beside him. She voiced that platitude of wives and mothers in their pride: "He looks just ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... visions of coming joy. But when it appears, on examination, that the book is as utterly unworthy of these elaborate commendations as any book can possibly be,—that it is from beginning to end nothing but a dead level of stagnant verbiage, a desolate waste of dreary platitude,—the reader cannot but regard the publishers' ardent expressions of approbation as going quite beyond the license ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... hand, the annexation of the same province in 1908 had just the opposite effect, for from that time the ultimate ideal was no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in any selfish sense, but Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia had scrambled the eggs. Evidence of the fairly amicable relations between Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs at the time of Gaj is not lacking. It was Gaj who reformed Croatian orthography on the basis of the Serbian. Bleiweis ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... be considered a law of religion and morality which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all, this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism against selfishness or the false egoism. Of course an ideal ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... lesson which a study of the more vicious among the State legislatures teaches, is that power does not necessarily bring responsibility in its train. I should be ashamed to write down so bald a platitude were it not that it is one of those platitudes which are constantly forgotten or ignored. People who know well enough that, in private life, wealth or rank or any other kind of power is as likely to mar a man as to make him, to lower ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... Pan with green hair and jewelled sandals, and by his side—I could scarcely believe my eyes!—walked a modest nun counting her beads. At a little distance were seen three dancers arm-in-arm, a lean, starved platitude, a rosy, dimpled joke, and a steel-ribbed sermon on predestination. Close upon them came a whole string of Nights with wind-blown hair and Days with faggots on their backs. All at once I saw the ample figure of Life rise above the whirling mass holding ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the ambitious, whom neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement, to follow them; ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... desire. "And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?" she pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram. She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited, her only experience of the Continent being an occasional six weeks in ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... from time to time insisting upon the proceedings being brought to a halt while a translation of something that had been said was furnished for his benefit, generally selecting some particularly unprofitable platitude which had been uttered by one of those present for ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... experience as an agreeable relaxation, as it undoubtedly is. But never for one moment did he allow such evanescent attachments to turn him a hair's breadth out of his course. Now something had happened to him, and he knew that for the future the platitude had become a lie, and that the only incentive either to high hopes or their fulfilment lay in the prospect of a hearth-stone shared by the girl who a few hours ago declared that she "would not like to ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... apologise for talking such commonplace platitudes as these, but, brethren, the most commonplace truths are usually the most important and the most impotent. And no 'platitude' is a platitude until you have brought it so completely into your lives that there is no room for a fuller working of it out. So I come to you, Christian men and women, real and nominal, now with this for my message, that Jesus Christ seeks from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... a spiteful speech; and Roger's silence made me feel it was, which, with the rather patronizing opinion I had of Roger, I found not a little galling. So I, too, kept silence, and nothing beyond a platitude had passed between us when I found myself at my own door, my shopping utterly forgotten, and something acid ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald |
