"Platitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see that. I don't quite understand that. But it has nothing to do with my present purpose. When I said that we were neither of us so young as we once were, I uttered what was a stupid platitude,—a foolish truism.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... you 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 ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... it is to see a great good man be-fuddled by a half truth. For to allege "Industrialism" to be the grand agency in the elevation of a race of already degraded labourers, is as much a mere platitude as to say, "they must eat and drink and sleep;" for man cannot live without these habits. But they never civilize man; and civilization is the objective point in the movement for Negro elevation. Labor, just like eating and drinking, ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... happiness, no matter how comforting it may be to those who have none to assure themselves to the contrary. There may even be doubts as to whether the majority of rich invalids would exchange their check-books for the privilege of being husky paupers in spite of the time-honored platitude concerning health. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... discretion. There or elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him whatever; and, for a forty years after the beginning of his reign, England excelled in anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter misery, platitude, and sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one has read of. Apparently a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in such arts and fine arts as there were; Svein's very ships, they say, had their gold dragons, top-mast pennons, and ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... 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
... 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 and Vraz endeavored ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... penny in accounts 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 ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... that thoughts about hydrostatics and pneumatics are difficult to the multitude, or that mental efforts in regions of political economy or ethical philosophy are beyond ordinary reach, one would only pronounce an evident truism, an absurd platitude. But let any man take any subject fully within his own mind's scope, and strive to think about it steadily, with some attempt at calculation as to results. The chances are his mind will fly off, will-he-nill-he, to some utterly ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... civilization. Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... of literary criticism their productions were not very commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the yard-stick and the pincers, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... its complementary 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, you'll be astonished ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... if her awkward body were a burden. "Is the instant response to an obvious truth—platitude even—always a diagnosis of lunacy? I state a thought so old no one knows who first expressed it and a hearer feels bound to choose between offense to himself and contempt for the speaker. Believe me, Weener, I was offering ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a sacred 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 medieval ages accrued ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to recover 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 ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... brown eyes, he might have been anything but a seaman. You would not have been surprised to learn that he was an architect. To me (I know how absurd it is) to me he looked like a churchwarden. He had the appearance of a man from whom you would expect sound advice, moral sentiments, with perhaps a platitude or two thrown in on occasion, not from a desire to dazzle, but from ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... man to wield such whip. Quite other 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
... of voting when you know 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 of ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... because he loves Mrs. Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... or lack of them. Books profoundly considered show a great nation more than anything else—more than laws or manners. (This is, of course, probably the deep-down meaning of that well-buried but ever-vital platitude, Let me sing the people's songs, and I don't care who makes their laws.) Books too reflect humanity en masse, and surely show them splendidly, or the reverse, and prove or celebrate their prevalent traits (these last the main things.) Homer grew out of and has held the ages, and holds to-day, by ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... swarthy Romanies, but Francis Ardrey, the friend of his youth; 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
... to his taste!" 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
... breaking eggs," was the responsive platitude from Herman Krech. "I suppose you mean you're going to start in ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... political and the social order—a relative status, moreover, that is measured by the demands of American ideals. The farm problem thus connects itself with the whole question of democratic civilization. This is not mere platitude. For we cannot properly judge the significance and the relation of the different industrial activities of our farmers, and especially the value of the various social agencies for rural betterment, except by the standard ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... brought him for mending. It was a significant observation, I thought; and as I went on my way home, writing another such chronicle with every springing step, it filled me with much reflection—largely of the nature of platitude, I have little doubt: such reflection, Reader, as is even already, I doubt less, rippling the surface of your mind with ever-widening circles. Yes! you sigh with an air, it is in the unconscious autobiographies we are every moment writing—not ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... 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
... 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 that the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... has 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. Editors of magazines refused my manuscript because they said it was too plain, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. This idea is one of the oldest platitudes, but it is a platitude whose profound truth and urgency most people live and die without realising. People complain of the lack of power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... control of myself; but, having crucified every rebellious thought, there was nothing left for control. I had marked my victory by extermination. To live was no joy; neither was it specially the reverse: a long, monotonous, changeless platitude; yet no desire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... feeling. Mackenzie replied, praising the work, and so did several others. All writers of note are favored with many such juvenilia, and usually there is a gracious electrotype reply. A doubt exists as to whether Mackenzie ever read Byron's book, but we know that his letter of stock platitude fired Byron to do still better. It is said that no flattery is too fulsome for a pretty woman—she inwardly congratulates the man on his subtle insight in discovering excellences that she hardly knew existed. This may be so and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... her austere manner and her philosophical platitude, Sarah was more moved in her heart than she had dared to confess. From the moment that she had heard of Reuben's death—when she had gone over with some of her mourning to offer Molly—she had ceased to ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... to have stayed one day longer with the fleet, when they entered the harbour," he wrote to Mrs. Nelson, "but service could not be neglected for any private gratification,"—a sentiment she had to hear pretty often, as betrothed and as wife, but which was no platitude on the lips of one who gave it constant demonstration in his acts. "Duty is the great business of a sea officer," he told his intended bride in early manhood, to comfort her and himself under a prolonged separation. "Thank God! I have done my duty," was the spoken thought ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Platitude though this may be, our greatest poets have not hesitated to use their highest powers to impress it upon us. Robert Browning put this truth into the mouth of Andrea del Sarto in one of the strongest lines in ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... 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 allowable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Hilda went on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent. That's a platitude, I know," she added, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... "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 Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Unity—its totality of effect or impression—we read it (as would be necessary) at a single sitting, the result is but a constant alternation of excitement and depression. After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical prejudgment can force us to admire; but if, upon completing the work, we read it again, omitting the first book (that is to say, commencing with the second), we shall be surprised at now finding ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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 in truth speak very ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... shook her 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... means much or little," he said quietly at last. "To me, the consecration of a love which has leaped the bounds of mere platitude. A woman of your training perhaps cannot grasp the honesty of my unconvention. I have meant you no harm. But ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... 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 had only himself ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... this is both obvious and to be ignored—a platitude with a flavour of cant. Is it? Do we not hear again and again the appeal to envy and hatred as motives of action, a desire in social life to pull down, if levelling up is not immediately practicable? Is not jealousy of the success of others, ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... but the wearisome calendar of all lovers?—The journal of a thousand incidents as interesting and important to two people as they are stupid and ridiculous to every one else. Each day was one of progress; finally, we loved each other. Excuse the homely platitude ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... bringing the personality out through the method, so that method disappears. Senator George F. Hoar once gave very sensible advice in an address to an audience of Harvard students. He did not content himself with dwelling on the inevitable platitude, first have something to say, and then say it; he said he had been, in all his career, at a special disadvantage in public speaking, from the want of early training in the use of his voice; and he ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... over 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
... 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 ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... 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 interrupted ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... A most delightful legal platitude, as one might call it, is to be found in the opening of the learned Sergeant's speech. It is a familiar, transparent thing, often used to impose on the Jury. As Boz says of another topic, "Counsel often begins in this way because it makes the jury think what sharp fellows they must be." "You have ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... another? Ten times ten thousand hearts go palpitating; all 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, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is seeing her home," she said, "and the front-door key is under the mat, and I thought Maria could ask him in, and I would go home through the cellar, and not be in the way. Three is a company." Maria said the last platitude with ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... rare; fraud is usually confined within what may be called its natural limits—the lawyer's office; the attention paid to the heroines not only by their heroes, but by their unsuccessful and objectionable rivals, is generally of the most honourable kind; and platitude ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... glittering bark of this brilliant amateur in the art of letters is not invariably steered with equal dexterity of hand between the Scylla and Charybdis of paradox and platitude, it is impossible that in its course it should not once and again touch upon some point worth notice, if not exploration. Even that miserable animal the "unattached writer" may gratefully and respectfully recognize his accurate apprehension and his felicitous application of well-nigh the most hackneyed ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... weight, and they have continued down to our own day to repeat the same phrases which roused the Eleatic's destructive ardour. It was only recently that it became possible to explain motion in detail in accordance with Zeno's platitude, and in opposition to the philosopher's paradox. We may now at last indulge the comfortable belief that a body in motion is just as truly where it is as a body at rest. Motion consists merely in the fact that bodies are sometimes ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... 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 ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... arise, and what complications occur, keep that resolve. It will at least help to sustain you with a sense of self-respect, if unhappiness from any outside source should shadow your life. An attractive home has become a sort of platitude in speech, but it remains a thing of vital importance, all the same, in actual ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... could I 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
... and desired that she should bring with her such letters or other documents as would establish her relationship to the deceased and assist in extracting the necessary Grant of Probate to the said Will, and it was subscribed by Messrs. Platitude & Glambe, Solicitors, Commissioners for Oaths ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... meddle with them now: 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 with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... had settled down in Venice with Pagello—and with all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, to say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite of everything, she continued congratulating herself ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... 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
... has already been completed, thus reducing life and 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 idea is ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... could always go to sea in a platitude. It is as leaky as a sieve, and not half so likely to upset and leave one floating without ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... placated him with an insignificant remark which led both into a maze of meaningless but infinitely diverting inconsequences; diverting, at least, to Anisty, who held up his head, giving her back look for look, jest for jest, platitude for platitude (when the waiter was within hearing distance): altogether, he felt, acquitting ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... of public opinion and they were always 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 Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... 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 it a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... Vicar, in a terrible voice, interrupting himself in the middle of a cheering platitude. But he had no time to say anything more, for behind Rupert came a procession of perhaps a dozen people, all dressed in sheets. Everybody saw at one pitiful glance that these were unfortunate householders, so suddenly roused from oblivion as ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... reverse the aphorism and say that whatever is in a part must be in the whole, we are on much safer ground. I do not say that it cannot be pressed into illegitimate extremes, but in one and that the simplest sense it is little better than a platitude. The fact that an apple has pips legitimises the assertion that an apple-tree has pips, and that the peculiar property of pips represents a faculty enjoyed by the vegetable kingdom as a whole; but it would be a childish misunderstanding ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... know how it is, Jane, but whenever I say anything I feel you are just the one person on whom it seems to make an impression. You have a trick of repetition, and you manage to turn everything into a platitude. If you cannot do better than ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... she can afford to be. The theorist holds up Glasgow as a 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 of the buildings, and the omnipresence ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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 of costumes, manners, methods and thought ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... 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 think, but he had not ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... another—Mill, Buckle, Carlyle, Emerson—all to no purpose, for he was not ready for them. At this period he read with great profit the "Recreations of a Country Parson," which, as he says, "gave me precisely the grade and shade of platitude I required." But more important were the weekly sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. Of ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... by versifying such 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 should ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Funeral—hoti's business, the enclitic de—were stimulants; they heightened his effects. They helped him make clear his meaning, that life is greater than art. These savageries spoke to the hearts of men tired of smoothness and platitude, and who were relieved by just such a breaking up of the ice. Men loved Browning not only for what he was, but also for ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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
... 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 civilization would ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 DOES ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... ought to 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 you this first and foremost, that you shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of 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 ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... satisfaction. And the older person, who would fatuously join in with a sensible remark, spoils all the enjoyment. The fact is, the secret of real companionship is not quality, but equality. There's a punning platitude ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... ground on which S. Paul bases the Christian's hope for the departed; first, faith in the death and resurrection of Christ; "if we believe that Jesus died and rose again." It is a mere platitude to say that the whole of S. Paul's teaching is founded on the actuality of the resurrection. "If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... flowed down 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
... event which must have taken place in the 'sixties or thereabouts. She is dead now. So is her husband, the prince of moralizers, the man who first taught me how contemptible the human race may become. Doubtless he expired with some edifying platitude on his lips and is deblatterating them at this very moment in Heaven, where the folks may well be seasoned to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... never faltered, never repeated his words, never fell 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 escape ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... The more he looked at it through her eyes, the more wonderful profundities he discovered in that remark of his, which at the time of uttering it had appeared to him a simple platitude. It went exceedingly deep in ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... stiff sort of moral plaster to apply to a bleeding wound. Of course, there 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 himself and them ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... orator an audience becomes of one mind: the dullest intellect is more alert than usual and the most discerning a little less so. Cheap wit will then often pass for brilliancy, and platitude for wisdom. We roar over the jokes we have known since childhood, and cry "Hear, hear!" when the great man with upraised hands and fire in his glance declares ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... have all been properly corrected. Today the city frowns from one end to the other like a highly efficient and insanely practical platitude. Mood has given way to mode. An essential evolution, alas! D'Artagnan wore his Paris as a cloak. And perhaps Mr. Insull wears his Chicago as a shirt front. But most of us have parted company with the town. It ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... passionate when most impersonal. "To 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, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... walking down Magpie Alley? You could do it as well as I could. Love has the imagination in it, and the mind. I suppose that's the difference. And, too, love wants to give. This is all platitude. No one can ever say anything new about love, it's all been said. Got ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... but 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 ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... do a 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 climbed a ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we venture the veriest platitude, May not its grammar be shamefully weak? You, Mr. Punch, can rely on our gratitude, If you will tell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... dialogue! 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... economic, industrial, and financial situation is rather hard to estimate, because their practical patriotism keeps them from making any public parade of their business troubles and worries, if they have any. The oft-repeated platitude that you would never suspect here that a war was going on if you didn't read the papers is quite just. Conditions—on the surface—are so normal that there is even a lively operatic fight on in Munich, where the personal friction between Musical Director Walters and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... discovered, that is to say, its meaning to my thoughts and feelings. Hence, in all my impressions, a mixture of familiarity and of astonishment; a sense, perhaps answering to the reality, that Rome—it sounds a platitude—is utterly different from everything else, and that we are therefore in different ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... the artist was inferior to the poet"; finally that Hugo and so Wagner have a certain pauvrete de fond. Thus would we ungenerously make Wagner prove our sum! But it is a sum that won't prove! The theory at its best does little more than suggest something, which if it is true at all, is a platitude, viz.: that progressive growth in all life makes it more and more possible for men to separate, in an art-work, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... to her so that he may ease a little his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with us is apt to be, ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of sexual purity, both flowing from ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... whilst Ira A. Cole, in "Five Sticks on Finance," gives some interesting suggestions for economy. "Opportunity," an essay by Mildred Blanchard, concludes the issue, and successfully disputes the noxious old platitude, that "Opportunity knocks but once at each man's door." With the Quarterly is bound The New Member, reviewed elsewhere, the two forming a tasteful ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... our interest, 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 ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... 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 stupid and sententious." With such apprehensions it is ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... lines in accordance with its own traditions. Above all, the principle 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 merely absurd in any of the earlier historical empires. In 1833 an official ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... 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 some ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... I am only appearing again from my cellar, with my hands filled with bottled platitudes; but if they are platitudes, by which I mean plain and obvious truths, why do we not find more people practising them? What I mean by a platitude is a truth so obvious that it is devoid of inspiration, and has become one of the things that every one does so instinctively, that no reminder of them is necessary. Would that it were so in the present case! All I can say is that I know very few people who live their ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... development by the free spreading of our capital all over the world, wherever the demand for it gave most profit to the owner, was a tendency to be encouraged, or at least to be left free to work out its will. This was true enough to be a platitude as long as we could rely on peace. Our capital went forth and fertilized the world, and out of its growing produce the world enriched us. As the world developed its productive power, its goods poured ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... found himself no longer that silent and disdainful Horace Endicott, who on such an occasion would have cooly stuttered and stammered through fifty sentences of dull congratulation and platitude. Feeling aroused him, illumined him, on the instant, almost without wish of his own, at the contrast between two pictures which traced themselves on his imagination as he rose in his place: the wrecked man who had fled from Sonia Westfield, what would he have been to-night but for ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... eyes. He felt angry at this girl who had shown herself ready to argue with him,—in her girlish fashion, of course,—and who, after listening to his incontrovertible arguments, fell back resolutely upon a platitude, and considered that she had ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... him to render more social service, and how is he to be certain what service is social? What is the test, what is the measure? A subjective feeling, somebody's opinion. Tell a man in time of peace that he ought to serve his country and you have uttered a pious platitude, Tell him in time of war, and the word service has a meaning; it is a number of concrete acts, enlistment, or buying bonds, or saving food, or working for a dollar a year, and each one of these services he sees definitely as part of a concrete purpose to put at the front an ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... coming into the world when they are born; but the weight of these words and the solemnity of the occasion on which they were spoken, and the purpose for which they were spoken—viz., to comfort and to illuminate these disciples—forbid us to see such a mere platitude as that in them. There would have been no consolation in them unless they meant something a great deal more than the undeniable fact that Jesus Christ was born, and the melancholy fact that Jesus Christ was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible, confused, and erroneous—that his audience think him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest platitude of cautious soberness. Great communities are like great mountains—they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions resemble the life of old ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... word 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, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... authorship which is common to most growing writers, when the style is "overlanguaged," and when it plunges wildly through the "sandy deserts of rhetoric," or struggles as if it were having a personal difficulty with Ignorance and his brother Platitude. It was capitally said of Chateaubriand that "he lived on the summits of syllables," and of another young author that "he was so dully good, that he made even virtue disreputable." Hawthorne had no such literary vices to contend ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... manner was not, as has sometimes been the case, a cloak for platitude. What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it. In English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he 'stands outside the regular line of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey |
