"Platitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... phrase struck Frank very much, and it seemed very philosophic to him, a maxim, for guidance through life. It did not strike him that it was generally either a platitude or an excuse for weakness, and that a nobler duty is to find out what is inevitable and what is not, to declare boldly that what the world oftentimes affirms to be inevitable is really evitable, and heroically ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... et Mercurii" Such models may have saved him from a base 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 vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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 that admirable which we before condemned—that damnable which we had ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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 and uplifted and separate. Morally ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... equal opportunity was not a pious platitude, but a practical means of solving the military's racial problems. Equal opportunity was the tactic he had used in the Navy where he had encouraged specialized training for all qualified Negroes. He understood that ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... me,' he said, 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
... not make a very natural Jap, being more on the robust than petite scale, but she was a very beautiful girl. With my impassioned love of beauty I could not help exclaiming about hers, and the foolish platitude, "You ought to be on the stage," inadvertently escaped me, seeing this is the highest market for beauty in these days when even personal emotions can be made ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... I was almost as much agitated as Mrs. Rayne. I felt that I must clinch the matter somehow, but I took refuge in a platitude to gain time: "There is such a difference in ships, almost as much as in houses, and the comfort of the voyage depends ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... effortless platitude, "liking is the great mystery—whether you take its coming or ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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 ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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
... coasts, he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at 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 other metallic ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... what is, I believe, called a lovely summer's night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the same remark would be in the small talk ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 in truth speak very much too fast, knocking ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... fish, until I began to believe that the stories I had heard of the wonderful fecundity of the Coast of Japan waters were fables without foundation, in fact. Had I known what sort of fishing our next bout would be, I should not have been so eager to sight whales again. If this be not a platitude of the worst kind, I don't know the meaning of the word; but, after all, platitudes have their uses, especially when you want to state ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... 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 that ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 be ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Germanism in us proceeds, whether from a Celtic source or from a Norman source. Of the true steady-going German nature the bane is, as I remarked, flat commonness; there seems no end to its capacity for platitude; it has neither the quick perception of the Celt to save it from platitude, nor the strenuousness of the Norman; it is only raised gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through almost interminable ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... return to my conclusion,—to my platitude, if you will. Professor Fawcett used to say that he could lay down no rules for the sphere of government influence, except this rule, that no interference would do good unless it helped people to help themselves. I think that the doctrine was ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... means," was the good man's reply; "justice is as much the right of the poor as the rich—so is the air we breathe—so is everything." And he put his fingers together again, as was his wont whenever he uttered a philosophical or moral platitude. ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... 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 my resentment ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... this special claim on 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 correct, the play is perhaps worth more ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... 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 ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... tell him what a high opinion you have of the world and its judgments," said Zara, "and he will teach you that the world is no more than a grain of dust, measured by the standard of your own soul. This is no mere platitude—no repetition of the poetical statement 'THE MIND'S THE STANDARD OF THE MAN;' it is a fact, and can be proved as completely as that two and two make four. Ask Casimir to ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... 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, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... their absolute saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't have ever been anything else ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... pink-and-white 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
... asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven't waited but to see the ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... have been made by individuals for themselves; and each, having discovered anything, has found that that same principle was discovered a thousand times before, and written a thousand times. There is no platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burst upon the perceptions of all who have not yet perceived it, as a new and burning truth; and on the other hand, there is no startling command to purity or compassion, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... bout, 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 ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... details for office-seekers, 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 ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... 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 the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... 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 when I was young, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... 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
... "A platitude! Self-esteem is synonymous to genius. Still, I do not suppose he would in any circumstances have been a great poet; but there is enough of the poet about him to enhance and complete his ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... 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 as to raise his sense ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 had placed him for ever out ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... world the place of chorus, interpreter or commentator is not given to the wise man, but to the fool who has degraded the office to a profession. Jaques, the wise man, finds the place occupied by one whose comment is platitude. Wisdom has no place in the social scheme. The fool, he finds, has both office ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Christmas 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 ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... which had been accepted on the spot by a not too 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 ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... devoted 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
... struggle was over. It was not that I had gained a laudable 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 to quit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • 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. ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... 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 ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... brought instantly true: With singular quickness Each victim of sickness Was made over, better than new, And people who formerly thought they were doomed With almost obstreperous healthiness bloomed, And each had some platitude, Teeming with gratitude, For the new ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the sloppy bar of an 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
... living; rather he writes 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 ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... forms of modern animism come under review. One or two preliminary observations, however, will be in place at this earlier stage. It is wise, for example, not to forget the limitations of our knowledge. A platitude! Yes—but one which even the greatest thinkers are apt to lose sight of, with consequent tendency to hasty generalisation and undue neglect of deep-seated instincts and intuitions. The discovery of some new cosmic law may change the whole face of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... as if every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered by ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... American 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. Of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... The great purpose of nature," 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, "but ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... causerie—pleasant, genial talk about a most interesting man. Easy and conversational as the tone is throughout, no important fact is omitted, no valueless fact is recalled; and it is entirely exempt from platitude and conventionality."—The Speaker. ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... And since nothing whatever 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 ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... must return To that same home, while bosoms burn With platitude for kindness shown To those you ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... Thousands of persons go through life unconscious of the existence 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 ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... say that 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 ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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; the student of Chinese, who learnt the language of the land of the ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... as they walked on, "I must go to that confounded harvest-supper. I begin to think there is something true in the venerable platitude about love in a cottage. And Will Somers must be married in haste, in order ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she turned away, leaving him the impression that she probably misunderstood his speech, thinking he meant that he drew from the living model or some such platitude: as if there could have been any likelihood he would have dealings with the dead. This indeed would not fully have explained the abruptness with which she dropped their conversation. Gabriel, however, was used to sudden collapses and even ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... 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
... 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 friend ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... shame our so-called 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
... 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 any support ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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 ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... 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 your latitude." ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... 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
... general. She read the sentence again, "I have 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... 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 into ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... 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, disputes. The people, ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... things all askew; Don't be afraid of what is new; Nor banish as unsound, untrue, A platitude. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Japanese cherry-trees in pots! They were followed by jovial 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... can do nothing with any French part in Covent Garden. If they can find a 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 detail ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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. I am not sure ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... bring happiness, my friend Kent." He chuckled ironically at his use of the platitude. "There is more in life than the ownership of gold. You ask my plans. I haf Babs, now. I am gifing up our Earth world. The mysterious man they know as Frank Rascor will vanish. I will hide our little fragment of quartz. No one up there will even ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... 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 ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... accepting the platitude as if it were now uttered for the first time. She dried her eyes and smiled. "I will tell Mrs. Bowen how you feel and what you've said, and I know she ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... 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 ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... 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 ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... must have lost many illusions; he must have herded with the Tapers and Tadpoles, and prompted Rigby to write slashing articles on his behalf in the quarterlies. He must have felt that his intellect was cruelly wasted in talking claptrap and platitude to suit the thick comprehensions of his party; and the huge dead weight of the invincible impenetrability to ideas of ordinary mankind must have lain heavy upon his soul. How many Tadpoles, one would like to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... about there being less danger in a young lady listening to the intelligence of a coarsely-dressed laborer than to the compliments of a rose-scented fop, but Mrs. Randolph walked out of the room before he finished the evident platitude. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... Nero had had a grown-up daughter there would have been the chance! Anyhow the attempt would have met with some sympathy from Iver. Of course a man desires his daughter's happiness (the remark is a platitude), but he may be allowed to feel annoyance at the precise form in which it realizes—or thinks it will realize—itself, a shape that may disappoint the aim of his career. If he is provided with a son, he has the chance of a more unselfish benevolence; but Iver ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... feeling that you haven't learned anything delights me, too. It proves that you have learned a great deal. It is only the ignoramus who thinks he is wise; the wise man knows that he is an ignoramus. That's a platitude, but it is none the less true. I have cold comfort for you: the more you learn, the less confident you will be of your own learning, the more utterly ignorant you will feel. I have never known so much as, the day I graduated from high school. I held ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... commonplace of 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 ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... whispered Walter, just loud enough to be heard by every one, but softly enough to disguise the platitude. ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... things. An author, here and there, will make as though he had a word worth hearing—nay, worth over-hearing—a word that seeks to withdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all too probably a platitude. But obviously, literature is not—as is the craft and mystery of painting—so at the mercy of a half-imposture, so guarded by unprovable honour. For the art of painting is reserved that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation. ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... 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 that you should ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... 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 ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 he represented a positive ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... as with every other art, is out of three platitudes to make not a fourth platitude—'but a star.' Newness of information is no necessity of conversation: else were the Central News Agency the best of talkers. Indeed, the oldest information is perhaps the best material for the artist as ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 who ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... cheapness has cheapened nothing but life," said Roger, "and it brings incalculable trouble with it. I mean, a ha'penny saved now means pounds lost later. Oh, that's a platitude, I know, but we pay no heed to it. I've never been to America, but we know quite well that one of the most serious problems for the Americans is the negro problem. I heard a Rhodes scholar talking about it once. He simply foamed at the mouth. He hadn't any plan for ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... sketches of comparatively obscure men" has been given to the public under the guise of a history of a city, with the sole object of making money. It is indeed consoling to know that "none but citizens have been represented," but why this statement should be coupled with the platitude that follows it would be hard to say. And then the utter ridiculousness of the nonsense about the publisher exercising a power higher than the law and erecting a caste distinction! ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... revolution, others must make the compromise. The Queen then appointed Lord John Russell as Prime Minister and ordered him to form a new Cabinet and give an office to Cobden. Lord Russell tried for four days to meet the issue, and endeavored to placate the people with platitude and promise. Cobden refused all office, and informed Lord Russell that he preferred to help the Crown by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... pointed to the toes of a pair I had just 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 ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... Sand 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 ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... 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 he attempted to suggest ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... 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
... 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 ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... 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
... 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 obtain ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... permanent sub-bases, 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 ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... equal," and the Tory Dr. Johnson, when he spoke of "the natural equality of man," used a curious eighteenth century phrase, of which a Greek scholar can see the origin; but it did not mean anything absurd, nor, on the other hand, did it convey a mere platitude. It should not be necessary to explain, as Lincoln did long after, that Jefferson did not suppose all men to be of equal height or weight or equally wise or equally good. He did, however, contend ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a severe intolerance of turgidity and inflation—of what he called "desperate endeavours to render a platitude endurable by making it pompous," and a lively horror of affectation and unreality. These, in literature as in life, were in his eyes the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the champion of that platitude, and sound that knell to the sentimental world; and since you have chosen to defend it, I will appeal to Willoughby, and ask him if he would not side with the world of good sense in applauding the nuptials of man or maid married within a month of a jilting?" Clara ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tongue's end all the platitudes of the socialist and possesses the knack of picking platitude and imperfect statistic to fit his theories, whenever he ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... energy of feelings is extinguished with the violence of desires, and that character 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... oh, Pam! 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 ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... subsequent taxation involved by the war debt. It would have been a much simpler and more businesslike proceeding to have taken, instead of borrowing, a much larger proportion of the war's cost during the war; but it is too late now to rub in this platitude which is now pretty generally admitted. Mr Hoare showed in last month's Journal that the creation of the War Debt has caused a huge addition to what he has called Rente—the gross income of the propertied classes; and there is much logic in his contention that this income is the source from which ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... most 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 ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... exasperates me to hear religious talk from any one. When I hear a sermon I feel an inclination always to say, 'My dear fellow, can't you put your case better?' I want good stuff about Divine and human nature—not this vagueness and platitude. Why don't they tell one something about the optimism of God, even before the spectacle of men's weakness? But, instead, we are told to moan about this vale of tears; we are promised chastisements, disappointments, woes, persecution. A philosophy of suffering makes men strong, but a philosophy ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... it," said I, annoyed. "Your attitude, John Flint, is a vulgar platitude. And permit ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... marks an epoch in the history of the world is to state a platitude. Nevertheless, it is worth stating, and for us who are lucky enough to be at Rheims during this week there is a solid satisfaction in the idea that we are present at the making of history. In perhaps only a few years to come the competitions of this week may look pathetically ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... 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 on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... message back to the kitchen and, with the air of a martyr engaged upon an unpleasant task, drew Mr. Wilks another glass of ale and stood over him with well-affected wonder while he drank it. Miss Nugent walked into the sitting-room, and listening in a perfunctory fashion to a shipmaster's platitude on kitchen-company, took a seat on his knee and ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Men have an idea that they are thinking when they operate the mechanism of language which they have at command. When somebody makes the joints of language creak, they say: "He does not know how to manage it." Certainly he does know how to manage it. Anybody can manage a platitude. The truth is simply this: the individual writer endeavours to make of language a cloak to fit his form, while, contrarywise, the purists attempt to mould their bodies till they fit ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 of Polonius ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... blemishes in The Grammarian's 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 what ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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 is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Man and His Wife" and "The Feast of St. Friend"—he finds the intellectual victuals that are to his taste. Here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty—here, in brief, we have the philosophy of the English middle classes—and here, by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of our own country can understand. It is the calm, superior num-skullery that was Victorian; it is by Samuel Smiles out of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... so 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 arsenic, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James |
