"Platitudinous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced man, the essential vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose habit of voluminous platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once or twice over the roused spirit within. He struggled with it, he burlesqued himself, and laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it was a moment for every one of clean, clear pain, "I have been ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Truth, then, is omnipotent, and the vices and moral weaknesses of man are not invincible. Man, in short, is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement. These sentiments have to the modern ear a platitudinous ring. So far from being platitudes, they are explosives capable of destroying the whole fabric of government. For if truth is omnipotent, why trust to laws? If men will obey argument, why ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... The platitudinous objection might be raised that "human nature is human nature," that all our feelings are born with us, and as such are inherited, that they have been with us for millions of years and that we cannot possibly originate any ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of it is that with the academic or clerical prig, when the mind has long been permitted to run in a deep, platitudinous groove from which it is at last powerless to escape, the resemblance to a prig in fiction is sometimes more than fanciful. It is real. For there is no doubt that prigs have a horrid family likeness to each other, whether in books or in real life. I have sometimes felt as the puzzled mother of ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... in propria persona) is not to some extent justified. "Dora" is very sensitive and six months ago would never have permitted Mr. COPPLESTONE to reveal to our enemies either the bumptious egoism of a nameless First Lord or the platitudinous vacillations of an anonymous Premier, even in the interests of popular fiction. Though we concede his audacity in allowing his superlative sleuth to stop a general strike of engineers by threatening them with martial ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... that campaign I had as fellow speakers many times on the platform statesmen of national reputation. These gentlemen, with few exceptions, made heavy, ponderous, and platitudinous speeches. If they ever had possessed humor they were afraid of it. The crowd, however, would invariably desert the statesman for the speaker who could give them amusement with instruction. The elder statesmen said by way of advice: "While the people want ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... the crowd responded with cheers and encores. The quartette retired, the chairman advanced, motioned with his hand for silence, and announced the name of the first orator of the occasion, who happened to be a clergyman—a tiresome, platitudinous person. Somehow, clergymen on the platform can never divest themselves of their pulpit manner. They bring an air of pews and Sabbath into secular things. The minister denounced Bryan and Democracy in the same tones he used in declaiming against Agag and the Amalekites ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... pompous, penurious pianist. The Hiller story of how Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Heller teased this grouty old gentleman on the Boulevard des Italiens is capital reading, if not absolutely true. Yet Chopin admired Kalkbrenner's finished technique despite his platitudinous manner. Heine said—or rather quoted Koreff— that Kalkbrenner looked like a bonbon that had been in the mud. Niecks thinks Chopin might have learned of Kalkbrenner on the mechanical side. Chopin, in public, was modest about his attainments, looking upon himself as self-taught. "I cannot create ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
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— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor |
