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More "Platitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... [Thursday, June 2]. Rev. Mr. Platitude visits author, Borrow leaves early; walks N. for two hours; buys Slingsby's pony and cart; afternoon travels N.W.; late at night arrives at a dingle ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... 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 that, you ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... birth, and have knocked down with his Dictionary for his assaults upon the English language, has usurped the chair of the sturdy old dogmatist. The specious impertinence and shallow assumptions of the English sage find their counterpart in the unworthy platitude of the Scottish seer, not lively enough for "Punch," a mere disgrace to the page which admitted it; whether a proof of a hardening heart or a softening brain is uncertain, but charity hopes the latter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... submit his poems, criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered that for Burke at least this delight would ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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 rise above the whirling mass holding a naked child in one hand ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... showing the paths that our eighteen-pound shot had ploughed up in their destructive passage. But even this was not the worst of it; for when I turned to the young officer and tried to soothe him by the utterance of some platitude having reference to "the fortune of war", he informed me that, although he had that morning been the ship's junior lieutenant, he was now the senior surviving officer; the captain and the other lieutenants being ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... platitude, of course, for everybody who has mixed with women and who possesses a gleam of intelligence knows that they are extraordinary, just as he knows, or ought to know, that if they were not bizarre and mystifying, ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... 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, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that Shakspeare writ down Fat Jack at his last gasp, as babbling, not o' green fields, but o' green turtle, and that that starvling Colley Cibber altered the text from sheer envy at a good man's death. To die well we must live well, is a familiar platitude. Morality is, of course, best promoted by the good quality of our fare, but quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised. Cteris paribus, the man who eats much is a better Christian than the man who eats little, and he who eats little will pursue a more uninterrupted ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill your empty room—on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... 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
... 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 out ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Bennett's volumes of pseudo-philosophy—e.g., "The Plain 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, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... This artist or group of artists goes in for the real—the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal—the ideal which may mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or idealists; we treat the matter as if it were one of almost moral importance. Now the fact of the case is that the question of realism ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not excited. Truth never excites—it is falsehood that excites—until we discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... questionable morality, 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 unwashed. He felt certain that ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... creature, and never very grateful unless he expects a continuance of past favors. With him a cessation of favors means a cessation of gratitude. A limited number of the Platitude class still linger about me—principally on account of a long-contracted habit. They are content with whatever they get; they are entirely harmless, always useful in some way, and ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... his gamut. Nature is not only never his model, she is never his inspiration. He is distinctively a literary painter; but this description is not minute enough. His conventions are those not merely of the litterateur, but of the extremely conventional litterateur. An artless platitude is really more artificial than a clever paradox; it doesn't even cast a side-light on the natural material with which it deals. Greuze's genre is really a genre of his own—his own and that of kindred spirits since. It is as systematic and detached as the art of Poussin. The forms ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life—how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... always falls to the ground. It is only our familiarity with the one experience and our lack of knowledge concerning the other that gives us the condition of wonder in the one case and lack of it in the other. In the light of modern knowledge "order" is, as W. H. Mallock says, "a physical platitude, not a ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... rather, all discoveries 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... you care for the rest, since it is 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 in this avowal. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that the police ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... It is a 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 other civilized or semi-civilized ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... country to pay a professional visit, so that I heard nothing about what had occurred until some hours afterwards. I was informed of it, however, before I reached the town, on my way homeward. To say that I was inexpressibly shocked and grieved would merely be to repeat a very stupid platitude, and to say that I was a human being. I had learned to love poor little Charlie almost as dearly as I loved my own children. And his father—what would be the ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of sexual purity, both flowing ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Bourget in his excellent book, "Outre-Mer." He, too, after having noted that our education merely produces narrow-minded bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or anarchists—"those two equally harmful types of the civilised man, who degenerates into impotent platitude or insane destructiveness"—he too, I say, draws a comparison that cannot be the object of too much reflection between our French lycees (public schools), those factories of degeneration, and the American schools, which prepare a man admirably for life. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... 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 ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... 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
... into the proper way of punching the table with his fists. A few words dropping from Mr. Sowerby did now and again find their way to his ears, but the sound of his own voice had brought with it the accustomed charm, and he ran on from platitude to truism, and from truism back to platitude, with an eloquence ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... 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
... to the best of people." Then he has to laugh at the platitude, and she laughs, too. "I mean—" he begins—"well, you are not to worry or blame yourself, or to take the slightest trouble. I am sorry it should happen just now, or at any time, for that matter, and my only desire is that you shall get perfectly ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of the firm, over a fireplace that maintained its useless dignity in spite of the steam-radiator near the window. On his desk was the inevitable picture of his wife framed in silver, a hand-illumined platitude of Stevenson, an elaborate set of desk paraphernalia in beaten brass that bore little evidence of service. In two green-glazed bowls of Japanese origin, roses from Mr. Flint's garden at Yolanda scattered faint pink petals on the Smyrna rug. These flowers were the only concession ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... you might spare me your platitude, Andrew," The Laird replied savagely. "I'm done with the lad forever, for son of mine he is no longer. Andrew, do you remember the time he bought that red cedar stumpage up on the Wiskah and unloaded it on me at a profit of ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... but what is the use 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 her ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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
... could procure them the whole stock, Lords and Commons, a wheelbarrowful or more, with no cost but the carriage. Every Member has the right to demand a copy, and few do it, few will let such a mass cross their door-threshold! This of Bowdoin's is a platitude of some magnitude.—Adieu, dear Emerson. Rest not, haste not; you have ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 to Laertes: ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... at present 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
... 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
... to provide henceforth for my board, but I beseech your Highness to provide no more for my lodging." Voltaire's acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made him commit more than one platitude. "I have a mortal aversion for prison," he wrote in 1734; once more, however, he was to be an inmate ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... something for wives as wives in this matter. In other matters, much more vital to their happiness, each case is unique because all individuals are unique; and the discussion of the questions can amount to no more than futile and obvious platitude. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such a man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or constitutional thing, but springs from some ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... machinery by which it can express itself. In this 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
... Macaulay of describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman is one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely that "fear is one of the causes of cruelty," and had he used a colourless abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word "mother," has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture and vivid ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... die starved, were it not best to end it; to have done with it, and restore it once for all to the Joetuns, Mud-giants, Frost-giants, and Chaotic Brute-gods of the Beginning? For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it may be well enough; but it is a Platitude which Men should be above countenancing by their presence in it. We pray you, let the word impossible disappear from your vocabulary in this matter. It is of awful omen: to all of us, and to yourselves ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the spirit of retaliation for the iniquities of the British rovers which was condoned by their monarch. In justification of our part of the game during this period of warfare for religious and material ascendancy, we stand by the eternal platitude that in that age we were compelled to act differently from what we should be justified in doing now. Civilization, for instance, so the argument goes, was at a low ebb then. I am not so sure that it did not stand higher than it does now. It is so ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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
... 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 and Protectors ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... believed that he had been providentially invented to supply it. But in the nature of things a cousin whom you have known familiarly from childhood cannot strike you as a revelation. He is really little better than a more or less animated platitude. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, were the dominant subjects; while knowledge, aiding the arts of life, had a very subordinate place. And in our own universities and schools at the present moment the like antithesis holds. We are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that throughout his after career a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The remark is trite that in his shop, or his office, in managing his estate or his family, in playing his part as director of a bank ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... about the individual; it thinks reluctantly about the species. It takes refuge from that sort of thing if it possibly can. And so the second great preventive of clear thinking is the tranquillising platitude. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... 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
... not 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 ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... for 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 ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... status, not only in the industrial, but in the 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 of class status. It is here ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... 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 ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... important issues thus raised will be postponed until certain 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, and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education. All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... 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 ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 kissed ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... sunbeam will make even the cloudiest day break into smiles; a bounding fawn will banish monotony even from a wilderness; and a glass of claret, or perchance some stronger grape, will convert even the platitude of a goblet of water into a pleasing beverage, and so May Dacre moved among her guests, shedding light, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... neither the boon of life nor the beauty of the world suffices to content, it comes as a penance that life with them is squandered and that they possess neither the benefits nor the beauty of the world." That might be a platitude said by some one else; but we know that in it Leonardo expresses his faith. The boon of life, the beauty of the world, were enough for him without ambition, without even further affections. He left father and mother and wealth, and even achievement, to follow ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... She would smile upon him with intense fondness, when, after wasting hours over a few lines of poetry, he would misplace all the adjectives and barbarously entreat the metre. She laughed with gratification, when, excited by the bright sayings that fell from her lips, the youth put forth some platitude, dim as the lamp in the expiring fire-fly. When he slipped in grammar she saw malice under it, when he retailed a borrowed jest she called it a good one, and when he used —as princes sometimes will —bad language, she discovered in it a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... work with us, only faster. If he had serious thoughts, he never disclosed them to us—seriously. When he opened his lips we waited always in the expectation of some ridiculous remark, even though it should clothe a platitude or a piece of good, common-sense advice. And we were never disappointed. Life with him was apparently one huge joke, and it came about that when we thought of him or spoke of him among ourselves, it was always with a smile. Yet now he is gone—and what a hole! ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes "the burning forehead and the parching tongue" like a gush of genuine ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... as 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 wear ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... 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 apt to ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to which philosophers are accustomed to give 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 in one place and sometimes ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... appeared in successive geological epochs and also at many places remote from each other. The key to the distribution of any group lies in the configuration of land and water of that epoch in which it made its first appearance. Although this sounds like a platitude, it has frequently been ignored. If, for argument's sake, Amphibia were evolved somewhere upon the great southern land-mass of Carboniferous times (supposed by some to have stretched from South America across Africa to Australia), the distribution of this developing class ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... (although he did put forward claims to be able to understand "Grey's French"), and he kept from time to time insisting upon the proceedings being brought to a halt while a translation of something that had been said was furnished for his benefit, generally selecting some particularly unprofitable platitude which had been uttered by one of those present for the ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... flat rubber soles 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 by ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... "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 ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude—a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it—the most effective advertising is ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... a platitude—a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. It is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. Words are often the most convenient indices of education, of cultivation, and of intellectual power. And what ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the platitude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment's consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works of long-departed authors; ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... 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 type of humanity. Gentle and ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the war, confronted with the platitude that the world must be made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... as if a nation, too long borne in By hard wrongers,—comprehending in such attitude That God had spoken somewhere since the morning, That men were somehow brothers, by no platitude,— Cried exultant in ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... 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 has appointments, inspections, interviews, disputes. The people, it ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... 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
... 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
... 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 Protestant parts ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... 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 ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... in a loose way about men 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 about ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... have known that raw period in 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 with. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... however, thought that she looked very like an angel, and accepting the proffered seat, sat down beside her. He uttered some platitude as to this deep obligation for the trouble she had taken, and wondered more and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Mommsen persists in interpolating 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... priests, of lower rank, had turned shop-keepers No one can testify but a householder Not of the stuff of which martyrs are made (Erasmus) Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless Obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned One golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude Pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper Paying their passage through, purgatory Poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats Pope and emperor maintain both positions with equal logic Power to read and write helped ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... have haunted the dim San Spirito, (Or was it rather the Ognissanti?) Patient on altar-step planting a weary toe! Nay, I shall have it yet! Detur amanti! My Koh-i-noor—or (if that's a platitude) Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi's eye; So, in anticipative gratitude, What if I take up ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... host's wife? Are you to turn on a light suddenly and expose her slapping a surreptitious banjo? Or are you to hurl cochineal over her evening frock when she steals round with her phosphorus bottle and her supernatural platitude? There would be a scene, and you would be looked upon as a brute. So you have your choice of being that or a dupe. I was in no very good humor as I followed Wilson to ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... mean simply printed books. The vaster proportion of what is printed is not literature. It may be statements of fact and items of information; it may be sound science and unimpeachable record; it may be truism; it may be platitude; it is often sheer bathos or doggerel. We do not count these things as literature. A good deal of singing, piano-beating and tin-whistling is not music. It is only in virtue of a certain fine quality that books are literature. According to Emerson, literature is "a record of the best thoughts." ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the home. This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman's place is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... a bad floor," Rachel said. Hirst did not attempt to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring at the dancers. After three minutes the silence became so intolerable to Rachel that she was goaded to advance another commonplace about the beauty of the night. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... he fed upon cackle and platitude, FURNIVALL sauce to a dish full of dearth, Still, in the favourite FURNIVALL attitude, Grubbing about like ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... 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 that, you might ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... conclude that one who talks thus is no better than a dead man; and when he sets out on some trusty platitude concerning women's sphere ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... is high on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the platitude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the city, and tells ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... 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 ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... 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 ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... try, through 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 seen ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 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 to the owner ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life—how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them. There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... see things!" Barbara resumed. "Sometimes one feels one wants a guide, but all one gets is a ridiculous platitude from her old-fashioned code. One has puzzles one can't solve by out-of-date rules. However, since she doesn't see, there's no use ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes "the burning ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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
... Prince Platitude has kissed, You threaten her with Night and Sorrow? Slay her by thousands, friend — but list: More Little Groups ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... 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 absurdly false, so long as we are what we are, and the human mind ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... 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 a silly simper. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... it is 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 in this avowal. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... try to find 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
... use 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 her ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... writing is that which 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
... plain in fact that her supposed parting glance upon them was one of suspicion. But there was no suspicion of Theobald; that he should have devoted his life to his children—why this was such a mere platitude, as almost to ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... but they were not worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity, his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... flowers and streams and queer little 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 rise above the whirling mass holding a naked child in one hand and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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 is a background designed and marvelously executed ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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, moral ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... local mayor to be paid over to a deserving charity, if any opponent of the speaker can, to the satisfaction of twelve honourable men, generally named, disprove some quite irrelevant truism, or can prove to the satisfaction of the same twelve men the falsity of some universally accepted platitude. This method is very popular with orators, and invariably carries ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... 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! "What fools these ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the 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; the student of Chinese, who learnt the language of the land of the Celestials from the figures on ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... did not contradict him with a well-worn platitude, because he knew that in the way the child meant grown-ups did have a great deal ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... cannot let the occasion pass without saying a few words and generally prevent the institutions of this country from falling out of human attention. He was a little abstracted in his manner, every now and then his lips moved as he imagined a fresh turn to some classic platitude; anyone who knew him might have foretold the speech into which he presently broke. He did this in the refectory where there was a convenient step up at the end. Beginning with the customary confession of incontinence, "could not let the occasion pass," he declared ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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 suavely ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to muster the same old property Smile every time that Charley Bromide or old Mr. Platitude lifted a shell of sparkling Vinegar and fervently ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... 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 of the temptation which he so earnestly sought to ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... find precisely how a thing ought not to be said, you take one of them down, and make it perform the service of the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with its stern forward, as sailors say, or in some ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... cheering up the poor, who presumably get as tired from their work as the idle get from their pleasures! What I have said upon every platform and which Lord Lee, in a generous desire to defend the youth of this country, denies, is not "cruel, ludicrous, and untrue," but a platitude. ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... know the least who are the most anxious to tell it and the medium or automatic writer sometimes gives them the opportunity. Consequently we get many foolish communications and an enormous amount of commonplace platitude is delivered at seances. But it is equally true that unquestionable proof of personal identity is ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... of my frame of mind at the time—only a faint one, though: for my heart swelled with unspeakable delight, and my spirits rose almost to madness, in spite of my prudent endeavours to bind them down to a reasonable platitude by thinking of the undeniable difference between Helen's rank and mine; of all that she had passed through since our parting; of her long, unbroken silence; and, above all, of her cool, cautious aunt, whose counsels she would ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... romance was on every one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality—that of the improper Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and getting out of control by generic excess. There was ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... on that he was failing. He had certain arguments at his fingers' ends,—points with which he was, in truth, so familiar that he need hardly have troubled himself to arrange them for special use,—and he forgot even these. He found that he was going on with one platitude after another as to the benefit of reform, in a manner that would have shamed him six or seven years ago at a debating club. He pressed on, fearing that words would fail him altogether if he paused;—but he did in truth speak very much too ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... because they must not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweep too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the mere describer's range and capture he may escape by as many doors as there are outlets from a forest. But much ready-made platitude brings about the world's guesses at a poet, and false and flat thought lies behind its epigrams. It is not long since the general guess-work assigned melancholy, without authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it was ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... there?" 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... this was platitude, and that counsel to such a man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or constitutional thing, but springs from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no central interest either of plot or person—the slovenly fashion of weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a -Deus ex machina- or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to conceal the irreparable want of poetic wholeness. Euripides ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in the country should live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in the towns. God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact, though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the worst places for Man's heavenly spirit ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... 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 Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... about any theatre except his own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment's consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works of long-departed ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... conditional truths are not in nature, which decrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman is one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely that "fear is one of the causes of cruelty," and had he used a colourless abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word "mother," has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture and vivid with ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... 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 ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... this period he betrays the fatal defect which remains with him through life, the indulgence in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' and the easy and irritating Micawber-like genteel roll with which he turns off a moral platitude or finely vague sentiment, in the belief that good principles constitute good character. 'As our minds improve in knowledge,' he writes, 'may the sacred flame still increase until at last we reach ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... wishing that I knew more Latin. I wanted to quote that Latin platitude about who watches the watchers. He watched me narrowly, and I expected him to quote me the phrase after having read my mind. But apparently the implication of the phrase did not appeal to him, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... track camel-pads or flat rubber soles 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
... Burleigh was not prepared for political disquisition on the pavement in front of the "Red Lion," but he pondered an instant on Mr. Buller's platitude as if it were a new revelation, and then said with quiet cordiality, "Well, think of it, and if you decide to give me your support, it will be the more valuable as being given on conviction. Good-day ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... this last clause makes us hope that it is simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immediately asking, "Flows ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... first to defend a man, You who had always the money to lend a man Down on his luck and hard up for a V, Sure you'll be playing a harp in beatitude (And a quare sight you will be in that attitude) Some day, where gratitude seems but a platitude, You'll find ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... chrysalis of a common English butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude, indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which England, and for the matter of that every other European country as well, is passing through something like the chrysalis ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... or words to that effect, for we quote only from memory." With a fresh E.S.E. breeze and no provisions there can be little doubt that Midshipman Sival perished at sea, but neither Edwards nor Hamilton are to be censured, the former for despatching a boat on ordinary duty, the latter for penning a platitude. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... in time for him to say that "on the trial of Miss Anthony she conceded that on the day of election she was a woman," and in a parenthesis ("we know that she generally was a woman, and are not surprised to learn that she was on election day.") What an amazing platitude this is to fall from the lips of a teacher of law. That the United States District Attorney engaged in the prosecution should degrade the dignity of the law by the question (to Judge Selden) "if it was conceded that on the day ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... did put forward claims to be able to understand "Grey's French"), and he kept from time to time insisting upon the proceedings being brought to a halt while a translation of something that had been said was furnished for his benefit, generally selecting some particularly unprofitable platitude which had been uttered by one of those present for the purpose of ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... June 2]. Rev. Mr. Platitude visits author, Borrow leaves early; walks N. for two hours; buys Slingsby's pony and cart; afternoon travels N.W.; late at night arrives at a ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Caesar, though Dr. Mommsen persists in interpolating 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, an ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the "set" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so readily reduced to a "bionomical" platitude. They all write for the same slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero, "wounded unto death" however, and one has the impression that even these ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... 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
... than it has been by him. For he effects this reconciliation only to the extent of showing that religion arises from the recognition of fundamental mystery—which it may be proved that science also recognizes in all her fundamental ideas. This, however, is after all little more than a platitude. That our ultimate scientific ideas (i.e. ultimate grounds of experience) are inexplicable, is a proposition which is self-evident since the dawn of human thought. My aim is to carry the 'reconciliation' into much more detail and yet without quitting the grounds of pure reason. I intend to ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... 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 ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... period in 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 with. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... being versed in speculations regarding the attributes of the Deity, stared; then, disinclined to commit himself, took refuge in platitude. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... sublime and grandiose effects of Nature are apt to lose their edge for us by over-popularization, as many of her scenes and moods have come to seem platitude from being over-painted. Niagara has suffered far more from the sentimental tourist and the landscape artist than from all the power-houses, and one has to make a strenuous effort of detachment from its excursionist associations ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... recognitions and coincidences must be inventions. The postillion's tale must be largely invention. But it is not fair or necessary to retort as Hindes Groome did: "Is the Man in Black then also a reality, and the Reverend Mr. Platitude? In other words, did Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by Keble's sermon?" For Borrow was unscrupulous or careless about time and place. But it is fair and necessary to say, as Hindes Groome ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... saved me from the worst things. But it simply worries and almost 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, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... And if we are quite candid we must concede that we very unfeignedly envy and admire the rich; we must grant that money confers a certain distinction on a man, be he the veriest ass that ever heehawed a platitude, and that we cannot but treat ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... 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 think of ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he winds up with such a platitude ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... 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 no exclusive indictment: I too am guilty—infinitely culpable. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... peculiar interest in the solemn enunciation of a platitude by a dull person who does not naturally aim at effect. You feel sure it is the condensation of life and experience. Such an utterance often brings a platitude home to me as no amount of ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... delightful 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 ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 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 Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... 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 characteristic of his ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... 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
... a wife's devotion is a very strong motive power, Jeffries. It will move irresistibly forward in spite of all the barriers you and I can erect to stay its progress. That may sound like a platitude, but it's ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and the ill-luck that befell 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
... however, the scene changes again, and we recognise that Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that the glory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rub our eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and we discover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuous phrases for the vulgar flux ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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 pull the strings, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... oriental schemes had not yet reached Paris. As for the British Ministry, it was trembling from the attacks of the Grenvilles and Windhams on the one side, and from the equally vigorous onslaughts of Fox, who, when the Government proposed an addition to the armed forces, brought forward the stale platitude that a large standing army "was a dangerous instrument of influence in the hands of the Crown." When England's greatest orator thus impaired the unity of national feeling, and her only statesman, Pitt, remained in studied ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... strenuous, an almost despairing effort to express and convey, treats the whole thing as some foolish riddle—"explains it to the children." As if every picture was a rebus and every poem a charade! "Little children," he says, "this teaches you"—and out comes the platitude! ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a number of "orators"—men regarded as "eloquent"—"silver tongued" men—fellows who to the common American knack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity of platitude, a captivating mastery of dog's-eared sentiment, a copious and obedient vocabulary of eulogium, an iron insensibility to the ridiculous and an infinite affinity to fools. These afflicting Chrysostoms are always lying in wait for an "occasion" ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a guarded border, Gantlets—but not to fling, Thousands of old emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order— And tongues, that ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... it," he replied in an undertone. "That run of '17' might happen—yes. But it is improbable. They let me win because I was a new player—new players always win at first. It is proverbial, but the man who is running this game has made it look like a platitude. To satisfy myself on that point I am going to play again—until I have lost my winnings and am just square with the game. When I reach the point that I am convinced that some crooked work is going on I am going to try a little ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... 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 Protestant parts ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
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