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More "Trite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... habitual blush, which was increased upon the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable cause.... So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite or vulgar." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Unquestionably his fancies were fantastic, anti-natural, bordering on hallucination, and they betray a desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them to the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with old faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, trivial and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the favours of fortune by seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically observed—"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not." A simple question founded on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely suggest to an indifferent person any other notion than that of a mind at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I believe about this ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... first, I established a special group to work on one problem. They were dubbed the Gravity Gang, and immediately after, the GG. I hired them for the gravity of the situation, a standard gag that, once uttered, became as trite as the phrase. The Tour's realism would be affected by normal ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... others. And you walked over their hearts in such a cavalierly way, rumor had it, that I could not resist the temptation to see what manner of man you were. You were only the usual lord of creation, a trite pattern. You amused me, and I was curious to see how long ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present—the hollowness—the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned commonplace of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the Poet, the Rhetorician, the Fabulist, the Moralist, the Divine, and the Philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... bright patter between male and female characters in books he'd smuggled started off on too high a level on both sides. Books that were written adequately for his understanding of this problem signed off with the trite explanation that they lived happily ever afterwards but did not say a darned thing about how they went about it. The slightly lurid books that he'd bought, delivered in plain wrappers, gave some very illuminating descriptions of ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... was that I seemed a young man to undertake the duties of a minister, to which I made the trite reply that time would speedily cure that defect. The conversation then ran, for a time, upon commonplace subjects, but finally struck matters of interest to ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... gates of a park, where two policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,—the cherry-blossoms ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... trite saying, that "children and fools always tell the truth." Captain Moar and Lieutenant Wood, of General Steadman's staff, went out with a full expedition. It was under Colonel Bishop, of the 2d Minnesota; but these staff ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... day matters mended—and our spirits rose. We began to think more and more of getting in touch with civilization. What a tale we should have to tell. How we should put it over the other explorers with their trite Solomons and threadbare Marquesas! ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sire introduced our Apollo, he found The maiden in torrents of sympathy drowned— "Floods of tears" is too trite and too common: Her eyes were quite swelled—her lips pouting and pale; For she just had been reading that heartbreaking tale, "Annabelle, or the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... a lover!" is a trite but beautiful saying, which touches a responsive chord in the great heart of humanity! We cannot remain indifferent to the magnetic effect of the strong tide of his eloquent and impetuous wooing. Nor can we withhold a sympathetic desire to aid him in reaching ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... history it is the shudder that tells. Hugo could find no higher compliment for Baudelaire than to announce that the latter had discovered a new one. For new shudders are as rare as new vices; antiquity has made them all seem trite. The apt commingling of the horrible and the trivial, pathos and ferocity, is yet the one secret of enduring work—a secret, parenthetically, which Hugo knew ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... TRITE but true is the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention. The first flag that flew over an American fort was constructed from an "ammunition shirt, a blue jacket captured from the British, and ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... private overtures which he had received from him, made the discovery himself; upon which the Pope gave him the reward he had promised, but, at the same time, to disable the satirist for the future, ordered his tongue to be cut out, and both his hands to be chopped off. Aretine is too trite an instance. Every one knows that all the kings of Europe were his tributaries. Nay, there is a letter of his extant, in which he makes his boast that he had laid the Sophi ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... suddenly come to mean more to him than it had yet meant. He had known it, groaned under it, lived it down, and let it go. He had felt sorry for other people and got rid of their woes as best as he could with the trite expressions in use, and had forgotten whether they were hushed ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Hierogliphick was the Egiptian wisdome, your Hebrew was the Cabala, your Roman had your Simball or impresse; but they are now obsolete, your embleme trite and conspicuous, your invention of Character and Alphabeticall key tedious and not delightfull, your motto or rebus too open and demonstrative: but the science and curiosity of your Colours in Ribbands is not only ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... apprehension of freedom and nationality which underlay the best thought of his time. His pamphlet is not a piece of elegant writing, and it is introduced by superficial theorizing; but the practical value is great. Thoughts which have so entered into our political consciousness as to be trite and commonplace are presented as the new possession of a young man lately from college, and it is fair to judge of the current speculation of his time by the results here gathered into logical order. Webster, as I said before, may be taken in this pamphlet as an admirable example of the American ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... of judging the inner life of a nation is to listen to its music, and accordingly judge of the sentiments and emotions of Americans by their sheet-music, we should arrive at very discouraging results. The characteristics of our sheet-music, briefly summed up, are: (1) trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm mechanical and commonplace, and the cadences unchanging ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... for the word "Preface." As I think the matter over, I'm not sure that I ever read a preface to any book; and this fact suggests to me that possibly others would pass by this page in my book if I dubbed it by that much-worn and very trite word. So I've hailed you all with a much more cheery and stimulating title for my opening page; and perhaps, in consequence, some ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... of a thought which I understood not, but must even take as my sole light, had suddenly modified my opinion of Foedora. Trite or profoundly significant, frivolous or of deep import, the words might be construed as expressive of either pleasure or pain, of physical or of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction, a forecast or a memory, a fear or a regret? ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... rapidly dashing past, the apparent movement of the engine will be in a reverse direction to the real; and the general effect will be that of retrogression at a furious pace, instead of the progression which is taking place in reality. This is altogether different from the trite illustration of the astronomical lecturer, who reminds us of the apparent movement of the shore when observed from the deck of a steamboat; for in this case it is the damp side of the tunnel that appears to be stationary, and the framework of the window through which the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... It is a trite saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But this is as true, in the case of financial institutions at least, from the point of view of the employe as of the company. It is an ingenious ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... that of the first; that the first was evidently needed; that the second may be as injurious as the first was useful. He exhibited various weak points in the inflation fallacies and presented forcibly the trite truth that no laws and no decrees can keep large issues of irredeemable paper ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... his loving heart made sluggish and cold. What shame she felt! For did not she and the children share in his degradation? What humiliation of spirit they endured! But she never spoke other than kindly to her husband. He had not the trite excuse of thousands of worthless husbands who are neglecting their homes and spending their money in the groggery, while their families are existing in squalor and famishing for bread. He could never ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... manifold volumes. He has hardly any of those happy combinations of words which stick fast to the memory, and do more than pages to express the author's meaning. He has little command of expression. His imagery is common; and his manner of arranging a trite figure in a rich suit of verbiage, only makes its essential commonness and poverty more apparent. His style is not dotted over with any of those shining points, either of imagery or epigram, which illumine works of less popularity ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... point in the same box freight cars as afford means of passage for colored soldiers. In short, when it comes to maintenance and equipment, and consideration for the comfort of the American soldier, to use a trite saying, 'the folks are as good as the people.' There is absolutely no discrimination, and the cheerfulness of those 1,000 boys whose freight cars became, in imagination, Pullman palace cars, was the proof to me that the colored boys in the ranks ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... 269, and to others, highly improbable. Nor does Josephus say there were no ancienter writings among the Greeks than Homer's Poems, but that they did not fully own any ancienter writings pretending to such antiquity, which is trite. ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... not always apposite, but linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling with the grandeur of the mountains. This reverential feeling for the Alps is connected with the Pantheistic form of our religious sentiments to which I have before alluded. It is a trite remark, that even devout men of the present generation prefer temples not made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive sense of the divine presence not formed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... dice, that our kingdom hath been snatched by Duryodhana. Like a weak offal-eating jackal snatching the prey from mighty lions, he hath snatched away our kingdom. Why, O monarch, in obedience to the trite merit of sticking to a promise, dost thou suffer such distress, abandoning that wealth which is the source of both virtue and enjoyments? It was for thy carelessness, O king, that our kingdom protected by the wielder of the Gandiva and therefore, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and by the time we were ambling back to the fence I had got on to our new sensitive electrical plant for registering the sound, height, range, speed and direction of hostile aircraft. The fluent ease of it intoxicated, and I was lucky not to mar the whole by working in something crude and trite about the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... remedy for such evils as this country has suffered except general military education. In my opinion, no man is fit for a seat in Congress unless he has had such an education. The first thing he ought to learn is the old and trite military maxim that the only was to carry on war economically is to make it "short, sharp, and decisive." To dole out military appropriations in driblets is to invite disaster and ultimate bankruptcy. So it is in respect to the necessary preparations for war in time of peace. No man ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... otherwise; thin enough to be called 'a very genteel figure,' in those days, before muscular Christianity had come into vogue; speaking with a slight Scotch accent; and, as one good lady observed, 'so very trite in his conversation,' by which she meant sarcastic. As to his birth, parentage, and education,—the favourite conjecture of Hollingford society was, that he was the illegitimate son of a Scotch duke, by a Frenchwoman; and the grounds for this conjecture were these:—He spoke ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... from Chapter I to Finis—no weighty problems to be solved, but just a fine running story, full of exciting incidents, that never seemed strained or improbable. It is a dainty love yarn involving three men and a girl. There is not a dull or trite ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... of Poverty" is a striking example of the trite phrase that "truth is stranger than fiction." It is a series of pictures of the lives of women wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. No work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, indeed, if they occurred in a novel would ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... the requirements for success in special feature writing may be reduced to the trite dictum that editors want what they believe their readers want. Although a commonplace, it expresses a point of view that aspiring writers are apt to forget. From a purely commercial standpoint, editors are middlemen who buy from producers what they believe they can sell to their ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... abandon the discussion of a principle now too trite, for humankind, at least in Europe, is satisfied that unlimited liberty is nowhere consistent with a properly-regulated state of society. I have touched lightly on the matter, only to give to my readers ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... indeed a wonderful story; and the fact that Bertha Nugent was on board a derelict vessel and should happen to fall in with me on board of another, was one of those events which corroborate the trite and hackneyed adage, that truth is ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... when routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty. The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out unlucky, were sufficient to embarrass him seriously. It was the old trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence; and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end also in binding ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... a practical education for a girl? Whatever will fit her for life. The question and answer are trite. What will best fit a girl for life? First of all a well-balanced character. I knew a girl who was a good cook before she was ten years old; she had a genius for sewing; she was an excellent scholar in school, and had musical talent, and yet because of her ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... duties are so much beneath us, it seems degrading to spend our time and thoughts upon them. Here is a radical error of judgment, for it is not a high or low duty that degrades or elevates man, but the performing any duty well or ill. It is as true as it is trite, that the honor or shame lies in the mode of performance, not in the quality of the duty. We all, perhaps, know and say, and yet need to be reminded, that a bad president stands lower in the scale of being than a good town officer; ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... provided they do but agree with them in the same Scheme of Belief. The Reason is, Because the vicious Believer gives the Precedency to the virtuous Man, and allows the good Christian to be the worthier Person, at the same time that he cannot come up to his Perfections. This we find exemplified in that trite Passage which we see quoted in almost every System of Ethicks, tho' ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... opportunities of seeing her. He looked on her for some time merely with that respect and admiration which her appearance seemed to demand; he heard her sentiments with peculiar attention, but seldom declared his opinions on the subject. It would be trite to observe the easy gradation from esteem to love; in the bosom of Harley ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... girl in his set who could compare with her, who had the glow and charm, the flame-like inner radiance; there wasn't one who had the singing heart of Corinna. Yes, that was the phrase he had been trying to remember, trite as it was—the singing heart—that was Corinna. She had had a hard life, he knew, in spite of her beauty and her wealth; yet she had never lost the quality of youth, the very essence of gaiety and adventure. When he thought of her, Patty ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... wisdom of the wavering counsels which began with 'lying down to Germany,' and were to be marked by the cession of Heligoland. Strong men and strong Governments recognize and respect one another; and in dealing with Germany he believed that it was necessary never to forget this trite ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... and Noel and I gave our testimony before the coroner's jury, and he was bound over for trial before the next term of the circuit court to sit six months hence. There is an old and very trite saying in Texas that, "a dead witness is better than a live one." This was gently whispered into our ears, and accordingly one night about a month after this, Noel and I "folded our tents, and like the Arabs, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... never sends To tell when he invites his friends: I wish ye may but have enough!" And while with all this paltry stuff She sits tormenting every guest, Nor gives her tongue one moment's rest, In phrases batter'd, stale, and trite, Which modern ladies call polite; You see the booby husband sit In admiration at her wit! But let me now a while survey Our madam o'er her evening tea; Surrounded with her noisy clans Of prudes, coquettes, and harridans, When, frighted at the clamorous ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the mode of explanation of monstrous births until the present century, while in the Middle Ages the superstitions were more ludicrous and observers more ignorant than before the time of Galen. In his able article on the teratologic records of Chaldea, Ballantyne makes the following trite statements: "Credulity and superstition have never been the peculiar possession of the lower types of civilization only, and the special beliefs that have gathered round the occurrence of teratologic phenomena have been common to the cultured Greek and Roman ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Darwin), is the instinctive inclination which induces individuals of the same species by preference to intercross with those possessing the qualities which they themselves want, so as to preserve the purity or equilibrium of the breed...It is trite to a proverb, that tall men marry little women...a man of genius marries a fool...and we are told that this is the result of the charm of contrast, or of qualities admired in others because we do not possess them. I do not so ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the taste of emancipation[403]." This practical aim has affected the form given to much of the Buddha's teaching, for instance the theory of the Skandhas and the chain of causation. When examined at leisure by a student of to-day, the dogmas seem formulated with imperfect logic and the results trite and obvious. But such doctrines as that evil must have a cause which can be discovered and removed by natural methods: that a bad unhappy mind can be turned into a good, happy mind by suppressing evil thoughts and cultivating good thoughts, are not commonplaces even now, if they receive ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was: "A Shipwreck." To me the words had a lyrical sound! But, nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind to elaborate the subjects given to us by the "Great Ape"; a sort of instinctive good taste kept me from writing trite commonplaces, and as for putting down things of my own imagining, the knowledge that they would be read and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible for me ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... inevitable rejoinder which is made always, which is at once trite and pathetic. "I can't call her mother," ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that his word was his bond is to repeat one of the trite tributes to him. But it was nevertheless very true. Often in discussing a business arrangement with his representatives he ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... that kindle sacred fire in young hearts. It was his own career, intellectual as well as political, that gave to his discourse momentum. It was his own example that to youthful hearers gave new depth to a trite lesson, when he exclaimed: 'Believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will repay you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beneath your darkest ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and the books were never sent, for my mother, who was to have forwarded them, learnt that Mademoiselle Guyon had died. Some of the consolatory remarks which the letter contains may seem very trite, but are there any better ones to offer a person afflicted with cancer? They are, at all events, as good as laudanum. As a matter of fact the Revolution had left no impress upon the people among whom I lived. The religious ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... worth noting, perhaps, save in so far as it is typical of the trite utterances of people striving to recover from some tremendous ordeal. Epigrams delivered at the foot of the scaffold have always been carefully ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... I nould believe your tales and fables stale and trite, Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the dulld ear of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... all action and all life, Burning for pleasure, not averse from strife; Woman—the Field—the Ocean, all that gave Promise of gladness, peril of a grave, In turn he tried—he ransacked all below, And found his recompense in joy or woe, 120 No tame, trite medium; for his feelings sought In that intenseness an escape from thought:[ji] The Tempest of his Heart in scorn had gazed On that the feebler Elements hath raised; The Rapture of his Heart had looked on high, And asked if ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... grew in him. If in the bright and silken distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it. But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... used to work this element of disappointment as an art. When the event was important and he wished to make a particularly good impression, he would begin in a very low, sing-song voice, and in a monotonous manner, dealing in trite nothings for five minutes or more. His angular form would seem to take on more angles and his homely face would grow more homely, if that were possible—disappointment would spread itself over the audience like a fog; people would settle back in their ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... weapon of ink, Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague And catches the not too pink, Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause Is the cause of community. Iterate, Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite: Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff: Yet always in measure, with bearing polite: The manner of one that would expiate His share in grandmotherly Laws, Which do the dark thing to destroy, Under aspect of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in front of my large bay window, and see the shadows on the grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by the storms, I cannot but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in the Lord; wait patiently for him'—they are trite words. But he made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... like Westerling! It has become too trite!" she protested. "The end! If I really were helping toward that and to save lives and our country to its people, what would my private feelings matter' My honor, my soul—what would anything matter? For that, any sacrifice. I'm only one human being—a weak, lunatic ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... given subject possesses or not the predicate in question. In arguing a doubtful question of fact before a jury, the general propositions or principles to which the advocate appeals are mostly, in themselves, sufficiently trite, and assented to as soon as stated: his skill lies in bringing his case under those propositions or principles; in calling to mind such of the known or received maxims of probability as admit of application to the case in hand, and selecting ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... half of the omelette, making five-sixths in all. He glanced at her surreptitiously, in her fine dress, on which was not a single splash or stain. He might have known that so extraordinary and exotic a female person would not concoct anything so trite as a ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... life-seats, and metallic life-boat, and dinner on board, if you wish. She is chiefly used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats, and supplies, but also by hunters and tourists. There was another steamer, named Amphitrite, laid up close by; but, apparently, her name was not more trite than her hull. There were also two or three large sail-boats in port. These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls. There were but few passengers, and not one female among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... little difficult sometimes, especially when he treats in detail of his friend's mystical experience, but he has a certain power of word-painting (unusual at his date) in matters both of nature and of grace, and it is only when he has been unduly trite or obscure that I have ventured, with a good deal of regret, to omit his observations. All such omissions, however, as well as peculiar difficulties of statement or allusion, have been dealt ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... side lay the paper from which he had made the great discovery. There was nothing in it, of course, but somehow the sight impressed him very much. It seemed months since he awoke to find the lamp gone out. How much may happen between the lighting of a candle and its burning away! Smiling at this trite reflection, he blew that light out, and, taking another, went to his room. Here he found a stout hand-bag, with which he made haste to return to ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... that there is not a word in the language that conveys so little endearment as the word "dear." But though the saying itself, like most truths, be trite and hackneyed, no little novelty remains to the search of the inquirer into the varieties of inimical import comprehended in that malign monosyllable. For instance, I submit to the experienced that the degree of hostility it betrays is in much proportioned to its collocation in the sentence. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... at the name of wise, is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of Nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, that an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple, so a woman will be a woman, that is, a fool, whatever disguise she takes up. And yet there is no reason women should take it amiss to be thus charged, for if they ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... deep-read, book- learned; accomplished &c (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c. v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household words, familiar to every schoolboy; hackneyed, trite, trivial, commonplace. cognoscible[obs3], cognizable. Adv. to one's knowledge, to the best of one's knowledge. Phr. one's eyes being opened &c. (disclosure) 529; ompredre tout c'est tout pardonner[French: to know all is to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... same manner; but I was strangely incompetent to the task. My ideas were frozen up; even words seemed to fail me. I was excessively vexed at myself, for I wished to be uncommonly elegant. I tried two or three times to turn a pretty thought, or to utter a fine sentiment; but it would come forth so trite, so forced, so mawkish, that I was ashamed of it. My very voice sounded discordantly, though I sought to modulate it into the softest tones. "The truth is," thought I to myself, "I cannot bring my mind down to the small talk necessary for young girls; it is too masculine and robust for the mincing ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the old weed-grown court, I saw a lady seated on my favorite spot, sketching the ruins. The lady was young, more beautiful than any woman I had yet seen,—at least to my eyes. In a word, I was fascinated, and as the trite phrase goes, 'spell-bound.' I seated myself at a little distance, and contemplated her without desiring to speak. By and by, from another part of the ruins, which were then uninhabited, came a tall, imposing elderly gentleman with a benignant aspect, and a little dog. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... may appear, what is it compared with the bare fate of genius, stripped of the bare means of sustenance by the unsuccessful result of a literary engagement, or the non-completion of a purchase, on which probably depended the very day's existence. The subject is trite and hacknied; but all that has been written about the illusions and misgivings of genius will not alter its complexion. It is true that such details have raised a spirit of sympathetic forbearance towards the distresses of men of letters, except in the breasts of the most barbarous and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... any fairly polysyllabic language. And Swedish, which is the most sonorous of all Germanic tongues, and full of Gothic strength, produces the most delectable effects in the long, rolling line of slow-marching dactyls and spondees. The tempered realism of Tegner, which shuns all that is harsh and trite, accords well with the noble classical verse. He employs it, as it were, to dignify his homely tale, as Raphael draped the fishermen of Galilee in the flowing robes of Greek philosophers. The description of the church, the rustic youth, and the patriarchal clergyman ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Administration—let us, in the name of all that is sublime and fundamental in republican principles, support and not perplex them in the hard and complex problem which they are appointed to solve. These are principles, which, however trite, need to be kept before us and practically sustained at a period when, as is often the case in long and tedious wars, the dispiriting influence of delays and occasional defeats work erroneous conclusions in the minds ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Ghadames, and in most parts of North Africa. The one I saw was a most unsightly creature. The construction of the eyes is remarkable; they turn on a swivel, or seem to do so, and are directed every way in a moment of time. It is a trite observation, that the lower brute animal has many advantages over the more perfect and rational animal. I often, en route, admired the beautiful facility with which the camel turned its head and neck completely round, and looked upon objects in every direction, without even moving its ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and other holy Places, under Pretence of Devotion. 2. That Vows are not to be made rashly over a Pot of Ale: but that Time, Expence and Pains ought to be employ d otherwise, in such Matters as have a real Tendency to promote trite Piety. 3. Of the Insignificancy and Absurdity of ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... akin to the maccaroni of my earlier days. The first of these expressions has become classical, by Mrs. Hannah More's poem of 'Bas-Bleu' and the other by the use of it in one of Lord Byron's poems. Though now become familiar and rather trite, their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... immersed in Hohenstaufen records, or searching after Roman antiquities, butterflies, minerals, or landscapes to paint—you will meet them in the most unexpected places; but never an Englishman. The adventurous type of Anglo-Saxon probably thinks the country too tame; scholars, too trite; ordinary tourists, too dirty. The accommodation and food in San Demetrio leave much to be desired; its streets are irregular lanes, ill-paved with cobbles of gneiss and smothered under dust and refuse. None the less, what noble names have been ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of this or of former generations. There is something very curious too, we think, in the way in which he, and Mr. Barry Cornwall also, have dealt with the Pagan mythology, of which they have made so much use in their poetry. Instead of presenting its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more is borrowed from these than the general conception of their conditions and relations; and an original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon them, which has all the merit of invention, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... altering it—but rely upon it, it was once useful, if it has existed long; and the presumption of present and continuing utility requires to be strongly outweighed by forcible considerations before it is abandoned. Lord Bacon has told us, in words which can never become trite, so profound is their wisdom, that our changes, to be beneficial, should resemble those of time, which, though the greatest of all innovators, works out its alterations so gradually that they are never perceived. Guizot makes, in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... she said. "As long as they exist, whether for individuals, or nations, or a whole species, life is still worth the living. Things are a bit bogged down right now, but at the risk of sounding very trite, ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of France to-day think differently. Our Creator did not make love of country a trite virtue, but a passion, and set it in our bodies along with our other passions. If in you it is absent, that ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... calmness of legislation, we cannot but allow the main theory of the system to have been precisely that most favourable to the prodigal exuberance of energy, of intellect, and of genius. Summoned to consultation upon all matters, from the greatest to the least, the most venerable to the most trite—to-day deciding on the number of their war-ships, to-morrow on that of a tragic chorus; now examining with jealous forethought the new harriers to oligarchical ambition;—now appointing, with nice distinction, to various service the various combinations of music ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... right hand. On his left, Netta, looking literally like 'a rose in June,' and receiving the very marked attentions of Captain Dancy, on one side, and of Mr Rice Rice, junior, on the other. He scarcely knew which was most irritating, 'the idioms,' or her affected giggle. Trite but true is the proverb, 'There is no rose without its thorn;' and Howel was pricked severely by the thorns surrounding the rose of his first step ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the extent of making him forget his mistrust of de Batz and his desire to get away. Mechanically almost he sat down again, and leaning both elbows on the edge of the box, he rested his chin in his hand, and listened. The words which the late M. de Moliere puts into the mouth of Celimene are trite and flippant enough, yet every time that Mlle. Lange's lips moved Armand watched ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... epitomizes the judgment of a world which has found that, though Shakespeare introduces evil or vulgar elements into his plays, his emphasis is always upon the right man and the right action. This may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that the splendor of his poetry is balanced by the rightness of his message becomes significant and impressive. It speaks not only for Shakespeare ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... seem trite to her; it does not to me," said the girl, as the doctor looked up. "I asked her to leave it ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... it was not without its few pails of cold water. These were emptied by some who hinted dark things about "political reasons," and it was easy to make the trite statement that history repeats itself and to predict that the formation of such a farmers' association as was proposed would be riding only for the same fall which had overtaken former attempts. The enthusiasm refused ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... the delight with which two children find they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This feeling, I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their freshness and interest, become trite and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is merely one of the sad effects of those "shades of the prison-house" which come gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no weapon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... laughed—a hearty laugh that was infectious and carried the laughter of everyone else with it. Longford, irritated, turned to his next neighbour with some trite observation, and allowed the discussion to drop. But Walden had heard it, and his heart went out to Gigue for the manner in which he had, for the moment at least, quenched the light of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... A trite platitude about his not caring to lose her was on his lips, but he refrained from uttering it. Another conclusion he had arrived at was that she was not to be nagged. Continual, or even occasional, reminders of his feeling for her would constitute ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... Bennoch's connexions with the Continent, and more especially with the United States, contribute very frequently to engraft upon these "re-unions" a variety of eminent foreigners and intellectual citizens of America. It is a trite saying, that few men can be good or useful abroad who are not happy at home. Mr Bennoch has been fortunate in wedded life. She who is the theme of many of his sweetest and most touching verses, is a woman whom a poet may love and a wise man consult; in whom the sociable gentleman finds an ever ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... in this trite manner; when, interrupting him, I said, These general observations, Colonel, suit not perhaps this particular case. But you yourself are a man of gallantry; and, possibly, were you to be put to the question, might ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply. The story she has ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... 61. Avoid trite or hackneyed expressions. Such expressions may be tags from everyday speech (the worse for wear, had the time of my life); or stale phrases from newspapers (taken into custody, the officiating clergyman); or humorous substitutions (ferocious ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... After some trite remarks upon the art, the doctor, either to flatter Salvator, or in imitation of the physician of the Cardinal Colonna, who asked for one of Raffaelle's finest pictures as a fee for saving the Cardinal's life, requested Don Mario to give him a picture by Salvator as a remuneration for ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... mental ruins of her hypnotic medicine. She hypnotizes because she can't help it. She's built that way. The Tyler savants are 'way behind the times. They are plunging into the shoreless realm of psychology in search of information that was trite in antediluvian times. They are trying to determine whether man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial, when the sire of Solomon had made answer, and Lillian Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the "vexatious question" forever and for aye. But perhaps ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... has always been complained of women that, though they are quicker, guided by instincts that act promptly and for the greater part correctly, they are not patient or thorough. Now, as I have told you so often that it must sound trite to you to have me repeat it, it is only patient thoroughness that wins. I am glad to have this editor of one of our largest dailies give this indubitable testimony that we can be thorough if we will. For those of you who neither wish nor expect to continue ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... before he died, shouted till the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with God: does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in his exegesis of Tristan, will have it that Wagner composed the opera to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than a thinking one, and in the hazy, steamy, overheated thinking part he often let idle phrases play about without himself firmly grasping their ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... it stated—'tis an aphorism trite— That people who live neighborly in daily sound and sight Of each other's personality, habitually grow To look alike, and think alike, and act alike, and so Did Mr. Thomas Todgers and Miss Thomasina Tee, In the town of Slocum Pocum, ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... be called a truly great one that has not been a truly good one: a very simple saying, and one which, however trite, yet requires frequent repeating, since its importance is but too seldom considered. And the noble fame that sooner or later surely attaches to the author of such a life belongs chiefly, but not entirely, to him; it being in part, in a certain sense, the property of all who would follow in his footsteps, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the martyr of God, he told the story now so familiar—the story of that dark wintry morning at Blois, when the king's messenger, knocking early at the duke's door, bade him hurry, for the king wanted him. The story is trite enough now. When I heard it first in the inn on the Clain, it was all new ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... condescension they are very suitable. To suppose that by our betters are meant the Gods, is very harsh, because to imitate the Gods has been hitherto reckoned the highest pitch of human virtue. The whole is a trite and obvious thought, uttered by Timon with a kind of affected modesty. If I would make any alteration, it should be only to reform the ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... {genee}. To save the chronology some insert {trite} before {genee}, but this will be useless unless the clause {kata de ton auton khronon tou kreteros te arpage} be omitted, as it is also proposed to do. Periander is thought to have died about 585 ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... is the human complexion! We are sent into the world naked, that all the variations of the blood might be made visible. However trite, I cannot avoid quoting here the lines of the most deep-thinking and philosophical of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Astounding Stories, my enthusiasm has reached such a pitch that I find it difficult to express myself adequately. A mere letter such as this can give scarcely an inkling of the unbounded enjoyment I derive from the pages of this unique magazine. To use a trite but appropriate phrase, "It fills a long-felt need." True, there are other magazines which specialize in Science Fiction; but, to my mind they are not in a class with Astounding Stories. In most of them the scientific element is so emphasized that it ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the prophecies from which he cannot even now refrain; and, throughout, the manner is that of the pulpit-thumping orator. The first half of his letter is a prelude in the form of a sermon upon Faith, all very trite and obvious; and the notion of this excommunicated friar holding forth to the Pope's Holiness in polemical platitudes delivered with all the authority of inspired discoveries of his own is one more proof that ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... thing so common, as almost to be ridiculous, for a man to express self-distrust at the commencement of any attempt in speech or writing. And yet, trite as this mode of beginning is, its appropriateness makes each one use it as heartily as if it were new and true for him, though it might have been a common-place for others. When he glances hurriedly across the wide extent of his subject, when ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... about that!" McGee's half audible remark was the trite expression so commonly used by those who are staggered by a ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... produced a decided impression. Her tall, commanding figure, expressive eyes, and features of perfect regularity, must have given her every natural requisite for the higher walks of her profession. As I watched her moving with majestic grace across the stage, irrepressible though trite reflections upon her early career passed through my mind. What audiences she has played before, in the days of the first empire! How many soldiers and statesmen, now numbered with the not-to-be-forgotten dead, have applauded her delivery of the same ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... which he undertook in offering to show himself—as Persius puts it—'Intus et in cute', to posterity, exceeded his powers, is a trite criticism; like all human enterprises, his purpose was only imperfectly fulfilled; but this circumstance in no way lessens the attractive qualities of his book, not only for the student of history or psychology, but for the intelligent man of the world. Its startling frankness gives ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... "Bad water!" then with a look of exulting contempt at the remaining fluid, he added, "Soul gone water? No!" This idea, that the soul was not drowned, electrified me; so good is a word spoken in due season, however trite a truism ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... tears" and "clasping hands," he had bidden her an eternal farewell—by moonlight. She was, moreover, perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within as on the state of things without and around us. I make this trite remark, because I happen to know that Messrs. Helstone and Moore trotted forth from the mill-yard gates, at the head of their very small company, in the best possible spirits. When a ray from a lantern (the three ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most trite and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that deserves careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used; there are people who will say they love new potatoes; there are a multitude of loves of different ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... being, just as if we had been birds. It will be difficult for any one not of that company to realize with what tender, touching pathos the simplest home melodies melted over those waters, though the words and airs might be trite ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... non-application, of salt, &c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on,—shall I confess?—in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions—and mine had not been inconsiderable—are ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the revealed attraction of native beauty; and the capstern was in consequence hove with more than common eagerness and expedition. But the utmost care, one may readily believe, was requisite to keep these enchanted fellows in good order. It is a trite remark, that the imaginary anticipation of pleasure is seldom or ever equalled by the enjoyment of it. Independent of the causes which may account for such commonly experienced disappointment, it is ten to one in almost any case, but that in a world ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... of this nature, whether it be to make money by means of cruising ships, or cruising scrip. It is true, these rovers encountered very differently-looking victims, in the first place; but it is a somewhat trite remark, that the aggregate of human beings is pretty much the same in all situations. There were widows and orphans as much connected with the condemnation of prizes, as with the prices of condemned stock; and I do not see that fraud is any worse when carried on by scriveners ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as technically and literally true—"The assertion that in the time of Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source and centre of ecclesiastical ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... and beating an atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says,—herein uttering a cardinal aesthetic principle,—"It is, above all, in the spirituality of ideas that poetry consists." Thought that is poetic will glisten through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the poetic ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... attainable now, of seeing him for some hours, and in the mood of conversation. As one belonging to the Wordsworth, and Coleridge constellation, (he too is now seventy-six years of age,) the thoughts and knowledge of Mr. De Quincey lie in the past; and oftentimes he spoke of matters now become trite to one of a later culture. But to all that fell from his lips, his eloquence, subtile and forcible as the wind, full and gently falling as the evening dew, lent a peculiar charm. He is an admirable narrator, not rapid, but ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... constitutionality of legislation and not with its motives, policy or wisdom, or with its concurrence with natural justice, fundamental principles of government, or spirit of the Constitution.[280] In various forms this maxim has been repeated to such an extent that it has become trite and has increasingly come to be incorporated in constitutional cases as a reason for fortifying a finding of unconstitutionality. Through absorption of natural rights doctrines into the text of the Constitution, the Court was enabled to reject natural ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the greater part of these once admired pieces will appear trite, prosaic, and tedious; but an uncultivated age—like the children and the common people of all ages—is most attracted and impressed by that mode of narration which leaves the least to be supplied by the imagination of the hearer or reader; and when this collection of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... formal dull way—telling Nannie the trite old things about the park and the village that they told every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... possibility it could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... American Union is geographically solid. So are the cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The nine millions of square miles over which the British flag waves are dispersed over the whole surface of the globe. The fact that this consideration is so trite and obvious does not prevent it from being an essential element in the argument. Mr. Seeley's precedents are not at ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... our young gentlemen, were here," said Mrs. Towers, "they might improve themselves in all the graces of polite and sincere complaisance. But, compared to this, I have generally heard such trite and coarse stuff from our race of would-be wits, that what they say may be compared to the fawnings and salutations of the ass in the fable, who, emulating the lap-dog, merited ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... and metallic life-boat, and dinner on board, if you wish. She is chiefly used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats, and supplies, but also by hunters and tourists. There was another steamer, named Amphitrite, laid up close by; but, apparently, her name was not more trite than her hull. There were also two or three large sail-boats in port. These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls. There were but few passengers, and not one female among them: a St. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... It would be trite to observe the easy gradation from esteem to love: in the bosom of Harley there scarce needed a transition; for there were certain seasons when his ideas were flushed to a degree much above their common complexion. In times not credulous of inspiration, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... two children find they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This feeling, I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their freshness and interest, become trite and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is merely one of the sad effects of those "shades of the prison-house" which come gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no weapon against the philosophy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... is a trite phrase in everybody's mouth; and it is not a little remarkable that those who use it most as applied to others, unconsciously afford in their own persons singular examples of the power which habit and custom ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... "True if trite; and never obsolete. It is as good doctrine to-day as it was in poor Richard's time. Of ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... learned say And envy called the tune Mayhap 'twere trite what treason saith That man is dust and ends in death; We'd slay with proof of printed law Whatever was new that seers saw, If Truth were what the learned say And envy ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... battle, but to a slight incident, not to a victory, but to a hasty retreat. I am alluding to the well-known stanzas on the Burial of Sir John Moore, who was killed at Corunna in 1809; and my apology for quoting anything so hackneyed must be that it is trite by reason of its excellence; for a short poem, like a single happy phrase, wins incessant repetition and lasting popularity, because the words precisely fit some universal feeling. Why have these verses made such an effect that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sure, that light loves and ancient wines are good, that riches are burdensome, and enough is better than a feast, that country life is delightful, that old age comes on us apace, that our friends leave us sorrowing and our sorrow does not bring them back. Trite sayings no doubt; but embellished one and all with an adorable force and novelty at once sadly earnest and vividly exact; not too simple for the profound and not too artful for the shallow; consecrated by the verbal felicity which belongs only to an age of peculiar ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... though a trite remark, that there is great stupidity in the proposal to lay up in a barn the portion of a soul. The soul, when it is hungry, cannot feed on musty grain. Material treasures cannot save a soul from death. The representation in the parable, however, is true to nature and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... woman, she was equally so to him. Unconventionality reigned in that house, and they were together an hour. Never before in his life had Ellis learned so much, nor caught so many glimpses of things beyond, in an equal length of time. His idea of woman had been trite, a little vague. He had no ideal; he had simply accepted, without question, the one ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... matters mended—and our spirits rose. We began to think more and more of getting in touch with civilization. What a tale we should have to tell. How we should put it over the other explorers with their trite Solomons ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... him. If in the bright and silken distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it. But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... however, leaves us in little doubt as to what Dr. Draper means by a conflict between science and religion. When he enlarges on the trite story of Galileo, and alludes to the more modern quarrel between the Church and the geologists, and does this in the belief that he is thereby illustrating an antagonism between religion and science, it is obvious that he identifies the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... name of Nehemiah Higginbottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... while her father bided near and talked to me of the community I had left, and which had given me my certificate to friend Hicks's Meeting. And yet I fear me that I made several dubious replies to his many trite questions as we sat on the porch in the quiet of the evening, for friend Barbara's eyes were upon me, and she had a little dint in either cheek which affected me amazingly. (I have heard such dints called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... no possible remedy for such evils as this country has suffered except general military education. In my opinion, no man is fit for a seat in Congress unless he has had such an education. The first thing he ought to learn is the old and trite military maxim that the only was to carry on war economically is to make it "short, sharp, and decisive." To dole out military appropriations in driblets is to invite disaster and ultimate bankruptcy. So it is in respect to the necessary preparations for war in time of peace. No man is wise enough ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the point of believing that the impossible was about to happen—a Grinnell victory! That these loyal rooters had been disappointed as regularly as the annual conflicts arrived, did not seem to dampen the ardor of the next season's support. "Hope springs eternal" was the trite but simple explanation offered by certain zealous followers who steadfastly refused to concede Pomeroy's vaunted superiority. Coach Edward's advent at Grinnell had served to heighten the interest when the small college had held ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... composition of Margaret impressed her fellow pupil, Dr. Holmes, as he relates, with a kind of awe. It began loftily with the words, "It is a trite remark," a phrase which seemed to the boy very masterful. The girls envied her a certain queenliness of manner. "We thought," says one of them, "that if we could only come into school in that way, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... against is the delivery of trite expressions. These are phrases and clauses which at first were so eloquent that once heard they stuck in people's minds, who then in an endeavor themselves to be emphatic inserted continually into their speeches these overworked, done-to-death expressions, ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... without generosity or pity. How many things a man who is not awake to side strenuously with the good in him against the evil, who is not on his guard lest himself should mislead himself, may do, of which he will one day be bitterly ashamed!—a trite remark, it may be, but, reader, that will make the thing itself no easier to bear, should you ever come to know you have done a thing of the sort. I fear, however, from what I know of Fergus afterwards, that he now, instead of seeking about to make some amends, turned the strength that should ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand—"are not Great, for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among us all; only let me at once partly modify ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... laboring to strike out sparks of wit, with a restless anxiety to shine, and with a labored affectation to please, which never pleases? All this be far from them! But we do wish to see the conversation of well-bred women rescued from vapid commonplaces, from uninteresting tattle, from trite communications, from frivolous earnestness, from false sensibility, from a warm interest about things of no moment, and an indifference to topics the most important; from a cold vanity, from the overflows of self-love, exhibiting itself under the smiling mask of an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the merest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished—his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... familiar, and of which they did not distinctly apprehend the meaning, is very remarkable. Junius thought De Lolme's Essay deep," (13) and talks of property which "savours of the reality:" (14) he misapplies that trite expression of the courts, bona fide: (15) misunderstands mortmain, (16) and supposes that an inquisitio post mortem was an inquiry how the deceased came by his death. (17) Walpole talks of "the purparty of a wife's lands;" of "tenures against which, of all ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... see six birds on a tree, and shoot three, there will be none left, for of course the remaining three will fly away. This last jest is so trite to-day as to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... remaining in public ownership is small, compared with the vast area in private ownership, the natural resources of those in public ownership are of immense present and future value. This is particularly trite as to minerals and water power. The proper bureaus have been classifying these resources to the end that they may be conserved. Appropriate estimates are being submitted, in the Budget, for the further prosecution ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specially to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge are the great ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the trite but, nevertheless, all-powerfully true assertion that the Press is the Archimidean lever which moves the world, cannot but regret the unblushing statement of the editor of our esteemed contemporary, the Planters' Friend, that he has been the victim of a soul-destroying, home-wrecking, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... to the heathen; and once we realise that we have to die, and very soon, and that the Catholic Church is the only true church, our ideas about race and nationality fade from us. They come to seem very trite and foolish. We are here, not to make life successful and triumphant, but to gain heaven. That is the truth, and it is to the honour of the Irish people that they have been selected by God to preach the truth, even ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... words in italics are needed, and were given by Manut. with the exception of nunc which was added by Dav. The idea of Orelli, that Cic. clipped these trite sophisms as he does verses from the comic writers is untenable. In docendo: docere is not to expound but to prove, cf. n. on 121. Primum ... modum: the word modus is technical in this sense cf. Top. 57. The [Greek: protos ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... destruction which had swept from his side many another whose eagerness for the fray had certes not sprung, like his own, from a desire to court destruction, he shuddered. And there arose in his mind the trite ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... with the manners and aspects of that other land known to him as yet only by contradictory hearsay tales or books of travel, for the most part unsatisfactory. Thoughts of a somewhat poetical cast, albeit hackneyed and trite to our modern ideas, crossed his brain, in response to some longing of which, perhaps, he himself was hardly conscious, a desire in the depths of a heart fastidious rather than ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the return of this effect; knowing the absolute correctness of their calculation, I suffered ten thousand torments, and became almost unconscious. At last I awoke from my nightmare when the Overture, to which I had disdained to give what I considered a trite ending, came to ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... many years, as human tongues would tell, Upon the face of this blank earth to dwell. Looks she not sad? 'tis but a tale of old, Told o'er and o'er, and ever to be told, The hourly story of our every day, Which when men hear, they sigh and turn away; A tale too trite almost to find an ear, A woe too common to deserve a tear. She is the daughter of a distant land;— Her kindred are far off;—her maiden hand, Sought for by many, was obtained by one Who owned a different birthland from her own. But what ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... think you," said Rodriguez, "if you could have but one, a lofty place or comfort?" Even in those days such a question was trite, but Rodriguez uttered it only thinking to dip in the store of Morano's simple wisdom, as one may throw a mere worm to catch a worthy fish. But in this he was disappointed; for Morano made no neat comparison nor even ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... facing Justin. He was standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid and inexpressive and—very white. The sky behind him, appropriately enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite tableau vivant. We two seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... have been well treated by their men-folk, they have nobly discharged their debt. It is trite to refer to the numerous schemes of philanthropy in which American women have played so prominent a part, to allude to the fact that they have as a body used their leisure to cultivate those arts and graces of life which the preoccupation of man has led him too often to neglect. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... is paid. If he does not do this, he is probably pauperized, and you at once throw out the balance of things. You can't hold up conditions artificially, and you can't change the underlying laws of trade. If you try, you must inevitably fail. All this may be trite and obvious, but it is remarkable how many men overlook what should be the obvious. These are facts we can't get away from—a business man must adapt himself to the natural conditions as they exist from month to month and year to year. Sometimes I feel that we Americans think we can find ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... from that of the first; that the first was evidently needed; that the second may be as injurious as the first was useful. He exhibited various weak points in the inflation fallacies and presented forcibly the trite truth that no laws and no decrees can keep large issues of irredeemable paper ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... popular education is familiar and trite, and yet it needs to be occasionally re-stated and enforced. There is no community in which there is not a considerable number of persons grossly and dangerously ignorant, and there are many communities in which the majority ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... hand, hazing of the new worker and the sneers of the jealous, accompanied by such trite expressions as—"You can't teach an old dog new tricks," have often destroyed self-confidence in a worker, who, in the absence of accurate records of his efficiency, is trying to judge himself at new methods. The jibes and jokes ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... right, but they're so confounded trite and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather than a listing of ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... is being examined with reference to baptism, and is asked why he decided to turn from the worship of idols. "God is true" is the reply, a very simple reason,—a trite one possibly; but there was something in the tone and emphasis of it which thrilled me. I saw the emptyness of heathen worship at a point from which I had never looked at it before. A God that is true, that can be absolutely trusted! Where will you find one in any heathen Pantheon? ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... so well turned and contempered with itself, and so everywhere conspiring, that, while it traverses many passions and humors and is accommodated to all sorts of persons, it still shows the same, and retains its semblance even in trite, familiar, and everyday expressions. And if his master do now and then require something of rant and noise, he doth but (like a skilful flutist) set open all the holes of his pipe, and their presently stop them again with good decorum and restore ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority? I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was all impromptu and horribly trite and commonplace. Only it was new to me because I never before took the trouble to consider it. But it's true, even if it is trite. People love or they don't love, and a regard for ethics controls only what they do ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... law is, your lordship will tell me, a trite topic, and which of its abuses have not been too severely felt not to be complained of? A man's property is to serve for the purposes of his support; and therefore, to delay a determination concerning ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in almost perfect silence they sat waiting for Joe to come home, her decision wavered again and again, and it took all her courage to hold herself in. She made occasional trite remarks, and received replies of the same kind. On them both the tension ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... It is a very trite proverb, and a sadly worn truth, exemplified over and over again at all times and seasons, and in all places of the earth, that the course of true love never ran smooth; and alas! notwithstanding all the pleasant preparations being made for them, these two poor ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... dissertation on the beauties of the Latin language, the origin of which he traced into the ancient Celtic, which, judging from its Nomic melody, he should say bore a trite and common resemblance to that now spoken in Wales, Ireland, and the Highlands of Scotland; and which, notwithstanding the authorities to the contrary, he firmly believed was introduced first into his country by William the Conqueror. Indeed, he insisted that he had twice debated this point with ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Roman stone mosaics. The designs employed vary of course with the fashion of the day, for there is a local school of art supported by the municipality, which professes to improve the tastes of the tarsiatori, but most persons will certainly prefer the trite but characteristic ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... clenched hands above his head and cursed the circumstance that had brought us to such extremity. That was the first and only time I knew him to lose his poise, his natural repression. Still water runs deep, they say; and a glacial cap may conceal subterranean fires. Trite similes, I grant you—but, ah, how true. The good Lord help those phlegmatics who can stand by unmoved when a self-contained man reveals the anguish of his soul in one passionate outburst. Could the fury that quivered in his voice have wreaked itself on the bison and the men ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... an earnest man, and he devoted much care to the composition of his sermons. He was used to expound twice a Sunday the more obvious parts of Holy Scripture, making in twenty minutes or half an hour, for the benefit of the vulgar, a number of trite reflections; and it must be confessed that he had great facility for explaining at decorous length texts which were plain ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... "commonplace"; instances means what we mean by it today, "examples," "illustrations." (Line 18 as a whole gives us a vivid sense of the justice's readiness to speak sapiently, after the manner of justices, and to trot out his trite illustrations on the slightest provocation.) The word pantaloon in line 20 is interesting. The patron saint of Venice was St. Pantaleon (the term is from Greek, means "all-lion," and possibly refers to the lion of ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... saying that I had grown into a fine youngster. He asked me how old I was; which, of course, he must have done merely to say something more, or perhaps he did so as a test of my intelligence. I replied: "Twelve, sir." He then made the trite observation about the flight of time, and we lapsed into another ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... good author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his incidents, should be trite, common, or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things, which may possibly have ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of Nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, that an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple, so a woman will be a woman, that is, a fool, whatever disguise she takes up. And yet there is no reason women should take it amiss to be thus ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... have been very limited, for it is somewhat scarce, though a specimen may easily be procured of any dealer in coins for a few shillings. This bears the bust of the {84} Queen, with the legend ANNA DEI GRATIA—reverse, BRITANNIA around the trite figure of Britannia with the spear and olive-branch: the date 1714 in the exergue. Those with Peace in a car, Britannia standing with olive-branch and spear, or seated under an arch, are patterns; the second has the legend BELLO ET PACE in indented letters, a mode revived in the reign of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 66, February 1, 1851 • Various
... one the shams had yielded to his prying gaze, and, but too well, he knew the truth of Tom Moore's trite remark, "False ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... sighed deeply. He was too straightforward to utter some trite, smooth remark, such as a man of the world might make. Regarding Gregory kindly, he said, almost as if it were a prayer, "May his mantle fall on you. You have many traits and ways that remind me strongly of him, and you have it in ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... as well to be prepared for the worst,' said Cargrim, in his blandest manner. 'The course of true love—but you are weary of such trite sayings. Good-day, Miss Whichello!' He raised his hat and turned away. 'One last proverb—Joy in the morning means grief ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... familiar vision, and often described; yet one that never fails of its effect. A man may weary, after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the waste—the miracle of water; and that of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... always the same, though our imagination determines the shape that love must assume; like and unlike, therefore, is love in every soul in which he dwells, and passion becomes a unique work in which the soul expresses its sympathies. In the old trite saying that love is a projection of self—an egoisme a deux—lies a profound meaning known only to philosopher and poet; for it is ourself in truth that we love in that other. Yet, though love manifests itself in such different ways that no pair of lovers since the world ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... to avail himself in the field of all the errors of his enemy. He is certainly a good judge of men, and has called around him valuable counsellors." He naively adds: "Prominent as General Grant is before the country, these remarks of mine may appear trite and uncalled for, but having been ordered to inspect his command, I thought it not improper for me to add my testimony with regard to the commander." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... It is trite to say that inequality of endowment and therefore inequality of results in human beings, as well as in inanimate things, is a law of nature. The capacity for creating, organizing, leading, etc., in short, the possession of those qualities of brain ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... species of criticism requires always that the poetic form should be applied to the details of execution; but when the plan of the piece is concerned, it never looks for more than the logical connection of causes and effects, or some partial and trite moral by way of application; and all that cannot be reconciled therewith is declared superfluous, or even a pernicious appendage. On these principles we must even strike out from the Greek tragedies most of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... aesthetic? I know how little the intellectual and factual content of great poetry has to do with its significance. The actual meaning of the words in Shakespeare's songs, the purest poetry in English, is generally either trivial or trite. They are ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... reasonable probability of being the true reading.' The difference is indeed small to the eye, but is great enough to give us fine gold instead of questionable ore. In an alternative of the kind, I must hope in what seems logical against what seems illogical; in what seems radiant against what seems trite. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... pocket, and handed it to me. It was addressed from France to Lance-Corporal Goyte, at Tible. I took out the letter and began to read it, as mere words. 'Mon cher Alfred'—it might have been a bit of a torn newspaper. So I followed the script: the trite phrases of a letter from a French-speaking girl to an English soldier. 'I think of you always, always. Do you think sometimes of me?' And then I vaguely realized that I was reading a man's private correspondence. And yet, how could ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... tongues, and full of Gothic strength, produces the most delectable effects in the long, rolling line of slow-marching dactyls and spondees. The tempered realism of Tegner, which shuns all that is harsh and trite, accords well with the noble classical verse. He employs it, as it were, to dignify his homely tale, as Raphael draped the fishermen of Galilee in the flowing robes of Greek philosophers. The description of the church, the rustic youth, and the patriarchal clergyman has, however, the note of ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... saying that misfortunes rarely come singly, and it would not be so trite if there were not truth in it. Misfortunes are sometimes like blackbirds: ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Washington, but she had to live here. Thus she patronized nearly all of those with whom she condescended to associate, using an upward tilt of the head, a tired droop of the eyelids, and a fine upward arching of the brows to indicate how trite it all was. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... happiness, until we met again. And when the time should come for our resumption of those pursuits which (here a general depression set in all round), pursuits which, pursuits which;—then let us ever remember what was said by the Spartan General, in words too trite for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... fire, concentration, and wild fancy. As great an impossibility as that vulgarity and tawdriness should not obtrude their ugly heads here and there from under Branwell's finest phrases. And since there is no single vulgar, trite, or Micawber-like effusion throughout 'Wuthering Heights;' and since Heathcliff's passion is never once treated in the despicable would-be worldly fashion in which Branwell describes his own sensations, and since at the time that 'Wuthering Heights' was written ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... down all erudition, to show the freedom and independence of genius, whose fertility is such as not to require borrowing anything from foreign sources; but I observed that this had sunk into a mere commonplace, trite and trivial, invented by indolence, adopted by ignorance, and which adds nothing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... miraculous thing is the human complexion! We are sent into the world naked, that all the variations of the blood might be made visible. However trite, I cannot avoid quoting here the lines of the most deep-thinking and philosophical of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... on in this trite manner; when, interrupting him, I said, These general observations, Colonel, suit not perhaps this particular case. But you yourself are a man of gallantry; and, possibly, were you to be put to the question, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... state pageants—are spirited and interesting. On the other hand the faults of the work are numerous and glaring. The general style is prolix, involved and vicious; mistakes of fact and false deductions are to be found in almost every page; and the constant repetition of trite moral reflections and egotistical references seriously detracts from its dignity. A more grave defect resulted from the author's strong political partisanship, which entirely unfitted him for dealing with the problems of history in a philosophical spirit. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... God. If we desire that upon our Christian lives there shall shine the perpetual sunshine of an unclouded confidence that we have the love and the favour of God, and that for us there is no condemnation, but only 'acceptance in the beloved,' the short road to it is the well-known and trite path of toil ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... setting sail upon a mighty ocean, in a small boat, which may or may not be seaworthy—some of them, it seems, sometimes, with neither chart nor compass—certainly with little knowledge of the crew. It's a trite ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... that the realization of this truth comes comparatively late in life to those who ought to have recognized it years before. Thinking along the surface of things, and in particular repeating catchwords and platitudes and trite maxims on the subject of sincerity, is apt to make us believe that we possess the quality we talk about, and as it is impossible to have anything to do with the education of children without treating of sincerity ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... ignorance, doubtless, did me little honour—that Bichat had died at thirty years of age, and this revelation was almost agitating. To have done so much in so short a life was to be truly great. This reflection, which looks deplorably trite as I write it here, had the effect of eloquence as I uttered it for my own benefit on the bare little mall ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... these words, he produced, from inside a purse which he had handy, a transcribed office-philactery, which he handed over to Y-ts'un; who upon perusal, found it full of trite and unpolished expressions of public opinion, with regard to the leading clans and notable official families in that particular district. They ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... ruffians with no weapon but a marline-spike. And hereafter, as he tells you in his 'Voyage to New South Wales,' he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or go. He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the ship; he packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous observations; he posed, in brief, as the captain of the ship without responsibility. Arrived at Port Jackson, he was acclaimed a hero, and received with obsequious solicitude by the Governor, who promised that his 'future situation should be such as would ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... all trite things to say to churchmen: I have tried, on occasion, to say them to non-churchmen, but they do not seem to respond. There are those who rejoice in their break with historic continuity, who look upon a written form of service with ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... nothing that shall shock or be inconsistent with this spirit. But, to entitle an epitaph to praise, more than this is necessary. It ought to contain some thought or feeling belonging to the mortal or immortal part of our nature touchingly expressed; and if that be done, however general or even trite the sentiment may be, every man of pure mind will read the words with pleasure and gratitude. A husband bewails a wife; a parent breathes a sigh of disappointed hope over a lost child; a son utters a sentiment of filial reverence for ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... they said, to be permitted to send from any port a cargo to Surat or Canton as freely as he now sent a cargo to Hamburg or Lisbon. [174] In our time these doctrines may probably be considered, not only as sound, but as trite and obvious. In the seventeenth century, however, they were thought paradoxical. It was then generally held to be a certain, and indeed an almost selfevident truth, that our trade with the countries lying beyond the Cape of Good Hope could be advantageously ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Third Degree, and the introduction of Hermetic and other symbols into Masonry; that they framed the three degrees for the purpose of communicating their doctrines, veiled by their symbols, to those fitted to receive them, and gave to others trite moral explanations they could comprehend."[129] How gracious of them to vouchsafe even trite explanations, but why frame a set of degrees to conceal what they wished to hide? This is the same idea of something alien imposed upon ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... discussion of a principle now too trite, for humankind, at least in Europe, is satisfied that unlimited liberty is nowhere consistent with a properly-regulated state of society. I have touched lightly on the matter, only to give to my readers some idea of my conduct in my own country, where I began to tread ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... bending his keen, wild blue eye on the stolid and unexpressive face of the Netherlander, like an eager student who seeks to discover some hidden and mysterious meaning in a passage of a classic author, the direct import of which seems trite and trivial. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... with a listless forbearance. "Don't go on. I know everything you are going to say.—That's always the way with you calm, quiet people, who are not easily moved yourselves. You still but faith in these trite remedies; for you've never known the ills ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... at your service: but had you fortuned a mere stranger, and made no means to me by acquaintance, I should have utterly denied to have been the man; both by reason of the act past in Parliament against Conjurers and Witches, as also, because I would not have my Art vulgar, trite, ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... pictures are open daily in the United States and the millions get for their nickel long hours of enjoyment. In Edison's small box into which only one at a time could peep through the hole, nothing but a few trite scenes were exhibited. In those twenty thousand theaters which grew from it all human passions and emotions find their stage, and whatever history reports or science demonstrates or imagination invents comes to life on the screen of the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... nation is to listen to its music, and accordingly judge of the sentiments and emotions of Americans by their sheet-music, we should arrive at very discouraging results. The characteristics of our sheet-music, briefly summed up, are: (1) trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm mechanical ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... don't, don't!" And suddenly it had been stilled, and she had listened. This was because she realised that Nigel himself was listening. That made her see what she had not dared to allow herself to see before. These trite things were true. There were laws to protect one. If Betty had not been dealing with mere truths, Nigel would have stopped her. He had been supercilious, but he could not ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... appliances are inexhaustible. When one style of experiment fails we turn at once to another and obtain our result, as I now prove to you by handing this cup of coffee to Miss Gray. You had better not sweeten it, Mademoiselle. It is quite unnecessary to make the very trite observation that in your case no sugar is required. Yes, the progress of science is slow, but it is sure. Everything must ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to a speech or in the spire of a cathedral, i.e., the human instinct to end whatever we attempt as impressively and completely as possible. This Coda, which, in Haydn and Mozart, was often a mere iteration of trite chords—a ceasing to go—was so expanded by Beethoven that it was the real glory of the whole movement. In fact so many eloquent treatments of the main material were reserved for the Coda that it often became a second development; and such was its scope that the form may be ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... eternal farewell—by moonlight. She was, moreover, perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... original it is "fair"—a trite word—instead of "young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid moonlight died" was ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... Papists. And why? Because many of his darts are aimed at their profligate priesthood. Now if, as they tell their people, these are but slanderous attacks on their religion, surely the shafts would fall harmless on the armor of truth. Why then so strenuously oppose their reading such works? Florry, the trite adage, 'Truth is the hardest of all to bear,' is applicable to these prelates of papacy; who, knowing their danger, are fully resolved to guard the avenues of light and knowledge. The Pope of imperial Rome, surrounded ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she heeded me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a child to sleep. Soon the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out on the grass; and with their ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... details, the vast improvement in morals which doubtless will distinguish twentieth century France; for morals are reformed only very gradually! Is it not necessary, in order to produce the slightest change, that the most daring dreams of the past century become the most trite ideas of the present one? We have touched upon this question merely in a trifling mood, for the purposes of showing that we are not blind to its importance, and of bequeathing also to posterity the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... come to-day— But really 'tis my spouse's way! He's so unkind, he never sends To tell when he invites his friends: I wish ye may but have enough!" And while with all this paltry stuff She sits tormenting every guest, Nor gives her tongue one moment's rest, In phrases batter'd, stale, and trite, Which modern ladies call polite; You see the booby husband sit In admiration at her wit! But let me now a while survey Our madam o'er her evening tea; Surrounded with her noisy clans Of prudes, coquettes, and harridans, When, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Scrotton pursued, ignoring her companion's trite comments, "embodies the thoughts and dreams of many races. It makes me always think of Pater's Mona Lisa—you remember: 'Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary.' She is, of course, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Immediately behind them followed a man who came dragging his limbs behind him, supported on either side by a servant. He was quite a young man, with a wonderfully handsome, clean-shaven face. Indeed, so handsome was he, that Venner could think of no more fitting simile for his beauty than the trite old comparison of the Greek god. The man's features were perfectly chiselled, slightly melancholy and romantic, and strongly suggestive of the early portraits of Lord Byron. Yet, all the same, the almost perfect face was from time to time twisted and distorted ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... marriages were an old story for her. She had loved to shine at watering-places, but the gayety no longer lured her. She had dazzled in diamonds, silks, and velvets, been admired on the right hand and on the left, until it was an old, trite story. Servants managed her house admirably. Mr. Lawrence never wearied her with any business details. Her clothes were ordered, and made, and hung in the closets. The carriage was always at hand. Not a want of any kind, hardly a desire, that ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... your father talks a little sculduddery after dinner, which it is perfectly licit for him to do, and which (although I am not very fond of it myself) appears to be entirely an affair of taste. Your father, I scarcely like to remind you, since it is so trite a commonplace, is older than yourself. At least, he is MAJOR and SUI JURIS, and may please himself in the matter of his conversation. And, do you know, I wonder if he might not have as good an answer against you and me? We say we sometimes find him COARSE, but ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often have in them a smarting force, and we cannot be too guarded how we use them. "Think twice before you speak once," is a trite but wise saying. We teach it to our children very carefully, but are too apt to forget that it has not lost its application ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... and thus did Van Dyck love his pictures into being. All portrait-painters are sociable—they have to be in order to get acquainted with the subject. The best portrait-painter in America talks like a windmill as he works, and tries a whole set round of little jokes, and dry asides and trite aphorisms on the sitter, meanwhile cautiously noting the effect. For of course so long as a sitter is coldly self-conscious, and fully mindful that he is "being took," his countenance is as stiff, awkward, and constrained as that of a farmer ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... allied to great gentleness and pity, combined to make a character extraordinary in one so young, and which her aunt summed up and summarily dismissed from her mind in the trite sentence that "she certainly did not take after ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... from what follows, which shows he did not agree with Lord George, in censuring the Government for not opening depots, and he undertakes to prove that they should not have done so. He uses, amongst others, the old trite argument, when he says: there is reason to believe that the establishment of Government depots at the end of '46, however cautiously introduced, tended in the localities to arrest the development of that retail trade, which was then rapidly extending throughout Ireland."—Lord George Bentinck, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... even words seemed to fail me. I was excessively vexed at myself, for I wished to be uncommonly elegant. I tried two or three times to turn a pretty thought, or to utter a fine sentiment; but it would come forth so trite, so forced, so mawkish, that I was ashamed of it. My very voice sounded discordantly, though I sought to modulate it into the softest tones. "The truth is," thought I to myself, "I cannot bring my ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... one of our theatres; and the light he throws upon a subject is like the dazzling effect of phosphorus, or an ignis fatuus of words. There is a wide difference, however, between perfect originality and perfect common-place: neither ideas nor expressions are trite or vulgar because they are not quite new. They are valuable, and ought to be repeated, if they have not become quite common; and Johnson's style both of reasoning and imagery holds the middle rank between startling novelty and vapid common-place. Johnson has as much originality ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... rejoinder I have never forgotten: "Ah! an excellent author; excellent for his matter; only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious there." Such was the colloquy; we bowed, parted, and never more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as this comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... which followed Miss Street's unconventional decision passed in a whirl is to be both trite and truthful. In fact, it was not until she had crossed the border that she ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... little of theoretical science except in one line, but who pursued that one practical line until he achieved a wonderful result. This man was Christopher Columbus. It is not necessary here to tell the trite story of his accomplishment. Suffice it that his practical demonstration of the rotundity of the earth is regarded by most modern writers as marking an epoch in history. With the year of his voyage the epoch ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... your bit!" How cheap and trite Seems that phrase in such a fight! "Do your bit!" That cry recall, Change it now to "Do your all!" Do your all, and then do more; Do what you're best fitted for; Do your utmost, do and give, You have but one life ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... the judge at supper, and he saw at once from her complacent reticence that she had achieved some triumph against his principles. She chatted about topics of the day in terms that were ingeniously trite. Then a letter came from their son in Denver, and she forgot her role somewhat, and read the letter aloud to the judge, and wondered wistfully who in Denver attended to the boy's buttons and socks; but she made no reference whatever to Siskiyou jail or those inside it. Next morning, however, it ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... genius begins, not where rules, abstractedly taken, end, but where known vulgar and trite rules have no longer any place. It must of necessity be that even works of genius, as well as every other effect, as it must have its cause, must likewise have its rules; it cannot be by chance that excellences are produced with any constancy, or any certainty, for this is not ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... vacant crown, not on the head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his wife, Mary, daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of that king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all those circumstances which demonstrated that their accepting King William was not properly a choice; but to all those who did not wish in effect to recall King James, or to deluge their country in blood, and again to bring their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... obliging, and after some little "dickering" (for he had heard that Western steamboats were not particularly uniform in their charges), he engaged a passage, applying to the bargain the trite principle that "no berth is secured till paid for," which had been reduced to writing, and occupied a conspicuous place in the cabin. Without waiting to see the berth he had paid for, he hastened to the hotel for the large hair trunk, which ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... moderate in tone. During the first three years of the existence of this paper, Daniel Webster, then a student, was a frequent contributor; he wrote both prose and poetry, more frequently the latter. The topics were trite, but the thoughts were always serious and elevated. In the issue of December 9, 1799, Mr. Webster published a poem on winter; he was then a Junior in college. The European wars commanded his attention and ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... which mean something or nothing, are expressions that have become trite and hackneyed. At some time they were accurate phrases, saying just what was needed. By being used for all sorts of purposes, they have lost the original thought of which they were the accurate expression. They have no ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... organized propaganda of anti-Semitism it has invariably been closely intertwined with every other contemporary reactionary oppressive and contemptible force. To those who know the history of anti-Semitism in Russia, in Poland, and in Rumania, even in quite recent years, this statement will seem so trite as not to require any demonstration. This close association with other forms of reaction and brutal oppression is not peculiar to anti-Semitism, but is a common characteristic of every form of race prejudice and hatred. ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... had come in and taken a chair. It was Half-past Full, and with his boots stretched to the warmth, he sat gazing into the fire. The door opened and another buckaroo entered and sat off in a corner. He had a bundle of old letters, smeared sheets tied trite a twisted old ribbon. While his large, top-toughened fingers softly loosened the ribbon, he sat with his back to the room and presently began to read the letters over, one by one. Most of the men came in before long, and silently joined the watchers round the treat fireplace. Drake ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... enormity of the offence would be to put Buondelmonti to death. And although some took into consideration the evils that might ensue upon it, Mosca Lamberti said, that those who talk of many things effect nothing, using that trite and common adage, Cosa fatta capo ha. Thereupon, they appointed to the execution of the murder Mosca himself, Stiatti Uberti, Lambertuccio Amidei, and Oderigo Fifanti, who, on the morning of Easter ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... often sent him bleeding to bed, or shamelessly despoiled him of his merchandise, or bullied and blustered him out of his fair price, knowing he dared not resent. It meant being chaffed and gibed at in language of which he only understood that it was cruel, though certain trite facetiae grew intelligible to him by repetition. Thus once, when he had been interrogated as to the locality of Moses when the light went out, he replied in Yiddish that the light could not go out, for "it stands in the verse, that round ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... matter how wild, how precarious, to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once. They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower all the time. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... great act of faith, which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination, it is obvious that the axioms, on which it is based, cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination. It is also a trite observation that, in the business of life, we constantly take the most serious action upon evidence of an utterly insufficient character. But it is surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... ought to do if they were to marry. And so, the note said, finally, she gave him up to his family, she released him altogether, and she begged him not to come back to her, or to urge her to change her mind. Also she made the trite but very sensible observation that he would be glad of his freedom before the year ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the Havana, I witnessed an event which, though disgusting in itself, gives rise to serious reflections. Every thoughtful reader is conversant enough with them; if, therefore, he should find them out of place or trite, apology is needless, as he will pass them by ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of his kind-heartedness, his generosity, his sympathy with all forms of suffering and anxiety, we do not need to speak. His career, too, has little in it to point any moral that is not already trite and familiar. The only lesson we can gather from it with any clearness is the uncertainty of this world, and all that it contains, and the folly of seeking the presidency. Nobody can hope to follow in his footsteps. He began life as ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... privateer. My father, at the present time, would not, perhaps, be thought very respectable; but I assure you he was so considered in those days. So many people in Liverpool were, to use an old and trite sea-phrase, "tarred with the same brush" that these occupations were scarcely, indeed, were not at all, regarded as anything derogatory from a man's character. In fact, during the privateering time, there was scarcely a man, woman, or child in Liverpool, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... matters—that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they could trust. For indeed he was built upon a ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... betray a desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them to the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with old faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, trivial and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... established, as indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. As Joubert says,—herein uttering a cardinal aesthetic principle,—"It is, above all, in the spirituality of ideas that poetry consists." Thought that is poetic will glisten through the plainest words; whereas, if the thought be prosaic or trite, all the gilded epithets in the dictionary will not give it the poetic ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... stranger than fiction.' A trite remark. We all say it again and again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands! On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... of my earlier days. The first of these expressions has become classical, by Mrs. Hannah More's poem of 'Bas-Bleu' and the other by the use of it in one of Lord Byron's poems. Though now become familiar and rather trite, their day ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... cry now for woman's advancement. If the women are hunting equality as their goal let them not seek out the crowded, hostile cities, but remain in the smaller places where their work can stand out distinctly. A trite phrase expresses it that a newspaper is the "voice of the people." What better than that a woman should set ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... amorous character becomes more and more predominant. Woman already plays the part that she plays in the novels of yesterday. A glance opens Paradise to Arthur's knights; they find in a smile all the magic which it pleases us, the living of to-day, to discover there. A trite word of farewell from the woman they cherish is transformed by their imagination, and they keep it in their hearts as a talisman. Who has not cherished similar talismans? Lancelot recalls the past to queen Guinevere: "And you ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the "Escambia" repeats the trite lesson that so many have tried to teach, and that they who need it most are so slow to learn! Young men starting out in life want to carry as little ballast as possible. They are enterprising, ambitious. They are anxious to go fast, and take as much cargo as they can. Old-fashioned principles ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... irregular. It is merely a set of additions and corrections to other men's works, or to the common stock of human knowledge, printed separately. You might as well expect a continued chain of reasoning in the notes to a book. It skips all the trite, intermediate, level common-places of the subject, and only stops at the difficult passages of the human mind, or touches on some striking point that has been overlooked in previous editions. A view of a subject, to be connected and regular, cannot be all new. A writer will always ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... remarkable twenty-ninth article may have been as old as the middle of Elizabeth's reign, and that the reason why it has not survived in the writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen's 'mystery' or were too trite or commonplace to need enunciation. At any rate in the face of the Gorges precedent it cannot be said, without reservation, that this rudimentary form of line ahead or attack in succession was invented by Ralegh, ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... stand assay. Reaction comes. We do better if we make our gift of blood as a matter of unalterable necessity. We make too much of it all, in any event. The vast evil of extended peace is the attachment of too great value to luxuries and to human life—trite, but true. We know, of course, that the world has progressed chiefly over the dead bodies of men and, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... out was: "A Shipwreck." To me the words had a lyrical sound! But, nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind to elaborate the subjects given to us by the "Great Ape"; a sort of instinctive good taste kept me from writing trite commonplaces, and as for putting down things of my own imagining, the knowledge that they would be read and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
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