Platitudes Quotes - Page 3

• The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.

  Harold Monro

  Art, Expression, Appreciate

  4 Copy quote

• Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

  Edward R. Murrow

  Thinking, People, Prejudice

  "This I Believe" radio program, thisibelieve.org. 1951.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

  Mason Cooley

  Way, Slides, Aphorism

  4 Copy quote

• As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

  H. L. Mencken

  Ideas, Healthy, Literature

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Writing, Names, Boredom

  4 Copy quote

• We should resist the temptation to identify our religious convictions with the platform of a party or the platitudes of favored politicians.

  Ralph E. Reed, Jr.

  Religious, Party, Scary

  10 Copy quote

• The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  God, Pain, Play

  "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1807.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Truth, People, Despise

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1916). “Vain Oblations”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism,in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.

  C. S. Lewis

  Plato, Doctors, Catholic

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Allegory of Love”, p.403, Cambridge University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise? Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means. And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in platitudes. True beauty grips your gut and squeezes your lungs, and makes you see with utmost clarity exactly what is before you. True wisdom then steps in, to interpret, illuminate, and form a life-altering insight.

  Vera Nazarian

  Wise, Real, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

  Edward Abbey

  Deny, Implications, Statements

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.31, RosettaBooks

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

  David Foster Wallace

  Sound, Adults, May

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.

  Mark Doty

  Inspirational, Pain, Passion

  4 Copy quote

• There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, timid policies, offer today a path to safety.

  Winston Churchill

  Mistake, Safety, Path

  "Churchill By Himself".

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren't sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education.

  Edward Gibbon

  Education, Clever, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• Without a rigorous, self-critical discourse, one risks lapsing into pious platitudes and unexamined generalizations.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Self, Risk, Discourse

  7 Copy quote

• As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

  Edith Wharton

  Wife, Long, House

  Edith Wharton (2006). “The Age of Innocence”, p.148, OUP Oxford

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Pain, Thinking, Suffering

  "True Myth: A Conversation With Sufjan Stevens". Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. February 16, 2015.

  32 Copy quote

  Show source

• What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Deception, Needs, Irreverence

  24 Copy quote

• applause, n. The echo of a platitude.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Echoes, Applause, Audience

  'The Cynic's Word Book' (1906) p. 19

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

  C. S. Lewis

  Decay, Holy Places, Amulets

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Allegory of Love”, p.403, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

  Edward Bernays

  Writing, Data, Mind

  18 Copy quote

• Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.

  Peter Kreeft

  Christian, Buddhism, Miracle

  7 Copy quote

• Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Departed, Mortals

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.183, University of Georgia Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Thinking, Wind

  H. L. Mencken (2015). “In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality”, p.2, 谷月社

  5 Copy quote

  Show source