Platitude Quotes & Sayings

You mere device," he gnarled. "You platitude! Your Gollux ex machina! — James Thurber

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area. — David Foster Wallace

In the letters he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs the mixture. For if I keep a journal, we may doubt that this journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists only in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my wounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel. — Roland Barthes

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

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

If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed. — Damian Kulash

Because "Platitude" was a language everyone spoke — Julie Anne Long

Applause, n. The echo of a platitude. — Ambrose Bierce

Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only science and history of full value to men consist of what is generally and clearly known; this is surely a platitude, but we have still to discover how to preserve our centres of philosophy and research from the caking and darkening accumulations of narrow and dingy-spirited specialists. We have still to ensure that a man of learning shall be none the less a man of affairs, and that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly, honestly, and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are the substance of mankind. The — H.G.Wells

He leaned in toward her, and as he gave her a hug said Give Cora a kiss from me. He said it the same way he gave her the hug, like it wasn't his sister he was hugging, like it wasn't his mother he was sending a kiss to, but just a polite platitude. Like he was ripping out her heart, like he was cleanly extracting it and placing it in a plastic bag and storing it in the refrigerator to eat later. — Yuri Herrera

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

Though the platitude - money can't buy happiness - may be comforting to those who are less than well heeled, great wealth doesn't ensure sadness either. — Bill Dedman

It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude. — G.K. Chesterton

Not I. not I. I can not acquiesce to your request-
I can not tie myself in the knots of your normalcy.
I want to run, run away with the wind-swept rain.
I want to kiss, the fervent lips of reciprocation.
I want to dance to the thunderous drums.
I can not be your quiet little ray of sun.
I have volcanoes in me. I have twilight's playfully cavorting.
I have springs and autumns boldly echoing my senses.
And I have roaring waves crashing upon the sands of my spirit.
I will not sit in supplication while you recite the mantras
that would change me into a quiet girl; a voiceless platitude.
I - to be true to myself - press against the windowpane
watching lightning, smiling, and feeling so awake.
The wildness in me not to be tamed."

From "The spark (of a Muse)" by Cheri Bauer — Cheri Bauer

What he has instead of a being, I thought, is blandness- the guy's radiant with it. He has devised for himself and incognito, and the incognito has become him. Several times during the meal I didn't think I was going to make it, didn't think I'd get to dessert if he was going to keep praising his family and praising his family ... until I began to wonder if it wasn't that he was incognito but that he was mad. Something was on top of him that had called a halt to him. Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything. — Philip Roth

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude. — Karl Marx

In The Highland Book of Platitudes, Marlais, there's an entry that reads, "Not all ghosts earn our memory in equal measure." I think about this sometimes. I think especially about the word "earn," because it implies an ongoing willful effort on the part of the dead, so that if you believe the platitude, you have to believe in the afterlife, don't you? Following that line of thought, there seem to be certain people - call them ghosts - with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life with more belligerence and exactitude than others - it's their employment and expertise. — Howard Norman

Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer. — Robert Grudin

Exceptionalism" - the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations - was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics. — Stephen Kinzer

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram. — Don Marquis

Platitudes or otherwise, there were no words to ease the agony of living. — Catherine Cookson

But that's not a very original idea, is it? It's really just a platitude ... sort of like a Florida sunset, Nevertheless, it happens to be the truth, and the truth deserves to be spoken ... if you can say it in a new way, I tried to put it in a picture. — Stephen King

Not all who listen, believe. If you call the Gospel a crazy fairy tale, a far-too-good-to-be-true myth, an insane extension of wishful thinking, or even a blasphemous lie, I will respect you and argue with you. But if you call it a platitude, I can only pity you, for that means you have never listened to it. — Peter Kreeft

Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy. — George F. Will

Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better - not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities. — Chuck Klosterman

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it. — Stanley Baldwin

Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude? — Christopher Fry

It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity. — Ruth Benedict

The purpose of life is to help others, and if you can't help them, won't you at least not hurt them? I know that is a platitude, that that is sentimental and can easily be attacked. But loving, caring is simple, and we make it complex. Our own neuroses make it complex. — Leo Buscaglia

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms. — Edward Abbey

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs. — John Brunner

As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable. — Eugene H. Peterson

Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored. — Ken Liu

Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth. — Ambrose Bierce

A life-threatening illness or two certainly gives you an awareness of your own mortality. It heightens your sense of gratitude for things that previously, if you've not taken them for granted, you perhaps never appreciated how precious they were. That's almost a platitude, but one has to state the obvious. — Norman Foster

Money can't buy everything." "Someone must have told you that. You'd never think of such a platitude all by yourself. What can't it buy?" "Oh, well, I don't know - not happiness or love, anyway." "Generally it can. And when it can't, it can buy some of the most remarkable substitutes. — Margaret Mitchell

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep. — Mary McCarthy

Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued. — George Steiner

Applause: the echo of a platitude. — Marty Rubin

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. — Karen Haber

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram. — Ambrose Bierce

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

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominately a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon. — Thomas Ligotti

Cue actor platitude, but I've been very fortunate and worked pretty consistently and have felt rather annoyingly grateful that I got to do what I got to do. — Jack Davenport

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. — H.L. Mencken

'Better to have loved and lost,' my ass.
Anyone parroting that little platitude had obviously never lost anyone of consequence. — Nenia Campbell

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. — Oscar Wilde

Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around. — Mason Cooley