Platitudinous Quotes & Sayings

I realize that my life is not the common ordinary person. — Buzz Aldrin

Motivating yourself, I think having big strong legs, that's pretty cool. Having a big VMOs [the teardrop-shaped muscle above your knee] is always nice. But, the thing is, when you see guys who are clearly gym junkies who only do bicep curls all day every day, and you see them walking down the street ... 'Mate, what about the legs?'. — Greg Rutherford

All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep. — George Orwell

These poems need to be released from their cages, — Coleman Barks

I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself. — Jane Addams

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.

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age. — Thomas Carlyle

When our assists lead to baskets, that's us playing our best, and we begin knocking down shots. — Tim Duncan

Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens
of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite. — H.L. Mencken

What science cannot declare, art can suggest; what art suggests silently, poetry speaks aloud; but what poetry fails to explain in words, music can express.
Whoever knows the mystery of vibrations indeed knows all things. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

CLARKSON: Are you fond of babies? VIOLET: Of course. CLARKSON: What's your favourite age? VIOLET: About sixteen. — Julian Fellowes

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism. — William F. Buckley Jr.

'This is how democracy works,' Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy platitudinous straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you. — David Harsanyi

We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing what they see and being asked to cure it. Blood and vomit and pus do not revolt them; senility and dementia have no terrors; it does not alarm them to plunge into the slippery tangle of internal organs, or to handle the infected and contagious. For them, the flesh and its diseases have been abstracted, rendered coolly diagrammatic and quickly subject to infallible diagnosis and effective treatment. The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it ... displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors. — John Updike

I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy, leads me to wish for my wife again. How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry-the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules-is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life. — Henry Adams

Guy de Chauliac's advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: 'Go quickly, go far, and return slowly. — Ian Mortimer

When one seeks assurance, there's none from those who respond, Now, don't you worry about a thing. If you weren't worried, you wouldn't have asked. If you are concerned, it's nice to know that those you query are, too. I'll take a worrier any day over a platitudinous reassurer. — Malcolm Forbes

Nonrefundable. It was a good, solid word, one you couldn't chew, one that only dissolved after sucking slowly. — Shannon Hale

I have very strongly this feeling ... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary. — Bryan Magee

We never try to convert those who receive (aid) to Christianity but in our work we bear witness to the love of God's presence and if Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, or agnostics become for this better men - simply better - we will be satisfied. It matters to the individual what church he belongs to. If that individual thinks and believes that this is the only way to God for her or him, this is the way God comes into their life - his life. If he does not know any other way and if he has no doubt so that he does not need to search then this is his way to salvation. — Mother Teresa

Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most humans will live in one. But this time the empire will be truly global. The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent. — Yuval Noah Harari

Girls that I use to try to talk to, now they want to talk to me. — Romeo Miller

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. — Jocelyn Gibb

He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him — Jim Harrison