80 Platitude Quotes

Following is our list of platitude quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Platitude Quotes

Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. — Claude C. Hopkins

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. - Anton Chekhov

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. — Anton Chekhov

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — Hannah Arendt

Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative. — Norman Rockwell

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. - Ambrose Bierce

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. — Ambrose Bierce

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects. — Karl Marx

Paradoxical, things that seem obvious, broad consensus — Howard Marks

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. — Noam Chomsky

As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted. — Lucy Maud Montgomery

An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. — Stefan Kanfer

The simplest things are often the truest. — Richard Bach

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. - Vincent Van Gogh

Normality is a paved road: It's comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it. — Vincent Van Gogh

Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bullshit before. — Tommy Cooper

PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost. — Ambrose Bierce

Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke. — Ambrose Bierce

Short Platitude Quotes

  • Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. — Aldous Huxley
  • We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievment. — Richard J. Daley
  • Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. — Thornton Wilder
  • The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram. — Don Marquis
  • In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin. — Oscar Wilde
  • Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. — H. L. Mencken
  • Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true. — Margaret Thatcher
  • applause, n. The echo of a platitude. — Ambrose Bierce
  • The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. — Van Wyck Brooks
  • Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth — Bertrand Russell

Platitude Image Quotes

What Is A Dialogue Quotes

I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue. — Richard Diebenkorn

Media used to be one way. Everyone else in the world just had to listen. Now the internet is allowing what used to be a monologue to become a dialogue. I think that's healthy. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The next decade cannot be a decade of confrontation and contention. It cannot be east vs. West. It cannot be men vs. women. It cannot be Islam vs. Christianity. That is what the enemies of dialogue want. — Benazir Bhutto

Even though I started playing the violin when I was four, my early chamber music experiences helped build a strong foundation for my solo work, as all music is a rich language and dialogue that is shared on stage, no matter what the size of the ensemble. — Anne Akiko Meyers

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked. — Dirk Benedict

The discernment of a vocation is above all the fruit of an intimate dialogue between the Lord and his disciples. Young people, if they know how to pray, can be trusted to know what to do with God's call. — Pope Benedict XVI

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I'm writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean. — Aaron Sorkin

Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film. — Pete Docter

Part of the fun of writing, touring, teaching, is engaging with real people about all of it: what to do now, how to build a movement, of approaches to teaching, of parenting - it's exciting to be in that dialogue. — Bill Ayers

There's often rarely any dialogue in a sex scene. With your fellow actor, it's good to talk about what the unspoken dialogue is, that's happening in the scene. You've got to play something rather than feel self-conscious or exposed. — Geoffrey Rush

People Writing About Platitude

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Read quotes by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce
quotes on war, love

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Read quotes by Claude C. Hopkins

Claude C. Hopkins
quotes on education, life and leadership

49 188
Read quotes by Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov
quotes on writing, love and manners

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Read quotes by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
quotes on evil, power and thinking

261 3698
Read quotes by Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell
quotes on art, life and education

46 441
Read quotes by Karl Marx

Karl Marx
quotes on capitalism, leadership and money

406 7911

More Platitude Quotes

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

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.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection. — Colin Powell

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge. — Havelock Ellis

The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes. — Jose Ortega y Gasset

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity. — Walter Benjamin

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. — C. S. Lewis

There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important. — George Orwell

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

She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious. — W. Somerset Maugham

Speakers are not supposed to waste time on platitudes, but the capacity of this generation for ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the negative and the obscure is immense. — Arthur Hays Sulzberger

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

The theatre has always been to me a place where beautiful lies are told, and playwrighting the orchestration of platitudes around a central flaw in logic or a ridiculous idea. Acting — the disguise and impersonation — is an art of deception. — Charles Ludlam

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. A desiccated epigram. — Ambrose Bierce

Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded. — W. H. Auden

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

Being unique seems more desirable than ever. People are exhausted by clichés, by platitudes, by mass-produced realities, by what's been done and done and done. The role of a true artist is to present their own unique vision, and so it has always made sense to me that works of art should be radical. — Porochista Khakpour

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again. — Hunter S. Thompson

The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when [Mormon] Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials. — D. Michael Quinn

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

The Republicans stroke platitudes until they purr like epigrams. — Adlai Stevenson

Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes. — Che Guevara

Such platitudes as "If you believe it, it will happen," "If you give 100%, you get 100%," "Good things happen to good people" people utter when we don't know what else to say. There's comfort in platitudes, and every so often they're accurate, but mainly they're hollow words. It's a sign of how little we're able to directly address the world around us. The language of the times reveals our avoidance. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

The Sixties was a perfect storm of disaffection with political leaders trying to pass off the same old platitudes to maintain the status quo and an unexpected courageousness in the masses of youth. Nothing on this scale had ever happened before in U.S. history and it hasn't happened since. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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

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

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball. — Lionel Strachey

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings - they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. — Norman Douglas

A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them. They like a man who expresses their own superficial thoughts in a manner that appears to be profound. This enables them to feel that they are themselves profound. — Van Wyck Brooks

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. — Katherine F. Gerould

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? — Norman Douglas

The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such. — H. P. Lovecraft

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

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