Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. — Claude C. Hopkins
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality. — Hannah Arendt
Save me from trendy religion that makes cheap clichés out of timeless truths. — Rich Mullins
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality. — Anton Chekhov
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. — George Orwell
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. — Robert Smithson
Being dull and boring is far more tragic than being tacky. — Thom Filicia
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. — Italo Calvino
Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative. — Norman Rockwell
Everybody is doing the same old thing. — Missy Elliot
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value. — E. M. Forster
No Ideas original - there is nothing new under the sun. — Nas
As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted. — Lucy Maud Montgomery
Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing! — Sadegh Hedayat
Short Trite Quotes
It sounds so trite but in relationships, you have to communicate. — Peter Krause
Every adventure requires a first step. Trite but true, even here. — American McGee
It sounds like something on a very trite T-shirt, but life is what happens. — Nigella Lawson
One of the dangers of making a movie about young people is it's potentially trite. — Greg Mottola
It may sound trite, but young people really are the future. — Jane Goodall
Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music! — Olaf Stapledon
Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. — Charles Lamb
It is a trite but true definition that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts. — Henry Fielding
It sounds trite, but I like telling stories. — Rebecca Hall
It sounds so trite, but my private life is mine. — Portia de Rossi
I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I'm sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character. — Justina Chen
The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash. — Sergei Rachmaninoff
Safety isn't just an illusion, it's a cop-out. I know it sounds trite, but there's simply nothing like a near-death experience to remind one of the impermanence of everything. And living imprisoned by fear only to die with regret over dreams postponed was a life neither of us was interested in. — Rich Roll
Because she understood what I was only then coming to realize – that safety isn’t just an illusion, it’s a cop-out. I know it sounds trite, but there’s simply nothing like a near-death experience to remind one of the impermanence of everything. And living imprisoned by fear only to die with regret over dreams postponed was a life neither of us was interested in. — Rich Roll
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world. — Pema Chodron
Success is not necessarily about connections, or cutting corners, or chamba - the three Cs of bad business. Call it trite, but believe me: success can be achieved through hard work, frugality, integrity, responsiveness to change, and most of all, boldness to dream. — John Gokongwei
This may sound trite, but I believe it to be true: Entrepreneurship is the fabric of what America is all about. — Vivek Ramaswamy
The Christian ministry is difficult, and we must not be lazy or trite. However, we often place burdens upon ourselves and make demands upon ourselves that are not according to the will of God. The more I know God and understand His perfect work on my behalf, the more I am able to rest. — Paul Washer
The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy. — Robert E. Lee
What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after. — Wendell Phillips
It is, of course, a trite observation to say that we live "in a period of transition." Many people have said this at many times. Adam may well have made the remark to Eve on leaving the Garden of Eden. — Harold MacMillan
My entire life has been an attempt to get back to the kind of feelings you have on a field. The sense of brotherhood, the esprit de corps, the focus - there being no past or future, just the ball. As trite as it sounds, I was happiest playing ball. — David Duchovny
Key statements made by latter-day prophets are not trite clichés. They are vital counsel to us from the Lord through his prophets. We should ponder and act upon such statements. — Joseph B. Wirthlin
The trouble with life is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending. — Martin Amis
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour. — Randall Jarrell
You're supposed to take a second if life is going well, to enjoy it and not just move on with the rest of your day worrying about the next thing. And it's a really trite point in some ways. But it's bizarre how little I had done it at various points in my life. — Domhnall Gleeson
This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist. — Warren Rudman
I think it's obscene that many people are starving to death from anorexia. It's been said many times, it's trite. But when so much evil is going on against, for example the Afghani people, where women are being so oppressed that a woman's body is a battlefield. — Nan Goldin
What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite. — Ivan Turgenev
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. — Patrick Marber
The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness! — Evelyn Waugh
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it. — Anais Nin
There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism. — Camille Paglia
Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man. — Lord Chesterfield
The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. ... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do. — Mary Hunter Austin
It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland
A Foreign Secretaryand this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretaryis always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion. — Harold MacMillan
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
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external. — Louise Imogen Guiney
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. — Anthony Powell
I don't think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don't want to be a part of a show where it's mostly about coming up with the jokes. — Sherilyn Fenn
It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture. — Norman Spinrad
Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents. — Margaret Atwood
I did Our Winning Season movie that Joe Roth produced, and Joe Ruben, who did Sleeping With The Enemy. He's a really cool director. That's where I met husband Dennis Quaid. Dennis and I met on location in Georgia, and I always thought that was a really great movie. That movie should be included, because it's a really terrific. It's a trite saying, but it's a real, great coming-of-age piece, and all the actors are wonderful. — P. J. Soles
It might sound trite, but happiness is a decision not a destination, and my choices now are all based on whether not a particular action will get me closer to my goals. It's something I'm quite ruthless about, and it helps me avoid the aforementioned wild goose chases! — Suw Charman-Anderson
Someone is spending their life and their passion and their ingenuity on something that's seemingly potentially trite. But it's what they're doing, and it's what's important to them and what's beautiful to them. — David Krumholtz
The average political poem - especially the kind that wears this label all too proudly - is both dull and full of brow-beating triteness. — Andre Naffis-Sahely
It can sound trite if you just say citizens need to be educated for democracy to work, but for him it wasn't trite. It was really this strenuous challenge to citizens to use their moments of leisure, which he defined as time away from work, to collect the facts that were necessary for full democratic participation. — Jeffrey Rosen
In the 20th century, artists did a great disservice to fairies. They painted fairies in a way that was shallow and trite. So when people see my stuff, they suddenly realize the depth of fairies. — Brian Froud
I've always liked New York even before I lived in New York. It represents something, I think, and it would be trite to say what it represents really because it's been said so many times. — Michelle Stuart
In Conclusion
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