"Trite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walls; a little nook of primeval savagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences of these better days. I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of that noble moorland range so much has been said and sung of late, that I really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of my boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat Claude Mellot, just beginning to ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... because capable of being enunciated at one explosive effort of the breath, but it is monotonous when too freely employed. To be sure, you might with some justice reply that you had qualified said adjective strongly—but the qualification was trite though blasphemous. And you limited it very nicely—but the limitation to myself is unjust, as it overlooks my brother's ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... community. In all probability we are already paying as much, or more, to authors, in the form of royalties, of serial fees, and the like. We are paying now with an unjust unevenness—we starve the new and deep and overpay the trite and obvious. Moreover, the community would have something in exchange for its money; it would have the copyright of the works written. It may be suggested that by a very simple device a large proportion of these payments could be recovered. Suppose that all books, whether copyright or ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... believe him guilty. Nothing was ever written more detestable in matter and manner. The narrations, the reflections, the jokes, the lamentations, are all the very worst of their respective kinds, at once trite and affected, threadbare tinsel from the Rag Fairs and Monmouth Streets of literature. A foolish schoolboy might write such a piece, and, after he had written it, think it much finer than the incomparable introduction of the Decameron. But that a shrewd statesman, whose earliest works ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reflected in Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase, is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations" did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince von Buelow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... referring to so many conditions of life. Thus, the familiar adage which tells us that "nobody is fond of fading flowers," has a far deeper signification, reminding us that everything associated with change and decay must always be a matter of regret. To take another trite proverb of the same kind, we are told how "truths and roses have thorns about them," which is absolutely true; and there is the well-known expression "to pipe in an ivy leaf," which signifies "to go and ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... way of judging the inner life of a nation is to listen to its music, and accordingly judge of the sentiments and emotions of Americans by their sheet-music, we should arrive at very discouraging results. The characteristics of our sheet-music, briefly summed up, are: (1) trite and vulgar melody, devoid of all originality, repeating what has been heard a thousand times already; (2) equally trite and monotonous accompaniments, the harmony limited to half a dozen elementary chords, the rhythm ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... four or five hours, from the fact that it was midnight by my watch when I left it on my cabin drawers, and that the final extinction of the smouldering keel was so soon followed by the first deep hint of dawn. The rest took place with the trite rapidity of the equatorial latitudes. It had been my foolish way to pooh-pooh the old saying that there is no twilight in the tropics. I saw more truth in it as I lay ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... pursued, ignoring her companion's trite comments, "embodies the thoughts and dreams of many races. It makes me always think of Pater's Mona Lisa—you remember: 'Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary.' She is, of course, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... understand them. Our present ephemeral dandy is akin to the maccaroni of my earlier days. The first of these expressions has become classical, by Mrs. Hannah More's poem of 'Bas-Bleu' and the other by the use of it in one of Lord Byron's poems. Though now become familiar and rather trite, their day may ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... than with those that attach to this present scene of existence, and inclined to indulge in a gentle and dreamy melancholy. The first thought of a king, when he began his reign, was to begin his tomb. The desire of the grandee was similar. It is a trite tale how at feasts a slave carried round to all the guests the representation of a mummied corpse, and showed it to each in turn, with the solemn words—"Look at this, and so eat and drink; for be sure that one day such as this ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... aside the beloved Sunset Book after vainly trying to get interested in it. How flat and unprofitable it seemed! Why could she never write anything but the trite and useless things that almost anyone who was able to hold a pen could say as well or better? The verses about the four o'clocks, which the other day had seemed a pretty conceit, to-day sounded silly, fit only for the little waste-basket at her side, where ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... wife, which, if it had been attended to, might have averted the crucifixion. But there again foreknowledge was impotent against fate. Calphurnia, Caesar's wife, in like manner strove in vain to avert the doom of her lord. There is no story more trite than that which tells of the apparition which warned Brutus that Caesar would make Philippi his trysting-place. In these cases the dreams occurred to those closely associated with the doomed. One of the best known of dream presentiments in English history occurred to a person ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... Walk from London to Kew, which first appeared in The Monthly Magazine, but was reprinted in 1817 with the name 'Sir Richard Phillips' as author on the title-page. Phillips was now no longer a publisher. Here we have some pleasant glimpses of a bygone era, many trite reflections, but not enough topography to make the book one of permanent interest. It would not, in fact, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... tale from Chapter I to Finis—no weighty problems to be solved, but just a fine running story, full of exciting incidents, that never seemed strained or improbable. It is a dainty love yarn involving three men and a girl. There is not a dull or trite situation in ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... of so many of these once sacred chants to the service of the street ballad, suggests the trite ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... one cursing her betrayer, the other wishing him always happy, exemplify revengeful and generous love. There are two model epistles from Climene to Mirtillo, the first upon his absence, the second upon his desertion of her. Soon the trite remarks degenerate into a scandal novel, relating the history of Sophiana, abandoned by Aranthus and sought by Martius, with many of her letters describing her gradual change of heart in favor of the beseeching lover. In the midst of exposing ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... to a strange course I am steering—but enough of that. I am delighted with you, Mr. Smith, for it is so seldom in this desert that I meet with a man who is gentleman and scholar enough to continue a quotation, however trite it may be.' ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... always the same, though our imagination determines the shape that love must assume; like and unlike, therefore, is love in every soul in which he dwells, and passion becomes a unique work in which the soul expresses its sympathies. In the old trite saying that love is a projection of self—an egoisme a deux—lies a profound meaning known only to philosopher and poet; for it is ourself in truth that we love in that other. Yet, though love manifests itself in such different ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... task which he undertook in offering to show himself—as Persius puts it—'Intus et in cute', to posterity, exceeded his powers, is a trite criticism; like all human enterprises, his purpose was only imperfectly fulfilled; but this circumstance in no way lessens the attractive qualities of his book, not only for the student of history or psychology, but for the intelligent man of the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... commotion, she seemed to have obtained a kind of stability which was a sufficiently good copy of the old order under the Popes, and won for her apparently the gratitude of mankind; but that stability is altogether illogical, and cannot long stand. There is an old, though now trite, saying to the effect that when you "sow the wind you must reap the whirlwind," and no one can fail to see the speedy realization of the truth of this adage on her part. Over the full tide of her prosperity there is a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... thing is the human complexion! We are sent into the world naked, that all the variations of the blood might be made visible. However trite, I cannot avoid quoting here the lines of the most deep-thinking and philosophical of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... base-ball is to play it, and it is a trite saying that the best practice for a ball player is base-ball itself. Still, there are points outside of the game, such as the preliminary training, diet, and exercise, an observance of which will be of great advantage when the regular work is begun. The method and style of play and the points ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... ridiculed that trite line as a pure exaggeration; but he altered his opinion after that ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... wrote when these rites were more prevalent, and delighted frequently to allude to them; but I have already quoted more than is necessary. I cannot, however, refrain from giving a passage from Shakespeare, even though it should appear trite, which illustrates the emblematical meaning often conveyed in these floral tributes, and at the same time possesses that magic of language and appositeness of imagery for which ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Trite usages in tamest style Had tended to their plighting. "It's just worth while, Perhaps," they had said. "And ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Miss Tuttle was treated with respect, with kindness, even, but she was not allowed any communication with her brother-in-law beyond the formal "Good afternoon" incident upon their separation; while he, scorning to condemn his lips to any such trite commonplace, said nothing at all, only looked a haggard inquiry which called forth from her the most exalted look of patience and encouraging love it has ever been my good fortune to witness. Durbin was standing near and saw this look as plainly as I did, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... practical education for a girl? Whatever will fit her for life. The question and answer are trite. What will best fit a girl for life? First of all a well-balanced character. I knew a girl who was a good cook before she was ten years old; she had a genius for sewing; she was an excellent scholar ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... along, Trite!" he exclaimed, in a gruff voice—which sounded not altogether unlike that of old Ben Yool's—as he looked over the bows; and presently he handed up a lady of very ample dimensions, who certainly, except for a petticoat and a necklace of shells, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... only be known to those who have suffered the horrors of restraint. That is a trite enough statement, but when one is describing elemental things there is no room for subtlety. The voyage was a fairly eventless one. We saw very little of Kara, who did not intrude himself upon ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been involved. But, quite apart from the objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and unapproachable to us, is ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Campbell's "Prisoners of Poverty" is a striking example of the trite phrase that "truth is stranger than fiction." It is a series of pictures of the lives of women wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. No work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, indeed, if ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... this clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... judge at supper, and he saw at once from her complacent reticence that she had achieved some triumph against his principles. She chatted about topics of the day in terms that were ingeniously trite. Then a letter came from their son in Denver, and she forgot her role somewhat, and read the letter aloud to the judge, and wondered wistfully who in Denver attended to the boy's buttons and socks; but she made no reference ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... the present moment, the like antithesis holds. We are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that throughout his after-career, a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The remark is trite that in his shop, or his office, in managing his estate or his family, in playing his part as director of a bank or a railway, he is very little aided by this knowledge he took so many years to acquire—so little, that generally the greater part of it drops out ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... weave them flowers For one who reads Boccaccio in the shade. The cowled students halt by two and threes To hear the voice come thrilling through the trees, Then tear themselves away to themes more trite. Anon I mark the diligent hands that turn Unlovely parchment scrolls whereby to learn The beauty ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld: the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country appear more conspicuous than in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... constantly a new adjustment of values, until you find yourself at the point where comparatives and superlatives are exhausted. The vehicle of language has broken down. Recurrent adjectives become trite. When the search for new ones is an effort, you realize that nature has imposed, through the prodigal display of herself, a limit of capacity to enjoy. Of copper rocks and azure sea; of mountain streams hurrying through profusely wooded valleys; of cliffs with changing profiles; of conifers; ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... code in which he was raised, based on religion or otherwise. There is the fact that man is fundamentally good, to use a trite term, given ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... day it had been! He had started out in the morning, vaguely hoping to divert his mind with some of those trite little happenings that for lack of a better term we call adventures in this humdrum world. And then, with the miraculous, unbelievable luck of youth, he had stumbled plump into the middle of the most wondrous adventure it was possible to conceive. And yet this wasn't ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... weaklings. But let him undergo the like! The supernatural, or seemingly so, has always had power to chill the hottest blood. And here was an invisible horror reaching out of the sky for its prey, without any of the ameliorating trite features which would temper an encounter with the alleged phenomena ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... trite observation, which is, nevertheless, never spoken with more justice or more truth than at or about Hyde Park Corner between May and July, that the world we live in is a ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the absolute correctness of their calculation, I suffered ten thousand torments, and became almost unconscious. At last I awoke from my nightmare when the Overture, to which I had disdained to give what I considered a trite ending, came ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... these rather trite remarks by the necessity of putting forward some sort of excuse for that frame of mind in which the Rev. Mark Robarts awoke on the morning after his arrival at Chaldicotes. And I trust that the fact of his being a clergyman ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... private virtues, of his kind-heartedness, his generosity, his sympathy with all forms of suffering and anxiety, we do not need to speak. His career, too, has little in it to point any moral that is not already trite and familiar. The only lesson we can gather from it with any clearness is the uncertainty of this world, and all that it contains, and the folly of seeking the presidency. Nobody can hope to follow in his ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority? I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... commence writing," said I, in as dry and trite a voice as if I had been addressing only ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... bed, or shamelessly despoiled him of his merchandise, or bullied and blustered him out of his fair price, knowing he dared not resent. It meant being chaffed and gibed at in language of which he only understood that it was cruel, though certain trite facetiae grew intelligible to him by repetition. Thus once, when he had been interrogated as to the locality of Moses when the light went out, he replied in Yiddish that the light could not go out, for "it stands in the verse, that round the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the form of poetry upon its substance are similar to those made by music upon the words in a song, only less stringent. The content must be emotional and significant; it cannot be trite and cold. The meaning of words would permit the poet to bring before the mind all possible objects, events, and ideas, but the music of words would be incongruous with most of them. Events narrated must be stirring, thoughts uttered must be emotionally toned, things described must be related to ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... by day. Yet the promptings of the brain, which then appear so lucid, so novel and convincing, will seldom bear examination in the light of the sun. To test the truth of this, one has only to jot down one's thoughts at the time, and peruse them after breakfast. How trite they read, those brilliant ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... familiar tune again, and hear the crowd cheer and roar its applause at the little harness maker, who stands shamefaced and abashed, coatless and aproned, before the crowd. And he is only a poet—hardly a poet, would be a better way to say it; an exceedingly bad poet who makes bad rhymes, and thinks trite thoughts, and says silly and often rather stupid things, but who once had his say, and for that one hour of glorious liberty of the soul has moved millions of hearts to love him. John Barclay does not envy Watts McHurdie—not ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... We are all great at something or other, small or great. Talboys was a first-rate freezer. He was one of those men who cannot shine, but can eclipse. They darken all but a vain man by casting a dark shadow of trite sentences on each luminary. The vain man insults them directly, and so gets rid ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... had been all this day, was indeed kind to him at last, he thought. He remembered certain trite observations concerning opportunity knocking at a man's door, and the obvious duty of a man to seize such opportunity, and bend it to his own use. If this were opportunity, he said to himself, he would make ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... to be found in the spirit in which Lord Cromer did his work. What raised him above the rank-and-file of our public men was his obedience to a very plain and obvious rule. It was this: to govern always in the interests of the governed. This sounds a trite and elementary proposition, and yet the path it marks out is often a very difficult one to follow. It may be straight, but it is so narrow that only the well-balanced man can avoid stepping off either to the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... first period of my life, I am tempted to enter a protest against the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known, that time I have never regretted; and were my poor aunt still alive, she would ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... fairly polysyllabic language. And Swedish, which is the most sonorous of all Germanic tongues, and full of Gothic strength, produces the most delectable effects in the long, rolling line of slow-marching dactyls and spondees. The tempered realism of Tegner, which shuns all that is harsh and trite, accords well with the noble classical verse. He employs it, as it were, to dignify his homely tale, as Raphael draped the fishermen of Galilee in the flowing robes of Greek philosophers. The description of the church, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... creations, Shakespeare pours wide and overflowing knowledge of life; there is nothing narrow or shut in, in his conceptions, but every character is alive in the great sense, illustrating no narrow precept or trite morality, no cut and dried scheme of a petty out-look on life, but the great morals of life itself, as varied, as intangible and as inexplicable. He represents this sense of varied life as manifested or objectified in his creations, i.e., his characters. In Othello, for instance, ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... heard it stated—'tis an aphorism trite— That people who live neighborly in daily sound and sight Of each other's personality, habitually grow To look alike, and think alike, and act alike, and so Did Mr. Thomas Todgers and Miss Thomasina Tee, In the town ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... holds the Dean's view sound to-day, the writer will venture to warn the readers of this book against a habit that, growing far too common among us, should be checked, and this is the iteration and reiteration in conversation of "the battered, stale, and trite" phrases, the like of which were credited by the worthy Dean to the ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... as a statue would, that is, he neither spoke nor moved. Mrs. Fairfax seemed to think it necessary that some one should be amiable, and she began to talk. Kindly, as usual—and, as usual, rather trite—she condoled with him on the pressure of business he had had all day; on the annoyance it must have been to him with that painful sprain: then she commended his patience and perseverance ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Trite words, similes and metaphors which have become hackneyed and worn out should be allowed to rest in the oblivion of past usage. Such expressions and phrases as "Sweet sixteen" "the Almighty dollar," "Uncle Sam," "On the fence," "The Glorious Fourth," ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... expression in journalistic phrase would disturb his mind with evil rancour. No one would have insight enough to appreciate the nature and cause of his book's demerits; every comment would be wide of the mark; sneer, ridicule, trite objection, would but madden him ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... mouth than Timon's, to whose character of generosity and condescension they are very suitable. To suppose that by our betters are meant the Gods, is very harsh, because to imitate the Gods has been hitherto reckoned the highest pitch of human virtue. The whole is a trite and obvious thought, uttered by Timon with a kind of affected modesty. If I would make any alteration, it should be only to reform ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... trite, but we won't let you be at the conference," returned the leader, sternly. "Come, four of you, lead them out of earshot. Take your guns, and use ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... old weed-grown court, I saw a lady seated on my favorite spot, sketching the ruins. The lady was young, more beautiful than any woman I had yet seen,—at least to my eyes. In a word, I was fascinated, and as the trite phrase goes, 'spell-bound.' I seated myself at a little distance, and contemplated her without desiring to speak. By and by, from another part of the ruins, which were then uninhabited, came a tall, imposing elderly gentleman with a benignant aspect, and a little dog. The dog ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... naturally, without thinking of what they were to say next, Father O'Grady ventured to doubt if Horace would approve of Landor's Latin and of the works written in comparatively modern times. Buchanan, for instance. At last the conversation became so trite and wearisome that Father O'Grady began to feel unable to continue ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... or wisdom, or with its concurrence with natural justice, fundamental principles of government, or spirit of the Constitution.[280] In various forms this maxim has been repeated to such an extent that it has become trite and has increasingly come to be incorporated in constitutional cases as a reason for fortifying a finding of unconstitutionality. Through absorption of natural rights doctrines into the text of the Constitution, the Court was enabled to reject natural law and still to partake ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... different from that of the first; that the first was evidently needed; that the second may be as injurious as the first was useful. He exhibited various weak points in the inflation fallacies and presented forcibly the trite truth that no laws and no decrees can keep large issues of irredeemable paper at ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... reposed confidence in a sealed paper, mystically inscribed, as a prophylactic against toothache. Having consented, at the request of her priest, to examine the writing, this is what she found: "Good Devil, cure her, and take her for your pains." This illustrates the somewhat trite proverb, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'twere folly to be wise," and is a proof of the wisdom of the popular belief that the inscription of a healing formula should not be seen by the wearer, inasmuch as its mystic words are ordinarily invocations ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the new madness that had fallen upon the world was prepared to confound and overturn, not religion alone, but all rule, nobility, pre-eminence and superiority—nay, all law and order. The reader, it may be feared, will tire of the frequency with which the same trite suggestions recur. It is, however, not a little important to emphasize the argument which the Roman Curia, and its emissaries at the courts of kings, were never weary of reiterating in the ears of the rich and powerful. And as they seized with avidity every slight incident of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... point of believing that the impossible was about to happen—a Grinnell victory! That these loyal rooters had been disappointed as regularly as the annual conflicts arrived, did not seem to dampen the ardor of the next season's support. "Hope springs eternal" was the trite but simple explanation offered by certain zealous followers who steadfastly refused to concede Pomeroy's vaunted superiority. Coach Edward's advent at Grinnell had served to heighten the interest when the small college had held Pomeroy to a 20 to 7 count the first year of his mentorship. ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his incidents, should be trite, common, or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things, which may possibly have never fallen within ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... verdure and blossoming which shall mature the apples of Sodom. O, how often have our legislators had reason to recall those pregnant words of Jefferson,—sad indeed is it that they should have become almost too trite for repetition, without having worked their way into the national conscience,—"I tremble for my country, when I consider that God is just!" The nations that have passed away, the decaying nations, the convulsed thrones, the smouldering rebellion-fires of the Old World, reveal the elements of national ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and that the reason why it has not survived in the writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen's 'mystery' or were too trite or commonplace to need enunciation. At any rate in the face of the Gorges precedent it cannot be said, without reservation, that this rudimentary form of line ahead or attack in succession was invented by Ralegh, or ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... all—perhaps I say we may grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright. If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters of the theatre has made it hard for him to do anything else? If he has until lately evaded in his theatrical work any attempt at a true ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a kingdom. During ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... emancipation[403]." This practical aim has affected the form given to much of the Buddha's teaching, for instance the theory of the Skandhas and the chain of causation. When examined at leisure by a student of to-day, the dogmas seem formulated with imperfect logic and the results trite and obvious. But such doctrines as that evil must have a cause which can be discovered and removed by natural methods: that a bad unhappy mind can be turned into a good, happy mind by suppressing evil thoughts and cultivating good thoughts, are not commonplaces even now, if ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... June,' and receiving the very marked attentions of Captain Dancy, on one side, and of Mr Rice Rice, junior, on the other. He scarcely knew which was most irritating, 'the idioms,' or her affected giggle. Trite but true is the proverb, 'There is no rose without its thorn;' and Howel was pricked severely by the thorns surrounding the rose of his first step ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... propriety of writing to you at all; but the suspense I now suffer is my excuse. I need not reiterate to you how dearly I love you; you know this, dear one, as fully as any assertion of my own could possibly express it. It is trite that my love for you has partaken in no small degree of a character of presumption, daring, as an humble lieutenant of infantry, to lift my eyes to one as peerless and beautiful as yourself, and of a class of society so far above what my own humble position ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... affectation in both of employing legal terms with which they were not familiar, and of which they did not distinctly apprehend the meaning, is very remarkable. Junius thought De Lolme's Essay deep," (13) and talks of property which "savours of the reality:" (14) he misapplies that trite expression of the courts, bona fide: (15) misunderstands mortmain, (16) and supposes that an inquisitio post mortem was an inquiry how the deceased came by his death. (17) Walpole talks of "the purparty ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... oft discovered without any observable cause.... So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite or vulgar." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... said, "Where is the life which late we led?" That motley clown in Arden wood, Whom humorous Jaques with envy viewed, Not even that clown could amplify, On this trite text, so long as I. Eleven years we now may tell, Since we have known each other well; Since, riding side by side, our hand, First drew the voluntary brand; And sure, through many a varied scene, Unkindness never came between. Away these ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... conversation; but the talent for quotation, both in conversation and in writing, is now become so common, that it cannot confer immortality.[122] Every person has by rote certain passages from Shakespeare and Thomson, Goldsmith and Gray: these trite quotations fatigue the literary ear, and disgust the taste of the public. To this change in the fashion of the day, those who are influenced by fashion, will probably listen with more eagerness, than to all the reasons that have been offered. But to return to the prince of Parma. After ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... too like Westerling! It has become too trite!" she protested. "The end! If I really were helping toward that and to save lives and our country to its people, what would my private feelings matter' My honor, my soul—what would anything matter? For that, any sacrifice. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... for discretion and devotion, There was the Donna Julia, whom to call Pretty were but to give a feeble notion Of many charms in her as natural As sweetness to the flower, or salt to ocean, Her zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid (But this last simile is trite and stupid). ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... serge piped in scarlet with Irish lace collar and cuffs. There were glints of gold in her fluffy hair and her eyes shone with unusual brightness. But Mrs. McLean's good food tasted as sawdust on her palate and the conversation of the eager Dodo sounded trite and stupid to her. Once she had said a word or two to Jimmy Lufton and he had turned and answered her politely and agreeably, but as soon as he decently could he was back with Molly again deep in ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... were never sent, for my mother, who was to have forwarded them, learnt that Mademoiselle Guyon had died. Some of the consolatory remarks which the letter contains may seem very trite, but are there any better ones to offer a person afflicted with cancer? They are, at all events, as good as laudanum. As a matter of fact the Revolution had left no impress upon the people among whom I lived. The religious ideas of the people were not touched; the congregations came ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... amazed, enraged through wounded vanity, if it had been possible for him to see himself from Dora's point of view: a subject for reformation; a test for many trite theories; an erring human to be reclaimed by a woman's benign influence. Naturally, these thoughts had not ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... enormity of the offence would be to put Buondelmonti to death. And although some took into consideration the evils that might ensue upon it, Mosca Lamberti said, that those who talk of many things effect nothing, using that trite and common adage, Cosa fatta capo ha. Thereupon, they appointed to the execution of the murder Mosca himself, Stiatti Uberti, Lambertuccio Amidei, and Oderigo Fifanti, who, on the morning of Easter day, concealed themselves in a house of the Amidei, situate between the old bridge ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... me flere, dolendum est primum tibi."—This is, I think, the ordinary form of a saying cited somewhere by Goldsmith, who calls it "so trite a quotation that it almost demands an apology to repeat it." Whence comes it originally? I am unable to give the exact reference to the passage in Goldsmith, but in his Citizen of the World, letter 53rd, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... went so far as to say that he hoped before long to see Mr. Watling in Washington. By no means the least among our callers was the Hon. Fitch Truesdale, editor of the St. Helen's Messenger, whose editorials were of the trite effectiveness that is taken widely for wisdom, and were assiduously copied every week by other state papers and labeled "Mr. Truesdale's Common Sense." At countless firesides in our state he was known as the spokesman of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... making five-sixths in all. He glanced at her surreptitiously, in her fine dress, on which was not a single splash or stain. He might have known that so extraordinary and exotic a female person would not concoct anything so trite as a Yorkshire pudding ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... is so well turned and contempered with itself, and so everywhere conspiring, that, while it traverses many passions and humors and is accommodated to all sorts of persons, it still shows the same, and retains its semblance even in trite, familiar, and everyday expressions. And if his master do now and then require something of rant and noise, he doth but (like a skilful flutist) set open all the holes of his pipe, and their presently stop them again with ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... shadows on the grass and the sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by the storms, I cannot but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in the Lord; wait patiently for him'—they are trite words. But he made the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled into a ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... man of affairs, who knew little of theoretical science except in one line, but who pursued that one practical line until he achieved a wonderful result. This man was Christopher Columbus. It is not necessary here to tell the trite story of his accomplishment. Suffice it that his practical demonstration of the rotundity of the earth is regarded by most modern writers as marking an epoch in history. With the year of his voyage the epoch of the Middle Ages ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... no more." If he struggles to take a different view of the same class of subjects, he speedily discovers that what is obvious, graceful, and natural, has been exhausted; and, in order to obtain the indispensable charm of novelty, he is forced upon caricature, and, to avoid being trite, must ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... poet his dreams were music," [Footnote: The Poet's Sleep.] says Richard Gilder, and the line seems trite to us. There was surely no reason why Keats' title, Sleep and Poetry, should have appeared ludicrous to his critics, for from the time of Caedmon onward English writers have been sensitive to a connection here. The ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... a story in England, rather trite here, and a sort of philosophic common-place, like Buridan's 'Ass between two bundles of hay,' but possibly unknown in Germany: and, as it is pertinent to the case between ourselves, I will tell it: the more so, as it involves a metaphysical question; and such questions, you know, go ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... greater name The Macedonian[10] owed his fame. 100 The Athenian bird, with pride replete, Their talents equalled in conceit; And, copying the Socratic rule, Set up for master of a school. Dogmatic jargon learnt by heart, Trite sentences, hard terms of art, To vulgar ears seemed so profound, They fancied learning in the sound. The school had fame: the crowded place With pupils swarmed of every race. 110 With these the swan's maternal care Had sent her scarce-fledged cygnet heir: The hen (though fond and loath to part) ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... matter how wild, how precarious, to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once. They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... In the trite examples of the sublime, where we speak of the vast mass, strength, and durability of objects, or of their sinister aspect, as if we were moved by them on account of our own danger, we seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our own danger would produce a touch of fear; it would be a practical ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... poet, and not, as is idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is more remarkable about Mrs. Browning's work than the absence of that trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad it is bad from some extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... he was not going to get any information under that roof, and after a further brief exchange of trite observations he rose to take his leave. Alderman ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... the chaplain service and by a chaplain. He knew what the thing would be like. His whole soul shrunk from the silly, melodramatic films which he knew would constitute the programme as from a nauseating dose of medicine. The billboard announced a double header, a trite and, especially to Canadians, a ridiculous representation of the experiences of John Bull and his wife and pretty daughter as immigrants to the Canadian Northwest, which was to be followed ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... her shoulders and smiled unbelievingly. Her recollection of Pink Upham was of a big red-faced fellow overgrown and awkward, with a disgusting habit of twisting every one's remarks into puns, and of uttering trite truths with the air of just having discovered them. The warning whirr of a clock about to strike made her spring down from the stool with an ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... D'Israeli did this is obvious from what follows, which shows he did not agree with Lord George, in censuring the Government for not opening depots, and he undertakes to prove that they should not have done so. He uses, amongst others, the old trite argument, when he says: there is reason to believe that the establishment of Government depots at the end of '46, however cautiously introduced, tended in the localities to arrest the development of that retail trade, which was then rapidly extending throughout Ireland."—Lord ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... was seated in the garden reading, as usual, and told him what the old nurse had engaged to do. He then began to debate about how he should write his letter, to cull sentences and to weigh phrases; whether "light of my eyes" was not too trite, and "blood of my liver" rather too forcible. At this the minister's son smiled, and bade the prince not trouble his head with composition. He then drew his inkstand from his waist shawl, nibbed a reed pen, and choosing a piece of pink and flowered paper, he wrote upon it a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... Episcopal Church is not used, yet responsive chords vibrate to some mystic touch. The church is plain and music faulty. In pulpit utterances there is nothing strikingly trite or profound. The preacher has none of oratorical gifts. Oswald cannot account for his own interest. While those imperfectly sharped and flatted notes are sounding, he wonders if that peculiarly adjusted, harmonious ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the narrative, however, leaves us in little doubt as to what Dr. Draper means by a conflict between science and religion. When he enlarges on the trite story of Galileo, and alludes to the more modern quarrel between the Church and the geologists, and does this in the belief that he is thereby illustrating an antagonism between religion and science, it is obvious that he identifies the cause of the anti-geologists ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind to elaborate the subjects given to us by the "Great Ape"; a sort of instinctive good taste kept me from writing trite commonplaces, and as for putting down things of my own imagining, the knowledge that they would be read and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible for me to ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... the place of Chief Jester to S——'s paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a "capital hand." Oh the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon "many waters." Then there was the collateral topic of ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... word see Westcott's Excursus in his commentary on 1st John) [Greek: ton kurion hemon ton gennethenta ek pneumatos hagiou kai Marias tes parthenou, ton epi Pontiou Pilatou staurothenta kai taphenta; te trite hemerai anastanta ek nekron, anabanta eis tous ouranous, kathemenon en dexia tou patros, hothen erchetai krinai zontas kai nekrous. kai eis pneuma hagion, hagian ekklesian, aphesin hamartion sarkos ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... enlightened days, That splendid lies are all the Poet's praise; That strained invention, ever on the wing, Alone impels the modern Bard to sing. 'Tis true that all who rhyme, nay, all who write, Shrink from that fatal word to genius, trite: Yet Truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires, And decorate the verse herself inspires. This fact in Virtue's name let Crabbe attest; Though Nature's sternest ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... had. Some small degree of congestion, and the consequent pressure on some portion of the brain, had sent certain faculties to sleep, and, perhaps, roused others into morbid activity. That it is impossible to tell where sanity ends and insanity begins, is a trite remark indeed; but like many things which it is useless to say, it has the more need to be thought of. If I yield to an impulse of which I know I shall be ashamed, is it not the act of a madman? And may not the act lead to a habit, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... the equality of the sexes was to be determined by an appeal to the characters of sovereign princes, the comparison is, in proportion, manifestly in favor of woman, and that without having recourse to the trite and flippant observation, proved to have been ill-founded, of male and female influence. Elizabeth of England affords a glorious example in truth ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word "boy." She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... uttered in her soul the abject cry: "Don't make him angry, Betty—oh, don't, don't!" And suddenly it had been stilled, and she had listened. This was because she realised that Nigel himself was listening. That made her see what she had not dared to allow herself to see before. These trite things were true. There were laws to protect one. If Betty had not been dealing with mere truths, Nigel would have stopped her. He had been supercilious, but he could ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
