"Trite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a ripping good 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 ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... nice of you to say that,' she said, highly pleased. 'I am very fond of Gwendoline myself—my ideal, you know. I won't quote that about "praise from Sir Hubert," because it's so very trite, but I feel it. But do you really like Gwendoline better than my Magdalen Harwood, in "Strawberries ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... learnt that he had been one among the many imprisoned during the reign of terror, and would have fallen by the guillotine, had the fall of Robespierre happened four-and-twenty hours later. This, it must be owned, is a trite and common story; but it is, perhaps, by the very triteness and frequency of such hair-breadth escapes, more than by any other circumstance, that the extent and ferocity of the revolutionary massacres are brought home to the imagination. The appointed victims, whom the delay of a ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... altering it—but rely upon it, it was once useful, if it has existed long; and the presumption of present and continuing utility requires to be strongly outweighed by forcible considerations before it is abandoned. Lord Bacon has told us, in words which can never become trite, so profound is their wisdom, that our changes, to be beneficial, should resemble those of time, which, though the greatest of all innovators, works out its alterations so gradually that they are never perceived. Guizot makes, in the same spirit, the following fine observation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... ear, and draws on my hand—"are not Great, for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among us all; only let me at once partly modify it, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 time, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... idealism, the worship of the first sweet months in marriage, had gone. Of course that incense had been foolish, but it was sweet. Instead, he felt these suspicious, intolerant eyes following his soul in and out on its feeble errands. He comforted himself with the trite consolation that he was suffering from the natural readjustment in a woman's mind. It was too ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... an old jest that there is not a word in the language that conveys so little endearment as the word "dear." But though the saying itself, like most truths, be trite and hackneyed, no little novelty remains to the search of the inquirer into the varieties of inimical import comprehended in that malign monosyllable. For instance, I submit to the experienced that the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... 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
... words in italics are needed, and were given by Manut. with the exception of nunc which was added by Dav. The idea of Orelli, that Cic. clipped these trite sophisms as he does verses from the comic writers is untenable. In docendo: docere is not to expound but to prove, cf. n. on 121. Primum ... modum: the word modus is technical in this sense cf. Top. 57. The [Greek: protos logos anapodeiktos] of the Stoic logic ran thus [Greek: ei hemera ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... derived from the circumstance, that Mr Bennoch's connexions with the Continent, and more especially with the United States, contribute very frequently to engraft upon these "re-unions" a variety of eminent foreigners and intellectual citizens of America. It is a trite saying, that few men can be good or useful abroad who are not happy at home. Mr Bennoch has been fortunate in wedded life. She who is the theme of many of his sweetest and most touching verses, is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... is epigrammatic, rich in figures, subtle, sometimes tortuous and even obscure. He abhors the trite and obvious, and, in escaping them to indulge in witty riddles, fanciful expressions, and difficult allusions, he imperils his clearness. In the presence of genuine emotion, he is always as simple in style as he is serious in attitude; but there are times ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... flat tints, which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis both childish and grotesque. 3d: Against the false claims of belonging to the future put forward by the Secessionists and the Independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones. 4th: We demand for ten years the total suppression of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... say, though it may be nothing profound or illuminating, he says it; and he can say the trite thing more freshly, with more delicacy, and in more haunting tones, than any other musician. His vocabulary is as marvellous as his facility in orchestration and in the development of a theme. He gets himself into tangles from which there seems no possible escape, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... abnormal moral strength, allied to great gentleness and pity, combined to make a character extraordinary in one so young, and which her aunt summed up and summarily dismissed from her mind in the trite sentence that "she certainly did not take ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... are a conventional fiction, then they are a proof of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime, which I also mean to punish'—what then? Fictions or realities, could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense? To tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as was never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the sanctuaries ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... about him; even his suffering—it was odd to think that a person with such a small, flat nose should suffer—even his suffering was pellucid. He puzzled her because he was different from anything she had ever encountered, and he made her think of a page of trite phrases printed in a half-comprehended dialect. If it was puzzling that any man should be sufficiently in love with Althea to suffer over it, it was yet more puzzling that, neglected as he so obviously was by ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... participate in the immense profits accruing from charters, franchises or special grants obtained by others of their own class. They never questioned the means by which these laws were put through. They did not care. The mere fact that a franchise was put through by bribery was a trite, immaterial circumstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be expected that he would feel moral objections, even ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... with increased production. He is an example of how little the skill and touch, belonging to unceasing work, should be despised in comparison with what is called inspiration. Donizetti arrived at his freshest creations at a time when there seemed but little left for him except the trite and threadbare. There are no melodies so rich and well fancied as those to be found in his later works; and in sense of dramatic form and effective instrumentation (always a faulty point with Donizetti) he displayed great progress at the last. It is, however, a noteworthy ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... fearless as a lamb 325 That, thither driven from some unsheltered place, Rests underneath the little rock-like pile When storms are raging. Happy are they both— Mother and child!—These feelings, in themselves Trite, do yet scarcely seem so when I think 330 On those ingenuous moments of our youth Ere we have learnt by use to slight the crimes And sorrows of the world. Those simple days Are now my theme; and, foremost of the scenes, Which yet survive in memory, appears 335 One, at whose centre ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... His voice was most strangely grave for an observation so trite; he might have been speaking some deeply meditated thing, profound, heavy with meaning, charged with fate. Fatuous! It was extraordinary that there was not an action of his but aroused her animosity. This vibrant gravity of tone—an organ used for a jig, just as ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... He thought how trite from use and yet how true, truer than any of us even dream, is the comparison that life is a great sea and we who journey through, as ships, that at distant intervals ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... no possible remedy for such evils as this country has suffered except general military education. In my opinion, no man is fit for a seat in Congress unless he has had such an education. The first thing he ought to learn is the old and trite military maxim that the only was to carry on war economically is to make it "short, sharp, and decisive." To dole out military appropriations in driblets is to invite disaster and ultimate bankruptcy. So it is in respect ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... knife. The judgments could not but be damnatory, and their 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 with a sense ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of the Military Service Bill brought forth some rather trite arguments from Mr. HOLT and other opponents of compulsion, and a lively defence from Mr. LLOYD GEORGE, who thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity, after a long silence, of being able to speak his mind without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... on a tree, and shoot three, there will be none left, for of course the remaining three will fly away. This last jest is so trite to-day ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... biographer had introduced from his own view of public affairs. We have no wish to make a peevish return to the writer of a work which has given us both information and pleasure. But it is necessary to caution Mr Tucker against giving trite and trifling opinions on subjects of which he evidently knows so little as of the Romish question, or the state of Ireland. Nothing is easier than to be at once solemn and superficial on such topics; and when a writer of this order flings his epithets of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... that I had grown into a fine youngster. He asked me how old I was; which, of course, he must have done merely to say something more, or perhaps he did so as a test of my intelligence. I replied: "Twelve, sir." He then made the trite observation about the flight of time, and we ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... of those trite and commonplace remarks that are customary for use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to express one's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated creature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wad of medicated ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... 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 of a wife's lands;" of "tenures against which, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the trail of an alligator from one of them to the sea. This dark forest, where the trees shoot up straight and tall, and are succeeded by generation after generation varying in stature, but struggling upward, strikes the imagination with pictures trite yet true. Here the hoary sage of a hundred years lies moldering beneath your foot, and there the young sapling shoots beneath the parent shade, and grows in form and fashion like the parent stem. The towering few, with ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... gods and men—that man! Is there any use for me to stammer out trite phrases of self-contempt? The fact remains that I am unfit to advise, criticise, or condemn anybody for anything; and it's high time ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... diverse, and abundant—and all felt intuitively from within. Into his 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
... in the mistake of an accidental and occasional symbol for an universal one," then, in speaking to the psycho-analyst, the psychologist should echo Emerson further, and say: "Let us have a little algebra instead of this trite rhetoric— universal signs instead of these village symbols—and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... around us," such was the course of natural though trite reflection, which flowed upon Tyrrel's mind; "wherefore should loves and friendships have a longer date than our dwellings and our monuments?" As he indulged these sombre recollections, his officious landlady disturbed their tenor ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... meanwhile found himself hungry to throw aside these tamed and trite forms of existence, and to penetrate to the harsh, true, simple things behind. His imagination and his heart turned towards the primitive, indispensable labors on which society rests—the life ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... mess. She preferred New York or Washington, but she had to live here. Thus she patronized nearly all of those with whom she condescended to associate, using an upward tilt of the head, a tired droop of the eyelids, and a fine upward arching of the brows to indicate how trite it all was. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the whole, the impression left upon the reader's mind is that Shelley and Harriet were very happy together at this period, and that Harriet was a charming and sweet-tempered girl, somewhat too much given to the study of trite ethics, and slightly deficient in sensibility, but otherwise a fit and soothing ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... oratorical declamations of the Bourbons against the Bonapartists, which in our day are repeated against the republicans and the legitimists by the Younger Branch, flourished in the speech. These trite commonplaces, which might have some meaning under a fixed government, seem farcical in the mouth of administrators of all epochs and opinions. A saying of the troublous times of yore is still applicable: "The label is changed, but the wine is the same as ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... undertakings meditated by the desultory ambition of a young and inexperienced student. And at that time I sought his advice upon a work of imagination, intended to depict the effects of enthusiasm upon different modifications of character. He listened to my conception, which was sufficiently trite and prosaic, with his usual patience; and then, thoughtfully turning to his bookshelves, took down an old volume, and read to me, first, in Greek, and secondly, in English, some extracts ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Horace Greeley would sooner or later fall back on his oft-repeated, trite remark, "The best women I know do not want to vote," Susan had asked Mrs. Greeley to roll up a big petition in Westchester County, and believing heartily in woman suffrage she had complied. This gave Susan and Mrs. Stanton a trump card to ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as technically and literally true—"The assertion that in the time of Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... rather trite—coming after that," Deane said. "But anyway, I'll have to say that I feel the ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... Thank you for mentioning it. It will supply a delightful topic of conversation next time I am honoured by a few minutes of his gracious Majesty's attention, and will save me from floundering into trite remarks about the weather.—And now take me to the Sphinx, Schehati. There is a question I would ask of It, just as the sun dips below ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... "Rome of the North," a comparison that seems rather trite at first, but those who feel the meaning of this city will understand and appreciate the French sculptor's judgment. Prague has, at least superficially, one quality in common with Rome; in your wanderings in either city you may come suddenly upon something of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The sentimental part of The Heir at Law is trite in plan and hard in expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... MacRae lifted his clenched hands above his head and cursed the circumstance that had brought us to such extremity. That was the first and only time I knew him to lose his poise, his natural repression. Still water runs deep, they say; and a glacial cap may conceal subterranean fires. Trite similes, I grant you—but, ah, how true. The good Lord help those phlegmatics who can stand by unmoved when a self-contained man reveals the anguish of his soul in one passionate outburst. Could the fury that quivered in his voice have wreaked itself ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 they receive ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... wondered if he were becoming insane. He seemed to become obsessed with the belief that his ability to think was slowly paralyzing. And with it his will. And yet, proof that this was not the case was found in his stubborn opposition to trite acquiescence, and in his infrequent reversals of mood, when he would even feel an intense, if transient, sense of exaltation in the thought that he was doing the best that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... any one living." The fact is, so far as may be judged from those of her letters which have come down to us, that Madame de Longueville's style bore the reflex of her conversation: there are some passages very remarkable in their force, some phrases altogether trite and insignificant. This opinion is quite beside the consideration of her diction in a grammatical point of view. In her written as in her spoken language, she seems to have been impassive or to have kindled into animation according as her thoughts were "dead or ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... flooring of flags or brick tiles, though damp and moss-grown, and with weeds sprouting between the crevices. Grass and weeds, indeed, have found soil enough to flourish in, even on the highest ranges of the walls, though at a dizzy height above the ground; and it was like an old and trite touch of romance, to see how the weeds sprouted on the many hearth-stones and aspired under the chimney-flues, as if in emulation of the long-extinguished flame. It was very mournful, very beautiful, very delightful, too, to see how Nature takes back the palace, now that ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the earth, or as Mr. Rawlence was above an 'inmate' of St. Peter's. To a twentieth-century English artist, Mr. Rawlence might have seemed a shade crude, possibly rather pompous and affected, somewhat jejune and trite, perhaps. But our talk took place in the 'seventies of last century, in New South Wales. The Board School was a new invention in England, and in Australia there was quite a lot of bushranging still to come, and the arrival of transported ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the 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 stereotyped device of making poetry a dream vision, so popular ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... thank you heartily for the Eclogue; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite: and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... In a very trite, popular ballad, which we find in "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," we see, that, when the travellers came to Jerusalem, the Devil declined still another request. Faustus wishes him to make a picture of Christ crucified, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... The usual trite criticisms of the church Dan had heard, and had already learned to think somewhat lightly of the kind of people who commonly make them. But this young woman—so wholesome, so good to look at in her sweet seriousness, so strong in her womanliness and withal so ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... without disgrace, and that the only vengeance proportionate to the 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... led into 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 will not be allowed to press against him unfairly. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... merit. More, it has been tried often, and with success. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the average couple cannot afford a double establishment, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of states and counties. In my own case, by examining the records of the county clerk's office, I have discovered the Indian names of various places and objects in the neighborhood, and have found them infinitely superior to the trite, poverty-stricken names which had been given by the settlers. A beautiful pastoral stream, for instance, which winds for many a mile through one of the loveliest little valleys in the state, has long been known by the common-place ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... to life and longevity, but it is trite to say it must be in moderation, and as far as possible select. So in the case of temperance, moderation is beneficial, excess hurtful. Total abstainers defeat the very object they propose to advocate when they propose ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... like these I would not deal alone In words and phrases trite and too well known, Nor, stooping from the tragic height, drop down To the low level of buffoon and clown, As though pert Davus, or the saucy jade Who sacks the gold and jeers the gull she made, Were like Silenus, who, though quaint and odd, Is yet the guide and tutor of a god. A hackneyed ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... The first piece of advice I have to give you is: Retain your individuality. It is a trite but perfectly true observation that altogether too many men who during courtship were chivalry personified assume a dictatorial tone as soon as the knot has been tied. They think that the wife has actually ceased to exist as a separate human being, that she has been absorbed, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... These trite remarks were nevertheless rendered necessary because of the enormous amount of misunderstanding which exists in connection with these phenomena, and of the general methods and objects of psychic research. The papers that have already been published on the question of hallucination in relation ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... you will do me the honour to remember that I am not trying to get into your set. I am trying to induce you to come into mine. You won't be tempted, so that's the end of it. Beastly day, isn't it?" He uttered the trite commonplace as if no other thought than that of the weather had been in his mind. "By the way," he resumed, with a most genial smile, "for some queer, un-masculine reason, I took it into my head last night to worry about the bride's trousseau. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... "clasping hands," he had bidden her an eternal farewell—by moonlight. She was, moreover, perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... brother dudes are simply the physical wrecks and mental ruins of her hypnotic medicine. She hypnotizes because she can't help it. She's built that way. The Tyler savants are 'way behind the times. They are plunging into the shoreless realm of psychology in search of information that was trite in antediluvian times. They are trying to determine whether man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial, when the sire of Solomon had made answer, and Lillian Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the "vexatious question" ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in youth, in the ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... talks a little sculduddery after dinner, which it is perfectly licit for him to do, and which (although I am not very fond of it myself) appears to be entirely an affair of taste. Your father, I scarcely like to remind you, since it is so trite a commonplace, is older than yourself. At least, he is MAJOR and SUI JURIS, and may please himself in the matter of his conversation. And, do you know, I wonder if he might not have as good an answer against you and me? We say we sometimes find him COARSE, but I suspect he might ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a trite phrase in everybody's mouth; and it is not a little remarkable that those who use it most as applied to others, unconsciously afford in their own persons singular examples of the power which habit and custom exercise over the minds of men, and of the little reflection they are apt to bestow ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... at rest rushed again into a terrible and tumultuous action. The newly-formed stratum of my mind was swept away; everything seemed a wreck, a chaos, a convulsion of jarring elements; but this is a trite and tame description of my feelings; words would be but commonplace to express the revulsion which I experienced: yet, amidst all, there was one paramount and presiding thought, to which the rest were as atoms in the heap,—the awakened thought of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite, empty, everyday, in the sense of what everyday often, alas! really is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... writing," said I, in as dry and trite a voice as if I had been addressing only Jules Vanderkelkov ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... to lengthen life, whereas I would sacrifice a million lives to prove that there is no such thing as death; that this human life of ours, by which we set such childish store, is but a fleeting phase of the permanent life of the spirit. One shrinks from setting down so trite a truism; it is the common ground of all religion, but I have reached it from the opposite pole. Religion is to me the unworthy triumph of instinct over knowledge, a lazy substitution of invention for discovery. Religion invites us to take her postulates on trust; but a material age is deserving ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... 'Where is the life which late we led?' That motley clown in Arden wood, Whom humorous Jacques with envy view'd, Not even that clown could amplify, 5 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; 10 And sure, through many a varied scene,, Unkindness never came between. Away these winged years have flown, To join the mass of ages ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... own ability urged him forward, and his indefatigable pertinacity kept him at his strange task throughout the whole of his life. He filled volumes, and the contents of those volumes afford probably the most complete illustration in literature of the very trite proverb—Poeta nascitur, non fit. The spectacle of that heavy German Muse, with her feet crammed into pointed slippers, executing, with incredible conscientiousness, now the stately measure of a Versailles minuet, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... established a special group to work on one problem. They were dubbed the Gravity Gang, and immediately after, the GG. I hired them for the gravity of the situation, a standard gag that, once uttered, became as trite as the phrase. The Tour's realism would be affected by normal ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... the learned say And envy called the tune Mayhap 'twere trite what treason saith That man is dust and ends in death; We'd slay with proof of printed law Whatever was new that seers saw, If Truth were what the learned say And envy called ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... A trite story is told of a man who was to be executed because of his persistent laziness. While being driven to the scaffold, he was given one more chance for his life by a kind-hearted individual who offered him a quantity of corn with which to ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... a very trite proverb, and a sadly worn truth, exemplified over and over again at all times and seasons, and in all places of the earth, that the course of true love never ran smooth; and alas! notwithstanding all the pleasant preparations being made for them, these two ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within as on the state of things without and around us. I make this trite remark, because I happen to know that Messrs. Helstone and Moore trotted forth from the mill-yard gates, at the head of their very small company, in the best possible spirits. When a ray from a lantern ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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
... home and abroad rather profoundly—who expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... the breezes bring proof of this. Surely, it is Bishop Heber's trite stanzas repeated in unison by the forgiving populace—they are sung everywhere, and why not in Ceylon's great seaport? The ship churns forward to her moorings. It is singing; there is no mistaking it. But the air! Does it deal with "spicy breezes," and "pleasing prospects?" ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of God. If we desire that upon our Christian lives there shall shine the perpetual sunshine of an unclouded confidence that we have the love and the favour of God, and that for us there is no condemnation, but only 'acceptance in the beloved,' the short road to it is the well-known and trite path of toil in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... at once. The young lady had ordered dinner, and, having eaten it, found that she could not pay for it. It was, to say the least, a trite situation. But what can a man do when a pretty woman approaches him and pleads for assistance? So ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... however, stands as a symbol of the larger situation; and its decisions or lack of them will be a considerable factor in the determination of subsequent events. Sometimes one is obliged to fall back on a trite phrase. We are genuinely at a parting of the ways. Even if we should follow in our old path, there would none the less be a parting of the ways, for we cannot consistently tread the old path unless we are animated by a much ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... counted for more than half of Homer's poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his opportunity for the touch of "golden alchemy," or at least for the pleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, in one's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been through the long reign of these ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... something to lift up and lead on the progress of mankind? These are the ones who have felt the meaning of those sublime words of Jesus: "He that loseth his life shall save it." If there is any meaning in that splendid passage from George Eliot, that is so trite ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... most pleasing, while the red-eye and the yellow-throat are very much alike, and both of them rather too monotonous and persistent. It is hard, sometimes, not to get out of patience with the red-eye's ceaseless and noisy iteration of his trite theme; especially if you are doing your utmost to catch the notes of some rarer and more refined songster. In my note-book I find an entry describing my vain attempts to enjoy the music of a rose-breasted grosbeak,—who at that time had never been ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... It is a trite saying, that health is harmony. But I plead for a much wider and fuller interpretation of harmony than is customary. Mens sana in corpore sano—a sane mind in a healthy body—does not fill all ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... feast; that he should be sufficiently intelligent to know when he is really felicitous, and not seek to put down the gaiety of his fellow guests; but that he should rise from the board satisfied with himself, contented with others; in short, to comprise the whole in a trite axiom of one of the Greek philosophers, he should learn the invaluable secret, "to ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... way to learn 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 ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... you," said Rodriguez, "if you could have but one, a lofty place or comfort?" Even in those days such a question was trite, but Rodriguez uttered it only thinking to dip in the store of Morano's simple wisdom, as one may throw a mere worm to catch a worthy fish. But in this he was disappointed; for Morano made no neat comparison ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... being operative that is found in the peroration to a speech or in the spire of a cathedral, i.e., the human instinct to end whatever we attempt as impressively and completely as possible. This Coda, which, in Haydn and Mozart, was often a mere iteration of trite chords—a ceasing to go—was so expanded by Beethoven that it was the real glory of the whole movement. In fact so many eloquent treatments of the main material were reserved for the Coda that it often became a second development; and such was its scope that the form may be ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... our spirits rose. We began to think more and more of getting in touch with civilization. What a tale we should have to tell. How we should put it over the other explorers with their trite Solomons ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... toilet and pour out their tea; Foremost to lead the dance, or patient sit To deal the cards out, or deal out small wit; Then oh! in public, what a perfect beau, So powder'd and so trimm'd for pulpit show; So well equipp'd to tickle ears polite With pretty little subjects, short and trite. Well cull'd and garbled from the good old store Of polish'd sermons often preached before; With precious scraps from moral Shakespeare brought. To fill up awkward vacancies of thought, Or shew how he the orator can play Whene'er ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... from servitude and chains—to-morrow, upon the assurance of a good dividend, it will pay the wages of the soldiery who have successfully desolated that country, and exterminated or enslaved its defenders. Trite, if sad commonplaces these, to which the world listens, if at all, with impatient indifference. I have not a very strong faith in the soundness of the commercial evangel upon this subject; still, the very last task I should set myself would be a sermon denunciative of mammon-worship—mammon-love—mammon-influence—and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... It is a trite saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But this is as true, in the case of financial institutions at least, from the point of view of the employe as of the company. It is an ingenious expedient to insure one's self with a "fidelity ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... staring at us, with a face that looked stupid and inexpressive and—very white. The sky behind him, appropriately enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite tableau vivant. We two seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... "Don't make trite remarks, Bella," says Mrs. Bohun, languidly. "You know if you did meet one he would bore you to death. The orthodox good man, the oppressive being we read about, but never see, is unknown to me or you, for which I, at least, am ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... something so odious in this trite and universal banter. Besides, to have it intimated, even in jest, that I would take advantage of my position in this family to pay my ridiculous addresses to Miss Sherwood—I do declare, Griffith, I never ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... softly. "'Hermione' is so much prettier. 'All shall be explained.' A little trite, perhaps! Oh, well—" So saying, he folded up the telegrams, switched off the lights ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that life had for him in this final lap of the race. And yet he had ceased ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... man, and he devoted much care to the composition of his sermons. He was used to expound twice a Sunday the more obvious parts of Holy Scripture, making in twenty minutes or half an hour, for the benefit of the vulgar, a number of trite reflections; and it must be confessed that he had great facility for explaining at decorous length texts which were ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Secretary of State; naturally the newspapers found much amusement in these few sentences; but the thing was typical of Page's whole career as an editor. He held to the creed that an editor should divorce himself entirely from prejudices, animosities, and predilections; this seems an obvious, even a trite thing to say, yet there are so few men who can leave personal considerations aside in writing of men and events that it is worth while pointing out that Page was such a man. When his firm was planning to establish its magazine, his partner, Mr. Doubleday, was approached ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick |
