"Trite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in swiftness, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... are gloomy, as 'The Sorrow of an Old Convict,' Loti; or old style, 'Christian Gellert's Last Christmas,' Auerbach; or trite, 'The Convict's Return,' Harben; or newspapery, 'Rescued by a Child;' or highly fantastic, 'The Egyptian Fire Eater,' Baumbach; or anecdotal, 'A Fishing Trip;' or sentimental, 'Hope,' Bremer; or repellent, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... some trite words of comfort; but she heeded me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a child to sleep. Soon the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out on the grass; and with their last sportive diamond- like tremble of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Ghadames, and in most parts of North Africa. The one I saw was a most unsightly creature. The construction of the eyes is remarkable; they turn on a swivel, or seem to do so, and are directed every way in a moment of time. It is a trite observation, that the lower brute animal has many advantages over the more perfect and rational animal. I often, en route, admired the beautiful facility with which the camel turned its head and neck completely ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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 ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... amused, tried to extract from Burgess something besides the trite and obvious servant's patter—something that might signify some possibility of a latent independence—the germ of aspiration. And extracted nothing. Burgess had not changed, had not developed. His ways were Philip's ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... As the bitter experience of daily life seared his very soul, he found that no smooth, fit expressions of his self-communing rose to his lips. It pained him to face his people, and speak to them in old, trite forms of speech, while his heart was burning within him; and they knew it, as they sat quiet in their pews, looking up to him with ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... with Lizzie's best skirt, and she was adjured not to let that drag. Then the best hat with the cheap pink plumes was set atop the elaborate coiffure; the jacket was put on; and a pair of Lizzie's long silk gloves were struggled into. They were a trite large when on, but to the hands unaccustomed to gloves they were like being run ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... "the tailor and painter often contribute to the success of a tragedy more than the poet," a trite saying which holds good now, and he ends his essay with the belief that "a good poet will give the reader a more lively idea of an army or a battle in a description, than if he actually saw them ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... the risk I run, in citing all these precedents and parallels, of seeming to justify, or at all events to palliate, Irish lawlessness. But I am not doing anything of the kind. I am trying to illustrate a somewhat trite remark which I recently made: "that government is a very practical business, and that those succeed best in it who bring least sentiment or enthusiasm to the conduct of their affairs." The government of Ireland, like ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... is 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 ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... bordering on hallucination, and they betray a desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them to the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with old faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... 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 Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of freedom can 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 us, and our main excitement ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... 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
... Trite and common-place though it be, I mention this circumstance attending my introduction to college, because it formed the first cause which tended to diminish my faith in the institution to which I was attached. I soon grew to regard my university training as ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... wedlock? What has fate Not given to thee in thy well-chosen mate? Good sense—good humor;—these are trivial things, Dear M——, that each trite encomiast sings. But she hath these, and more. A mind exempt From every low-bred passion, where contempt, Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found A harbor yet; an understanding sound; Just views of right and wrong; perception full ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 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 not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... dreaded his arrival, had been wondering how they should meet after the strange revelation of the afternoon, had been thinking of the most trite and commonplace remark with which she might greet him. But when it actually came to the point, she could not say a word, only looked up at him with eyes full of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... pardon!" said I at last and then, struck by the inadequacy of these trite words, drew a pace nearer. "Oh, pray—pray don't weep!" I pleaded. "If I have hurt you, I crave your forgiveness!" Here she sobbed but the fiercer. "But indeed—indeed," I stammered, "I thought—that is, I did not think, I—I mean I could not leave you destitute and having ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... again the author committed an indiscretion. Jaques (by the way, why was not Mr. SUGDEN'S role described as, "the more melancholy Touchstone?") is permitted to stop the action of the piece to deliver some thirty lines commencing with the trite truism, "all the world's a stage." Mr. BOURCHIER spoke his words with excellent discretion, but I cannot help thinking that, in the cause of Art, the speech should have been cut out, and I have no doubt, that Mr. BOURCHIER, as a true artist, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... fate! Far from the land in which his life began; Walled from the healthful air of hardy man; Reared by cold hearts, and watched by jealous eyes, His guardians jailers, and his comrades spies. Each trite convention courtly fears inspire To stint experience and to dwarf desire; Narrows the action to a puppet stage, And trains the eaglet to the starling's cage. On the dejected brow and smileless cheek, What weary thought the languid lines bespeak; Till drop by drop, from jaded ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... himself as the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous aspects. His men he regards with love and friendship; whatever is trite he views with ecstasy. Nature appears charming; in the dead woods and monotonous forest his mind becomes overwhelmed with delight. I speak for myself, as a careful analysation of the attack, in all its severe, plaintive, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... of this trite reflection was borne in on her by a loud wrangle between the bridge players. A woman had revoked, and was quite wroth with the man who ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... efforts; and Kavanagh, apparently under a similar inspiration, indulges the pleasing anticipation, that he has completed a monument more lasting than brass—of which material, it may be observed, he does not appear to have a deficient supply. He confesses, that on so trite a subject, the presumption is against him of so great an achievement; but he sticks to his point, and is sure that he has attained an undying name by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... principles is, that pride, or an over-weaning conceit of ourselves, must be vicious; since it causes uneasiness in all men, and presents them every moment with a disagreeable comparison. It is a trite observation in philosophy, and even in common life and conversation, that it is our own pride, which makes us so much displeased with the pride of other people; and that vanity becomes insupportable to us merely because we are vain. The gay naturally associate themselves with the ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... for 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 I ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Guardian, the Mirror or the Lounger, as my poor abilities may be able to accomplish. Not that I have any purpose of imitating Johnson, whose general learning and power of expression I do not deny, but many of whose Ramblers are little better than a sort of pageant, where trite and obvious maxims are made to swagger in lofty and mystic language, and get some credit only because they are not easily understood. There are some of the great moralist's papers which I cannot peruse without thinking on a second-rate masquerade, where ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 to the necessary preparations for war in time of peace. ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... trees, with white houses and minarets in between. A familiar vision, and often described; yet one that never fails of its effect. A man may weary, after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the waste—the miracle of water; and that of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... 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
... 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 ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,—perhaps he did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her beside ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... President of the Senate, the Hon. Lafe Giddings, 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 Crossing • Winston Churchill
... philosophy: a mistake; for our intellect being the highest gift we have received from God, it follows that we shall please him best by using it assiduously. He spoke about the prayers before sunrise and asked Joseph if they did not seem to him somewhat trite and trivial and if he did not think that the moment would be more profitably spent by instituting a comparison between the light of the intellect ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... p. 53. "To find the answers, will require an effort of mind, and when given, will be the result of reflection, showing that the subject is understood."—Ib., p. vii. "To say, that 'the sun rises,' is trite and common; but it becomes a magnificent image when expressed as Mr. Thomson has done."—Blair's Rhet., p. 137. "The declining a word is the giving it different endings."—Ware's Gram., p. 7. "And so much are they for every one's following their own mind."—Barclay's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... slight invitation, he told her two events of his past life which had been full of trite excitement, and had afforded him nothing but disappointment and disgust. Never, however, before having met her, had the thought of marrying occurred to him; in the matter of love as in the matter of friendship, he had ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... half of the omelette, 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 ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... seven schools nor a half to the same universities, when at least a quarter have been to no recognised classical school at all, it is impossible that the same free-masonry should prevail. There were a hundred trite classical quotations (no great evidence of scholarship, but made jestingly familiar by the old school curricula) which our fathers could use with safety in any chance company of the society to which they were accustomed; but even the most familiar of them would be a parlous experiment in small talk ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Federal Government has been and must necessarily be, almost wholly secular. But the education given by this Association is distinctly, not technically, religious. It is rooted and grounded in the Bible. And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it, because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... "sayings" (compare the phrase "an old saw"); modern means "moderate," "commonplace"; instances means what we mean by it today, "examples," "illustrations." (Line 18 as a whole gives us a vivid sense of the justice's readiness to speak sapiently, after the manner of justices, and to trot out his trite illustrations on the slightest provocation.) The word pantaloon in line 20 is interesting. The patron saint of Venice was St. Pantaleon (the term is from Greek, means "all-lion," and possibly refers to the lion of St. Mark's Cathedral). ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... impossible to guess. To take the bull by the horn, is a common enough expression, and might represent no more than a piece of advice to act boldly; on the whole that was not likely, for would anyone wind up such a carefully veiled communication with so trite and everyday a saying, or finish such an obscure message with so ordinary ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... upon nations and societies are the trite, thread-bare jokes of those who set up for wit without having any, and so have recourse to common-place.' Chesterfield's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... to the inn, there was the postchaise in front of the door, the horses being led away to bait, and a little group of villagers standing round; for though the auction of the Why Not? was in itself a trite thing with a foregone conclusion, yet the bailiff's visit always stirred some show of interest. There were a few children with their noses flattened against the windows of the parlour, and inside were Mr. Bailiff and Mr. Clerk hard at work on their dinner. Mr. ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... of its lustre, and his loving heart made sluggish and cold. What shame she felt! For did not she and the children share in his degradation? What humiliation of spirit they endured! But she never spoke other than kindly to her husband. He had not the trite excuse of thousands of worthless husbands who are neglecting their homes and spending their money in the groggery, while their families are existing in squalor and famishing for bread. He could never say he was driven to drink by the naggings of a querulous wife; ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the names I find are so trite." ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... 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, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Has many years, as human tongues would tell, Upon the face of this blank earth to dwell. Looks she not sad? 'tis but a tale of old, Told o'er and o'er, and ever to be told, The hourly story of our every day, Which when men hear, they sigh and turn away; A tale too trite almost to find an ear, A woe too common to deserve a tear. She is the daughter of a distant land;— Her kindred are far off;—her maiden hand, Sought for by many, was obtained by one Who owned a different birthland from her own. ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... 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 ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... it is disjointed, disproportioned, and irregular. It is merely a set of additions and corrections to other men's works, or to the common stock of human knowledge, printed separately. You might as well expect a continued chain of reasoning in the notes to a book. It skips all the trite, intermediate, level common-places of the subject, and only stops at the difficult passages of the human mind, or touches on some striking point that has been overlooked in previous editions. A view of a subject, to be connected and regular, cannot ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... perfectly trite," said Susanna, "and it would be perfectly absurd, if it were n't rather tragic, or perfectly tragic, if it were ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... of our young gentlemen, were here," said Mrs. Towers, "they might improve themselves in all the graces of polite and sincere complaisance. But, compared to this, I have generally heard such trite and coarse stuff from our race of would-be wits, that what they say may be compared to the fawnings and salutations of the ass in the fable, who, emulating the lap-dog, merited a ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... this happy ending to be brought about? Why by this very easy and trite expedient; to wit, by reforming Lovelace, and marrying him to Clarissa—Not, however, abating her one of her tryals, nor any of her sufferings [for the sake of the sport her distresses would give to the tender-hearted ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... distinguish twentieth century France; for morals are reformed only very gradually! Is it not necessary, in order to produce the slightest change, that the most daring dreams of the past century become the most trite ideas of the present one? We have touched upon this question merely in a trifling mood, for the purposes of showing that we are not blind to its importance, and of bequeathing also to posterity the outline of a work, which they ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... about that!" McGee's half audible remark was the trite expression so commonly used by those who are staggered ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... once, to save one's self a vast deal of unnecessary trouble. And, for mere tale-telling, this may be sufficient. What need to burden memory with imaginary statements, or to weary out one's sympathies on trite fictitious woes?—come to the catastrophe at once: the uncle hanged; the heir righted; the heroine, an orange-flowered bride; and the white-headed grandmother, after all her wrongs, winding up the story with a prudent moral. Now, this may all be very well with histories ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the favours of fortune by seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically observed—"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not." A simple question founded on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely suggest to an indifferent person any other notion than that of a mind at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I believe about this time last year), I had taken ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is a book which, either from its subject, its authorship, or its handling, is sui generis. I call such books "uniquities"; it sounds a little less trite than saying they are unique. I think I will let someone else speak of these books. I will look to see, and will let you see, what others have said about ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... his neighborhood had followed the then growing fashion of the age, and set up a Mechanics' Institute; and some worthy persons interested in the formation of that provincial Athenaeum had offered a prize for the best Essay on the Diffusion of Knowledge—a very trite subject, on which persons seem to think they can never say too much, and on which there is, nevertheless, a great deal yet to be said. This prize Leonard Fairfield had recently won. His Essay had been publicly complimented ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't 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 ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... 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
... of the mind, and not outward circumstances, is the nice point on which happiness depends is but a trite remark; but that intellectual power should have the force to render a man discontented in extraordinary prosperity, such as that of the present bishop, or contented in his brother's extreme ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... the "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 ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... 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 degree of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... is trite enough, and has been said a thousand times already, but, unfortunately, with the saying of it the matter ends. Co-operation has been brought into practice in relation to distribution with considerable success, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the Teutonic mind, although the Germans sneer at us for being a nation of shopkeepers. There are two words we hope never to hear again, "Kultur" and "Unser." "Unser Deutschland," "Unser Kaiser," "Unser Kultur." How weary and trite are these! What an extraordinary mixture the Germans are, brave, conceited, sentimental, prosaic, patriotic, and yet no people so soon lose their national characteristics, and become citizens of another ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... and verify more than a few symptoms; but he feels a just pride, on his arrival at the end of his difficult enterprise, from the consciousness that he is leaving to his successors a new field of research; and that in a matter apparently so trite, not only was there much to be said, but also very many points are found remaining which may yet be brought into the clear light of observation. He therefore presents here without order or connection the rough outlines which he has so far been able to execute, in the hope that later he ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... trite; Stubborn, and no one can force you. Errant, but generally right— Yet, on the ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... no means unfrequent. Our delight in viewing external things, though agreeing up to a certain point, does not agree throughout. It is a trite remark that there is a large individual factor, a considerable "personal equation," in matters of taste, as in other matters. Permanent differences of natural sensibility, of experience, of intellectual habits, and so on, make an object aesthetically ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... with a number of members of the legal profession, had to reply to the toast, "The Bench of Scotland." In illustration of a trite remark that all litigants could not be expected to have the highest regard for the judges who have tried their cases, he told the following story: A worthy but unfortunate south-country farmer had fought ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... and Noel and I gave our testimony before the coroner's jury, and he was bound over for trial before the next term of the circuit court to sit six months hence. There is an old and very trite saying in Texas that, "a dead witness is better than a live one." This was gently whispered into our ears, and accordingly one night about a month after this, Noel and I "folded our tents, and like the Arabs, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... 'That's trite!' said Leonard, patting her fondly. 'I like you to do—as you call it—Miss May does, and every one that is worth anything. I say, Ave, when I go out to the islands, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looked at me shrewdly. She drew a letter from her pocket, and handed it to me. It was addressed from France to M. Alfred Goyte, at Tible. I took out the letter and began to read it, as mere words. "Mon cher Alfred"—it might have been a bit of a torn newspaper. So I followed the script: the trite phrases of a letter from a French-speaking girl to an Englishman. "I think of you always, always. Do you think sometimes of me?" And then I vaguely realised that I was reading a man's private correspondence. And yet, ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... that I was altogether his unless love had put me in his hands. For if he loves me not, at least he does not fear me. I hope that love which gives me to him will in return give him to me. But now I am sore dismayed because it is so trite a word, and I may simply be deceived, for many there be who in flattering terms will say even to a total stranger, 'I and all that I have are yours,' and they are more idle chatterers than the jays. So I do not know what ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... instance. If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... possible that some bumpkin really believed it to be a mermaid, but the invention has become so common of late that it is found in the curio-shops of every town, and as an eye-catching device is often put into show-cases by some merchant who deals in anything rather than mermaids. Trite and ridiculous as this patchwork appears, it symbolizes a belief of full three thousand years. Men have always been prone to fill with imaginations what they have never sounded with their senses, and it is to this tendency we owe poetry and the arts. The sea was a ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... first attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... many 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 footsteps. He began life as a kind of editor of which he was ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... movement of the engine will be in a reverse direction to the real; and the general effect will be that of retrogression at a furious pace, instead of the progression which is taking place in reality. This is altogether different from the trite illustration of the astronomical lecturer, who reminds us of the apparent movement of the shore when observed from the deck of a steamboat; for in this case it is the damp side of the tunnel that appears to be stationary, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 61. Avoid trite or hackneyed expressions. Such expressions may be tags from everyday speech (the worse for wear, had the time of my life); or stale phrases from newspapers (taken into custody, the officiating clergyman); or humorous substitutions ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... gallery round the top, and the whole is most admirably regulated and arranged. Among other things, I here saw a description of Oxford, with plates to illustrate it: and I cannot help observing what, though trite, is true, that all these places look much better, and are far more beautiful on paper, than they appeared to me to be as I looked at them where ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... Fresh-water streams coloured as yesterday, and 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. It was thus I meditated in my walk. The foot of European, I said, has never touched where my foot now presses—seldom the native wanders here. Here, I, indeed, behold nature fresh from the bosom of creation, unchanged ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the trite but, nevertheless, all-powerfully true assertion that the Press is the Archimidean lever which moves the world, cannot but regret the unblushing statement of the editor of our esteemed contemporary, the Planters' Friend, that he has been the victim of a soul-destroying, home-wrecking, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... pleasing recreation, when no other is at hand, to read the letters of some of the New York correspondents who do the heavy Trite and the small Horrible for the outside barbaric folios. Standing on the shore of their Firth of Froth, so to speak, we watch with considerable interest the unique soarings and divings of "Our Own." One of these writers informs the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... unthinking that nothing (rightly treated) is too low for its breath to vivify and its wings to raise, that the Herd awaken from their chronic lethargy of contempt, and the Lawgiver is compelled to redress what the Poet has lifted into esteem. In thus enlarging the boundaries of the Novelist, from trite and conventional to untrodden ends, I have seen, not with the jealousy of an author, but with the pride of an Originator, that I have served as a guide to later and abler writers, both in England and abroad. If at times, while imitating, they have mistaken me, I am not. answerable for ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... stiffen from disease, the efforts of the man—supposing him to have energy sufficient to make an effort—to redress the wrongs done to the boy, will in most cases be vain. That self-educated men are generally the best educated is a trite remark; so trite, indeed, that it frequently falls on the ear without rousing attention to the apparent paradox which it contains; and yet there must be some reason well worthy of attention for the fact, that so many who, in early life, have enjoyed advantages, have, on reaching manhood, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... happier than he had ever been in all his life; and so much in love that he found nothing to say for a moment save the few trite phrases in which a man in love says many commonplaces, all of which ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which were helping the Belgians to hold their ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... he said, "with the usual trite remarks. I will simply tell you that the time has been long enough. I ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this now, when my hope is dead, so that you may know that my love for you began when you were little more than a baby, and has endured to this day and will endure forever. I pray God you may always be happy. And now, in closing, I can only add the trite sentence,—which I recall reading in more than one novel and which I was imitative enough to put into my own unfinished masterpiece: If ever you are in trouble and despair and need me, I will come to you from the ends of the earth. I mean it, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... and the books 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 ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... 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 ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... superstition, which destroys the primeval innocence; but why or when does not very clearly appear; yet, though the general theory is incoherent, he catches a distinct view of one aspect of the question and expresses a tolerably trite view of the question with ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... opposed to that of the historiographer. This contradiction, and the charge consequently brought against speculation, shall be explained and confuted. We do not, however, propose to correct the innumerable special misrepresentations, whether trite or novel, that are current respecting the aims, the interests, and the modes of treating history ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... experience was "to teach him to live well with all persons." Soberly clad, and sagely accompanied by some learned antiquary or pious churchman, and by a few of his deferential disciples, he gave out his trite axioms in measured phrase and emphatic accent, lectured rather than conversed, and appeared like one of the peripatetic teachers of the last days of Athenian pedantry ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge are the great social qualities, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of a wife's lands;" of "tenures against which, of all others, quo warrantos are sure to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... victory was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property of everyone, all thought; while paper has made the work of printing cheap. Such reflections as these, however, are trite and must occur to every mind. It is far more to the purpose to repeat that not the inventions, but the intelligence that used them, the conscious calculating spirit of the modern world, should rivet our attention when we direct it to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... express more than the trite observation, that a knowledge of futurity would prove a torment to the possessor. Beneath that obvious is couched the deeper moral, which expresses the sufferings of the philosophic prophet—of the man who, too much for his ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... that he was soon to be with God: does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in his exegesis of Tristan, will have it that Wagner composed the opera to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than a thinking one, and in the hazy, steamy, overheated thinking part he often let idle phrases play about without himself firmly grasping their meaning or want of it. Anyhow, if he had ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... world—a fine Roman nose, and a forehead like a sage's—was now dressed in nankeen tights, and a coat without skirts, splitting the sides of the gallery in the part of Tony Lumpkin. But into the heroine, Fanny Millinger threw a grace, a sweetness, a simple, yet dignified spirit of trite love that at once charmed and astonished all present. The applause was unbounded; and Percy Godolphin felt proud of himself for having admired one whom every one else ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beautiful—almost too trite to write—but the beauty is lonesome and terrifying, and my city-bred soul longs for some good, homely, human "blot on the landscape." There are no trees on the cliffs now. I understand, however, ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly of universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among a people is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagates established ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public. Plato's quarrel was not so much with poetic art as with ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusade ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human mind, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... soldier receives, and the white soldier travels from point to point in the same box freight cars as afford means of passage for colored soldiers. In short, when it comes to maintenance and equipment, and consideration for the comfort of the American soldier, to use a trite saying, 'the folks are as good as the people.' There is absolutely no discrimination, and the cheerfulness of those 1,000 boys whose freight cars became, in imagination, Pullman palace cars, was the proof to me that the colored boys in the ranks are ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... the 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 Sense, quickening at scream of seagull or roar of ravenous ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 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 of spiritual Beings, and are not therefore adapted ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... 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
... Shipman had been teaching for twenty years, but she had never grown old. And her influence was—to use a trite description—like a stone flung into a still pool of water; the ever widening circles set moving by it lapped the very outer ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... service: but had you fortuned a mere stranger, and made no means to me by acquaintance, I should have utterly denied to have been the man; both by reason of the act past in Parliament against Conjurers and Witches, as also, because I would not have my Art vulgar, trite, and common. ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... 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 fact, that ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... terms of penal servitude had scattered our friends, and I could not interest myself in the new. Nor did Marshall himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown just a little trite. My affection for him was as deep and sincere as ever; were I to meet him now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal friendship; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle Athenes who interested me ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a trite remark that diamonds can be polished only by diamond dust. Whatever the rude processes were to which the rude nature of the young Corsican was subjected, the result was remarkable. Latin he disliked, and treated with disdainful neglect. His particular aptitudes were ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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, I should not have suspected ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 and the politician's ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... this night, were crowded with trifles on which hung important and far-reaching results. This is a very trite saying, I know. All weeks are crowded with eventful trifles; at least, we in our blindness call them trifles, although we are constantly discovering their importance, and ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... talked in their formal dull way—telling Nannie the trite old things about the park and the village that they told every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... whose every thought was honour. He was carried into camp, and was well aware that his last hour was approaching. A comrade went to see him. He smiled, and quoted the old tag, which, when so quoted, ceases to be trite: "Well, old fellow, 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'; you see it's my case. It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." Poor fellow! he did not survive his wound twenty-four hours. He was a good swordsman, ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... crease' ap peal' dis creet' be queath' in crease' ap pear' en treat' re vere' de mean' ap pease' ex treme' be seech' fu see' ar rear' gran dee' bo hea' re peal' blas pheme' im peach' a light' de scribe' ac quire' dis guise' a wry' de spise' at trite' es quire' be guile' pre scribe' as sign' ig nite' be lie' de cline' de mise' in quire' de prive' re quite' com prise' ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... has been the past, satisfactory as is the present, it is but a foretaste of the future. It is a trite saying, that we live in an age of great events. Nothing can be more true. But the greatest of all events of the present age is at hand. It needs not the gift of prophecy to predict, that the course of the world's trade is destined soon to be changed. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... It is a trite saying, that every man has that in his heart, which, if known, would make all his fellow-creatures hate him. Was it this evil spirit which now struggled in Captain Rothesay's breast, and darkened his face with storms of passion, remorse, or woe? He gave no utterance to them in ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... keen, wild blue eye on the stolid and unexpressive face of the Netherlander, like an eager student who seeks to discover some hidden and mysterious meaning in a passage of a classic author, the direct import of which seems trite and trivial. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... (and bare-faced) black apostle, with a wife and five handmaids; and a multitude of converts loaded with crucifixes and satchels of relics. Our home march was enlivened by glimpses of the magnificent river seen through the perennial tropical foliage, and it did not suggest trite reflections upon the meanness of man's highest aspirations in presence of ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Those whom you can make like themselves better Timidity and diffidence To be heard with success, you must be heard with pleasure To be pleased one must please Trifle only with triflers; and be serious only with the serious Trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon Unwilling and forced; it will never please Well dressed, not finely dressed What is impossible, and what is only difficult What pleases you in others, ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... lovely in her pretty gray 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
... Irene would be, of course; but marriages were an old story for her. She had loved to shine at watering-places, but the gayety no longer lured her. She had dazzled in diamonds, silks, and velvets, been admired on the right hand and on the left, until it was an old, trite story. Servants managed her house admirably. Mr. Lawrence never wearied her with any business details. Her clothes were ordered, and made, and hung in the closets. The carriage was always at hand. Not a want ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... exposed. The good name, the worldly reputation of his family, seemed to be of more value than a conscience void of offence before Him who readeth all hearts. To speak of the sin of the act was but to utter trite and commonplace words, which could be found in any cheap catechism; but to mention the disgrace attending the exposure of that sin, was to touch him ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... wider and deeper, and their usefulness as aids to General Education would be largely increased. To a great majority of the reading class, even here, political discussions—and especially of questions so trite and so unimportant as those which mainly engross the attention of Parliament—are of quite subordinate interest; and I think less than one reader in four ever peruses any more of these debates than is given in the Editorial synopsis, leaving the verbatim report a sheer waste of costly ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... expressive eyes, and features of perfect regularity, must have given her every natural requisite for the higher walks of her profession. As I watched her moving with majestic grace across the stage, irrepressible though trite reflections upon her early career passed through my mind. What audiences she has played before, in the days of the first empire! How many soldiers and statesmen, now numbered with the not-to-be-forgotten dead, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Individualists? The answer is 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 right or to the left. It is always ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... 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 ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... etc. the 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: ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... what I should find the world to be like, but I do know that when I looked out of the window for the first time it seemed to me that the scenery was rather commonplace, and the mountains which I could see in the distance, were not especially remarkable for grandeur. The rivers, too, seemed trite. That they should flow down-hill struck me as being nothing at all remarkable, for I could not for the life of me see how they could do otherwise, and when night came on and my nurse, Dinah, pointed out the moon and asked me if I did not think it was remarkable, I was so filled with impatience ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... word was his bond is to repeat one of the trite tributes to him. But it was nevertheless very true. Often in discussing a business arrangement with his representatives he ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Jews holding worship in their gutted Temple. Some ruffians broke into this church after the occupation, and wrote ribaldry in the Bible and hymn-book. Dr. Minnegerode dared not pray for the Confederate States, and his sermon was trite, based upon the text of the eleventh chapter of the Acts—"The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch." In the opening lesson, however, he aimed poison at the North, selecting the forty-fourth and following Psalms, commencing, "We have heard with our ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the original it is "fair"—a trite word—instead of "young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... him in consecrating their endeavours to 'sacred night.' There is really no connection between Shakespeare's theory of the supernatural and nocturnal sources of his rival's influence and Chapman's trite allusion to the current faith in the power of 'nightly familiars' over men's minds and lives, or Chapman's invitation to his literary comrades to honour Night with him. It is supererogatory to assume that Shakespeare had Chapman's phrases in his mind when alluding to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... literary work is time. The trite, the commonplace, and the irrelevant die and turn to dust. The vital lives. Schopenhauer began writing in his youth. Neglect, indifference and contempt were his portion until he was over fifty years of age. His passion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... us abandon the discussion of a principle now too trite, for humankind, at least in Europe, is satisfied that unlimited liberty is nowhere consistent with a properly-regulated state of society. I have touched lightly on the matter, only to give to my readers some idea of my conduct in my own country, where I began to tread a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... household primitive in their hours, as in every thing else, and I rose to take my leave. But I could not be altogether parted with yet. It seems that they had found me a most amusing guest; while, to my own conception, I had been singularly spiritless; but the little anecdotes which were trite to me had been novelties to them. Fashion has a charm even for philosophers; and the freaks and follies of the high-toned sons and daughters of fashion—who wore down my gentle mother's frame, drained my showy father's rental, and made ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... End, he indeed attempts to describe what it is, but is quite vague and perplex'd in his Description; and at last, instead of collecting his scatter'd Rays into a Focus, and exhibiting succinctly the clear Essence and Power of WIT, he drops the whole with a trite Compliment. ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... natural habitual blush, which was increased upon the least occasion, and 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... could I nould believe your tales and fables stale and trite, Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the dulld ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... in the name of all that is sublime and fundamental in republican principles, support and not perplex them in the hard and complex problem which they are appointed to solve. These are principles, which, however trite, need to be kept before us and practically sustained at a period when, as is often the case in long and tedious wars, the dispiriting influence of delays and occasional defeats work erroneous conclusions ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... depended upon its possession of the remarkable mineral springs in which the fashionable world has at different periods discerned so many healing and social virtues. The popular story of their discovery by the legendary King Bladud is too trite to need re-telling. The real history of Bath begins as early as A.D. 44, when it is known to have been a Roman station. Its Latin name was Aquae Sulis, Sul being a local divinity, whose name appears on several inscriptions in the Museum, and may have some connection with ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither when one was fifteen. To read the "Voices of the Night," in particular—those early pieces—is to be back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with a wide ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... science, remains a conservative in the other branches, to which he refuses to apply the positive method, and which he does not study with a critical spirit, but in which he contents himself with the easy and superficial repetition of trite commonplaces. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... 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," ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the great Pacific Ocean, that the natives look upon as the gulf that parts time from eternity, and that is to waft them to the spirits of their fathers? After all this, Mr. Hunter must find Mr. Owen and his parallellograms trite and flat, and will, we suspect, take an opportunity to ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow—I felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out across the grey wastes of the St. George's Channel. I am loth to use the trite metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange twist of things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being—the moment it showed through, the outer world, including my own self, had always greeted ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... very limited, for it is somewhat scarce, though a specimen may easily be procured of any dealer in coins for a few shillings. This bears the bust of the {84} Queen, with the legend ANNA DEI GRATIA—reverse, BRITANNIA around the trite figure of Britannia with the spear and olive-branch: the date 1714 in the exergue. Those with Peace in a car, Britannia standing with olive-branch and spear, or seated under an arch, are patterns; the second ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 66, February 1, 1851 • Various
... he more openly taxeth: 'As to the numerous treatises, essays, arts, &c., both in verse and prose, that have been written by the moderns on this ground-work, they do but hackney the same thoughts over again, making them still more trite. Most of their pieces are nothing but a pert, insipid heap of common-place. Horace has even, in his Art of Poetry, thrown out several things which plainly shew he thought an Art of Poetry was of no use, even while he ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... concentration of mind. Her fingers were stiff. Finally, she laid her pencil aside and read what she had written. It was a laboured introduction to the story, an attempt to give a picture of the times. She was only nineteen and a novice, but she knew that what she had written was rubbish. It was a trite synopsis of what she had read, of what everybody knew; and the English, although correct, was commonplace, the vocabulary cheap. She set her lips, tore it up, and began again. At the end of another hour she destroyed the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... his own; The plant by Socrates was sown; To Aristotle's 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... she had planted herself in all the revealed attraction of native beauty; and the capstern was in consequence hove with more than common eagerness and expedition. But the utmost care, one may readily believe, was requisite to keep these enchanted fellows in good order. It is a trite remark, that the imaginary anticipation of pleasure is seldom or ever equalled by the enjoyment of it. Independent of the causes which may account for such commonly experienced disappointment, it is ten to one in almost any case, but that in a world ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... economy of Providence every fragment of creation seems to unfold, as man progresses in the arts of life, unbounded capabilities of adaptation to his every want. We have, indeed, daily illustration of the truth of that trite and homely adage, that ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... through the rank blue vapor. Winter was coming, and he had not a shelter. He had not money enough to keep him long from starvation. He knew not how to obtain employment. He thought vaguely of wood-piles, of cutting winter fuel for people. His mind traveled in a trite strain of reasoning. Somehow wood-piles seemed the only available tasks ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... unfortunately, it doesn't stand assay. Reaction comes. We do better if we make our gift of blood as a matter of unalterable necessity. We make too much of it all, in any event. The vast evil of extended peace is the attachment of too great value to luxuries and to human life—trite, but true. We know, of course, that the world has progressed chiefly over the dead bodies of men and, yes, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... With the roll of his fat off the cliff. Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink, Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague And catches the not too pink, Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause Is the cause of community. Iterate, Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite: Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff: Yet always in measure, with bearing polite: The manner of one that would expiate His share in grandmotherly Laws, Which do the dark thing to destroy, Under aspect ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wholly efface the distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases, terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the actualities which it is the object ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... us that life is brief and death is sure, that light loves and ancient wines are good, that riches are burdensome, and enough is better than a feast, that country life is delightful, that old age comes on us apace, that our friends leave us sorrowing and our sorrow does not bring them back. Trite sayings no doubt; but embellished one and all with an adorable force and novelty at once sadly earnest and vividly exact; not too simple for the profound and not too artful for the shallow; consecrated ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell |
