toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

platitude
in a sentence

show 68 more with this conextual meaning
  • He used the same platitudes, such as don't struggle and it will be easier for you.†   (source)
  • Because—isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture —?†   (source)
  • Norman Brinker a legend in the industry, the founder of Bennigan's and Steak and Ale, the current owner of Chili's, a major donor to the Republican Party spoke to the conference in language that was simple, direct, and free of platitudes.†   (source)
  • I remember her telling me how sorry she was that my marriage was over, I remember losing my temper at her platitudes.†   (source)
  • He experienced a sudden anger at her: fatuous old witch with her mouth full of platitudes.†   (source)
  • Among philosophers this is so widely believed it's almost a platitude, but for him it's a revelation.†   (source)
  • After a time there came a sort of ruth to Johnnie for the poor creatures, furtive, stealing glances at each other, and answering her inquiries or Uncle Pros's with dry, evasive platitudes.†   (source)
  • Petrov found himself stumbling through politically acceptable platitudes in front of a half-dozen cameras and wishing the entire affair were the bad dream it seemed to be.†   (source)
  • We went through the required conversation, making sure to hit all the main points and platitudes.†   (source)
  • Now, don't ever waste my time with such sentimental platitudes again.†   (source)
  • I found that what I once considered empty platitudes are actually descriptions of fact.†   (source)
  • What in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service were to both John and Abigail Adams a lifelong creed.†   (source)
  • "More platitudes," Eugenides said.†   (source)
  • The fact that mass slaughters hadn't been prevented in places all over the world -- and weren't being prevented now -- didn't argue against these attempts to preserve the memories of former massacres and the hope they represented, that someday "Never Again" might seem like more than a pious, self-enhancing platitude.†   (source)
  • …There's dizzy queens and mad queens and lipstick queens and drag queens and macho queens and feather queens and disco queens and leather queens and tragic queens and magic queens and screaming queens and dreaming queens and attitude queens and platitude queens and hustle queens and muscle queens and pissy queens and sissy queens, black queens, white queens, left queens, right queens, red queens, dead queens, acid queens, speed queens, down queens, and weed queens, Wizard of Oz'd queens…†   (source)
  • "bursting the bonds of tyranny," and the like, may come across to this post-Freudian age as mawkish posturing, romantic sentimentalism, hollow platitudes.†   (source)
  • But this claim, itself hardly momentous, then opens onto something sadly like a forced march of the platitudes: We all like stories.†   (source)
  • In addition, it is a platitude by now that the Jew has found considerable fellowship among white Southerners because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb.†   (source)
  • In teachers' manuals, in the platitudes muttered by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in myself.†   (source)
  • He was impatient with men who refused to stop speaking platitudes, but it was against his faith in life to suppose such stubbornness proved stupidity.†   (source)
  • Dudorov's pious platitudes were in the spirit of the times.†   (source)
  • It was not a list of pleasing platitudes to be set lightly aside when expediency required it.†   (source)
  • One person fighting for the truth can disqualify for me the platitudes of centuries.†   (source)
  • I believe my honesty was much more effective than warnings or platitudes.†   (source)
  • What seems like bathos or platitudes to us were real pathos and convictions for them.†   (source)
  • In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.†   (source)
  • Instead of easy banter, we'd speak in platitudes and the magic would be gone, and I couldn't bear another discussion of the weather.†   (source)
  • " Now I believe in platitudes, when they serve, especially that battered and hard-worn antique, "Eternal vigilance is the pride of liberty.†   (source)
  • I sank lower and lower in my stall, and began to tune him out as one cancels sound with the dial of a radio, allowing my mind to capture drowsily only the plumpest and moistest platitudes.†   (source)
  • One of the few tolerable features of life at McGraw-Hill had been my view from the twentieth floor—a majestic prospect of Manhattan, of monolith and minaret and spire, that never failed to revive my drugged senses with all those platitudinous yet genuine spasms of exhilaration and sweet promise that have traditionally overcome provincial American youths.†   (source)
  • What word, what platitude, what comment might have stopped him?†   (source)
  • What word, what platitude, what comment of his had led Peter to this?†   (source)
  • After all, I was a writer, an artist, and it was a platitude by now that much of the world's greatest art had been achieved by dedicated men who, husbanding their energies, had not allowed some misplaced notion of the primacy of the groin to subvert grander aims of beauty and truth.†   (source)
  • Yes, platitudinously but truly, politics make strange bedfellows.†   (source)
  • This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul.†   (source)
  • The Enemy loves platitudes.†   (source)
  • For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them.†   (source)
  • The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had--and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a "great man", but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers.†   (source)
  • Even for his classroom he had no platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes.†   (source)
  • There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.†   (source)
  • It had been one of his platitudes that he was not afraid of death.†   (source)
  • If you think that I am going to return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken.†   (source)
  • Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.†   (source)
  • We call it War, and pass it by—but do not put me off with platitudes and conventions—come with me, come with me—realize it!†   (source)
  • This is wanting in the police report, where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter.†   (source)
  • If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I'm a militant Socialist.†   (source)
  • A few ordinary platitudes will do.†   (source)
  • This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.†   (source)
  • Once he dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue.†   (source)
  • Then Lord Decimus, who was a wonder on his own Parliamentary pedestal, turned out to be the windiest creature here: proposing happiness to the bride and bridegroom in a series of platitudes that would have made the hair of any sincere disciple and believer stand on end; and trotting, with the complacency of an idiotic elephant, among howling labyrinths of sentences which he seemed to take for high roads, and never so much as wanted to get out of.†   (source)
  • And how he swallowed my platitudes!†   (source)
  • Poor Isabel was doubtless not aware that many women would have uttered graceful platitudes to cover the working of their observation.†   (source)
  • The place, the occasion, the combination of people, signified more than lay on the surface; she would try to understand—she would not simply utter graceful platitudes.†   (source)
  • You'd never think of such a platitude all by yourself.†   (source)
  • It's a hypnopaedic platitude.†   (source)
  • He was more out of touch with her kind than he had ever been; he would have known what to say to her in the old days, feeling no pity at all, speaking with half a mind a platitude or two.†   (source)
  • It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly to the reality recognized by the general.†   (source)
  • In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude.†   (source)
  • …the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the…†   (source)
  • Finding the tone inappropriate to the sentiment he repeated his command in the spaced and considered rhythm with which his old master, Doctor Dohmler, could cast significance on the tritest platitude.†   (source)
  • He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage.†   (source)
  • In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must…†   (source)
  • Here were domestic oceans And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a guarded border, Gantlets—but not to fling, Thousands of old emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order— And tongues, that we might sing.†   (source)
  • His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer.†   (source)
  • "Yes, yes," said he, "I know the ancient platitude,—wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless.†   (source)
  • I heard myself speaking in reassuring platitudes.†   (source)
  • The American literature of "inspirational" platitude is enormous and almost unique.†   (source)
  • [Pg301] IX Miscellanea § 1 /Proverb and Platitude/—No people, save perhaps the Spaniards, have a richer store of proverbial wisdom than the Americans, and surely none other make more diligent and deliberate efforts to augment its riches.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)