Top 98 Platitudes Quotes & Sayings

To me, when I think of New Age, I think of crystals and rainbows and platitudes.

Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck.

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.

Such platitudes as "If you believe it, it will happen," "If you give 100%, you get 100%," "Good things happen to good people" people utter when we don't know what else to say. There's comfort in platitudes, and every so often they're accurate, but mainly they're hollow words. It's a sign of how little we're able to directly address the world around us. The language of the times reveals our avoidance.

To a certain extent, platforms are platitudes that you test when you get to govern. You have to run those priorities up against the opposition and decide what's most important.

Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.

The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.

Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.

There's nothing to Obama - nothing but platitudes. When it's time to get to the substance, we get contradictions and confusions. We don't think that he knows what he's talking about because it's true: He doesn't.

As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark Card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.

Forget the empty platitudes; your star employee is not a 'godsend.' They are a person deserving of your not infrequent acknowledgment and worthy of appreciation and respect.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes

To all the self-righteous defenders of 'freedom of speech' who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT's journalistic work in the U.S.: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes.

Without a rigorous, self-critical discourse, one risks lapsing into pious platitudes and unexamined generalizations.

To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.

The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when [Mormon] Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials.

Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?

Authority is permission to spew platitudes to people below you.

The days of a politician talking platitudes are over, and if it wasn't for Mr. Trump in this race, people would have allowed politicians to have a pass in talking platitudes about things that will never be accomplished.

Our society is just less open to platitudes, more open to stories.

We should resist the temptation to identify our religious convictions with the platform of a party or the platitudes of favored politicians.

The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.

Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, timid policies, offer today a path to safety.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.

Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.

The criticism of the Democrats in the past is that they were too timid. They ran on consultant-driven platitudes and didn't offer a compelling enough vision.

Beto O'Rourke speaks in annoyingly pert platitudes like some mediocre yoga instructor who promises to 'build a movement.'

Christie led the way - with a bulldozer. The governor is blunt, brash, and self-consciously authentic, the antithesis to what turns off today's voters: flip-flopping politicians who speak in poll-tested platitudes. Yes, he's the anti-Romney.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievment.

I find talking about acting very boring, having to come out with platitudes about how terribly nice everyone is. I would much rather just do it.

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.

Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.

Crises like the Mirai botnet can't be prevented by vague calls to protect our cybernetworks or platitudes about working with private industry. We need to be able to force recalls on consumer devices with massive security vulnerabilities.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Principles without programs are platitudes.

Platitudes are generally the oldest and profoundest of truths.

The stream of empty platitudes ordering troop worship is especially ironic considering the abysmal treatment veterans receive once they return home.

Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.

The Chautauqua Institution is truly a national treasure. It is a place for contemplation and a place for reflection, a place where platitudes and slogans can be set aside and be replaced by thoughtfulness and introspection.

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.

Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in the bottom of the barrel, in dark tunnels.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.

Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

Those who misrepresent the normal experiences of life, who decry being controversial, who shun risk, are the enemies of the American way of life, whatever the piety of their vocal professions and the patriotic flavor of their platitudes.

Speakers are not supposed to waste time on platitudes, but the capacity of this generation for ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the negative and the obscure is immense.

The theatre has always been to me a place where beautiful lies are told, and playwrighting the orchestration of platitudes around a central flaw in logic or a ridiculous idea. Acting — the disguise and impersonation — is an art of deception.