Latitude Quotes

1. "PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

2. "The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—universe."
Author: Annie Dillard

3. "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."
Author: Arthur Hays Sulzberger

4. "The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses."
Author: C.S. Lewis

5. "Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!"
Author: Charles Baudelaire

6. "From the days when it was always summer in Eden,to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one way Charles Darnay's way the way of the love of a woman"
Author: Charles Dickens

7. "Cynicism is what happens when skepticism is given too much latitude."
Author: Chris Brady

8. "The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal."
Author: Colette

9. "The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

10. "If I were to envy any persons on this planet, it would be mountain hermits. You often hear old platitudes such as, 'Speak out. Be heard.' On the contrary, a breath of fresh air would be something like: 'Silence, think for at least 15 minutes, and then maybe speak out."
Author: Criss Jami

11. "Cable had a latitude to move which created less censorship and bestowed upon the artists, the writers and the creators, more liberty to create their shows."
Author: Daniel Gillies

12. "Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little "decision latitude." Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it's another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don't have much of it."
Author: Daniel H. Pink

13. "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. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep"
Author: Edith Wharton

14. "Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in dark tunnels."
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

15. "When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes."
Author: Ella Maillart

16. "In face of this modern nihilism, Christians are often lacking in courage. We tend to give the impression that we will hold on to the outward forms whatever happens, even if God really is not there. But the opposite ought to be true of us, so that people can see that we demand the truth of what is there and that we are not dealing merely with platitudes. In other words, it should be understood that we take this question of truth and personality so seriously that if God were not there we would be among the first of those who had the courage to step out of the queue."
Author: Francis August Schaeffer

17. "I remarked constantly, just at sunset, in these latitudes, that the eastern horizon was brilliantly illuminated with a kind of mock sunset. This in a short time disappeared, to be soon succeeded by another similar in character, but more faint."
Author: George Grey

18. "The Dandy is the highest form of existence attainable by the human form. His life is exclusively dedicated to dressing exquisitely, parading about the fashionable boroughs of splendid cities and and holding forth at his club, where he dispenses witticism as readily as the vulgaroisie utters its banal platitudes. The only species of 'work' this singular Chap might engage in would consist of discussing buttonhole stitching with his tailor and performing his ablutions until the morning has been well aired enough for him to step into it."
Author: Gustav Temple And Vic Darkwood

19. "Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

20. "Who am I? What am I doing here? I fall between the cold walls of human malevolence, a white figure fluttering, sinking down through the cold lake, a mountain of skulls above me. I settle down to the cold latitudes, the chalk steps washed with indigo. The earth in its dark corridors knows my step, feels a foot abroad, a wing stirring, a gasp and a shudder."
Author: Henry Miller

21. "I am a dull fellow...my person reeks, my conversation consists of insipid platitudes."
Author: Jack Vance

22. "One becomes sated with platitudes no less than honey, so that one often breaks another's bones in one's vexation."
Author: Jack Vance

23. "You mere device," he gnarled. "You platitude! Your Gollux ex machina!"
Author: James Thurber

24. "The Danes don't take themselves seriously at all and look for the joke in everything. Us Scots are on the same line of latitude and have the same amount of light, which may be why we have a similar sense of humour."
Author: Jamie Sives

25. "...invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland's cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at hight latitudes poses more diverses challenges that does a seasonally constant tropical climate"
Author: Jared Diamond

26. "They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words."
Author: Joan Didion

27. "Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed."
Author: Joan Didion

28. "She had smiled her way through the births andhad offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the momentshe'd sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacyknew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when theywant to eat and You can't hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: Thischild you've been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You're strangers now; you'll bestrangers years from now."
Author: Jodi Picoult

29. "It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs."
Author: John Brunner

30. "Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego."
Author: John Cheever

31. "...I do not tell you often enough, dear Mother, how very grateful I am that I am yours. It is a rare parentwho would offer a child such latitude and understanding. It is an even rarer one who calls a daughterfriend. I do love you, dear Mama."
Author: Julia Quinn

32. "Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—" (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) "—yes, that's about the right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)"
Author: Lewis Carroll

33. "As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the TajMahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunateconclusion —usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling ofsome substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his lastbook, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossibleto rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You mustgo home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine,without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudesand latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacularview in front of you."
Author: Marisha Pessl

34. "There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights."
Author: Mark Twain

35. "Ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas."
Author: Martin Cohen

36. "I write a few lines in haste to say that I am safe—and well advanced on my voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land, perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits: my men are bold and apparently firm of purpose, nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing, appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected."
Author: Mary Shelley

37. "Remember, Peter: you are some hybrid of friend and hired help. You have latitude, but you can't get uppity."
Author: Michael Cunningham

38. "By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words."
Author: Michael Richardson

39. "What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?"
Author: Norman Douglas

40. "What he has instead of a being, I thought, is blandness- the guy's radiant with it. He has devised for himself and incognito, and the incognito has become him. Several times during the meal I didn't think I was going to make it, didn't think I'd get to dessert if he was going to keep praising his family and praising his family...until I began to wonder if it wasn't that he was incognito but that he was mad. Something was on top of him that had called a halt to him. Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything."
Author: Philip Roth

41. "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievment."
Author: Richard J. Daley

42. "Leadership obeys the principle of Hooke's law to the very bone. It explains:When an elastic material is stretched, it returns to its original position. But when it's over stretched beyond its limit point, it loses its elasticity and becomes plastic, and later cuts or breaks.As a leader, in your leadership disposition, it behoves of you to acquaint yourself with this very leadership principle that edges forward. It's however, a human nature to adopt to an environment, so, leaders are humans, they tend to have this rapore with their followers which is somewhat a must needed. But the ability for such one to return and recollect to knowing his boundary makes a good leader. A phenomenon whereby he becomes drunk of platitudes, then it comes to a time where they (followers) dictate for him. And even sought and suggest plans without his consent or knowing, it has gotten to the point of plastic and break respectively."
Author: Richmond Akhigbe

43. "Percy says be talked to a Nereid in Charleston Harbor!""Good for him!" Leo yelled back. "The Nereid said we should seek help from Chiron's brothers.""What does that mean? The Party Ponies?" Leo had never met Chiron's crazy centaur relatives, but he'd heard rumors of Nerf sword-fights, root beer-chugging contests, and Super Soakers filled with pressurized whipped cream. "Not sure," Annabeth said. "But I've got coordinates. Can you input latitude and longitude in this thing?""I can input star charts and order you a smoothie, if you want. Of course I can do latitude and longitude!"
Author: Rick Riordan

44. "The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. 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. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow"
Author: Robert M. Pirsig

45. "Act'. How many good people do you really know? I discount those who mouth out platitudes for the edification of the young, and who truly are 'good', whatever that means?"What a strange subject, and from such a strange person!"Everyone I know is a mixture, some with more good than bad, and it varies on different days,"
Author: Sherwood Smith

46. "Assail me not with noble policy, for I care not at all for platitude. And surrender such tedious detail to greater minds than mine and nimbler tongues, singular in their purpose and resolveand presuming to speak for everyman."
Author: Steve Earle

47. "The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time."
Author: Terry Eagleton

48. "Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise?Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means.And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in platitudes.True beauty grips your gut and squeezes your lungs, and makes you see with utmost clarity exactly what is before you.True wisdom then steps in, to interpret, illuminate, and form a life-altering insight."
Author: Vera Nazarian

49. "It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state."
Author: William H. Seward

50. "Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality ...though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]"
Author: Winston Churchill

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