Top Trite Quotes

Browse top 64 famous quotes and sayings about Trite by most favorite authors.

Favorite Trite Quotes

1. "If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are trite, I admit, but if the play had no value the whole universe wouldn't know it by heart"
Author: Alfred De Musset
2. "We would never have met," he explained, voice dropping to a husky note. "I would have gone about my life and not thought I was missing anything. You would have – you would have painted obsessively, all those transformative images, and I would be someone unimagined and unknown, and I cannot decide whether it would be trite to call that a tragedy or if I should resent you for making this – all this death – somehow bearable, tolerable for the tenuous joy I have gained. You steal my anger and leave me dazed."He stopped, took a shaking breath, then laughed."I sound like Pan's understudy, failing to channel Shakespeare. There's no way to do more than guess what would have happened if Fisher Charteris and Madeleine Cost met one day in a world which had never feared dust, any more than we can be certain of surviving two years, or two days. I can't speak to what-ifs, but I know I will always be glad to have been here in this moment with you."
Author: Andrea K. Höst
3. "I was not really angry: I felt for him all the time, and longed to be reconciled; but I determined he should make the first advances, or at least show some signs of an humble and contrite spirit, first; for, if I began, it would only minister to his self-conceit, increase his arrogance, and quite destroy the lesson I wanted to give him."
Author: Anne Brontë
4. "Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time."
Author: Anthony Kiedis
5. "Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!"
Author: Anton Chekhov
6. "Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance."
Author: Beryl Markham
7. "Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather. This story is the fictionalized version of the real diary. The thoughts more or less trite pedantic have been curtailed, the happenings (for obvious reasons) sometimes changed, but the weather remains practically intact. ...So step out of the yellowed diary, Linnie Colsworth,.... Recreate yourself from the fading ink of it's pages and help us understand something of the stanch heart that beat under those hard little stays, bidding you defy convention three-quarters of a century ago."
Author: Bess Streeter Aldrich
8. "We are so little, that if God should manifest His greatness without condescension, we should be trampled under His feet; but God, who must stoop to view the skies, and bow to see what angels do, turns His eye yet lower, and looks to the lowly and contrite, and makes them great."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon
9. "The tender heart, the broken and contrite spirit, are to me far above all the joys that I could ever hope for in this vale of tears."
Author: Charles Simeon
10. "In human studies, black cohosh has been found to decrease hot flashes associated with menopause. Unlike conventional estrogen effects on individuals predisposed to breast cancer, black cohosh has been shown in laboratory studies to inhibit cancer cells. Most studies used doses of 20–80 mg twice daily, providing 4–8 mg triterpene glycosides for up to six months. Melatonin—This hormone is produced in the pineal gland that, among other functions, helps sleep. Melatonin levels decline with age and may lead to the sleep disturbances common during menopause. Melatonin has been shown in laboratory studies to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells. Melatonin acts as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant in the brain and other tissues like the intestine. Studies show that low melatonin levels increase breast cancer risk in women. So if you are having trouble sleeping consider 3–6 mg of melatonin before bed. It may boost your immune system and help you sleep."
Author: Daniel G. Amen
11. "I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman's window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It's right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring."
Author: David Wong
12. "The glamorous life is a facade, a frauda farce of frivolous triteThe storybook is blank insideChivalry has died"
Author: Donato DiCristino
13. "The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!"
Author: Evelyn Waugh
14. "The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite."
Author: Fulton J. Sheen
15. "Mid-December then and still no snow. Strange Chicago crèches appeared in front yards: Baby Jesus, freed from the manger, leaned against a Santa sled half his height. He was crouching, as if about to jump; he wore just a diaper. Single strings of colored lights lay across bushes, as if someone had hatefully thrown them there. We patched the roof of a Jamaican immigrant whose apartment had nothing in it but hundreds of rags, spread across the floor and hanging from interior clotheslines. Nobody asked why. As we left, she offered us three DietRite Colas."
Author: George Saunders
16. "The Silver Key:I.In the first daysof his bondagehe had turnedto the gentle churchlyfaith endeared to himby the naivetrust of his fathers,for thence stretchedmystic avenueswhich seemed to promiseescape from life.II.Only on closer viewdid he mark the starvedfancy and beauty, thestale and prosytriteness, and theowlish gravityand grotesqueclaims of solid truthwhich reigned bore somelyand overwhelminglyamong mostof its professors;or feelto the fullthe awkwardnesswith whichit sought to keepalive as literalfact the outgrownfears and guessesof a primalrace confronting"
Author: H.P. Lovecraft
17. "It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen
18. "It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions."
Author: Hermann Hesse
19. "You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that."
Author: Iain M. Banks
20. "I wish I worried about my uncle's opinions, and had problems to work out with my mom. Hell, I'd settle for knowing what her voice sounded like." I put a hand on her shoulder. "Trite but true—you don't know what you have until it's gone. People change. The world changes. And sooner or later you lose people you care about. If you don't mind some advice from someone who doesn't know much about families, I can tell you this: Don't take yours for granted. It might feel like all of them will always be there. But they won't."
Author: Jim Butcher
21. "As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can't be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy. It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit. Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization."
Author: John C. Bogle
22. "...some say Twitter seems trite and lacks weightiness - but in actuality, it lends itself to poetry - it can be very compressed and intense..."
Author: John Geddes
23. "I've got passion, and for people who don't, I make them see how trite their lives are."
Author: John Singleton
24. "Bartimaeus: "A small piece of advice," I said "it isn't wise to be rude to someone bigger than you, especially when they've just trapped you under a boulder."Imp: "You can stick your advice up....""This brief pause replaces a short, censored episode, characterized by bad language and some sadly necessary violence. When we pick up the story again, everything is as before, except that I am perspiring slightly and the contrite imp is the model of cooperation." Bartimaeus: "I'll ask again: who is Rupert Deveraeux?"Imp: "He's the British Prime Minister, oh Most Bounteous and Merciful one."
Author: Jonathan Stroud
25. "What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God.""I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
Author: Joseph Heller
26. "Two hours later he was ready to kill her. Even his outraged mind, however, recognized that murder was not a viable option, and so he contented himself with devising various plans to make her suffer.Torture was probably too trite, he decided, and he didn't have the stomach to use it on a female. Although ... He looked over at the person in the baggy breeches. She appeared to be smiling as she lugged the stones. She was no ordinary female.He shook his head. There were other ways to make her miserable. A snake in her bed perhaps? No, the blasted woman probably liked snakes. A spider? Didn't everyone hate spiders?"
Author: Julia Quinn
27. "I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I'm sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character."
Author: Justina Chen
28. "If you'll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I'll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, ‘to my better half,' but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don't you?"
Author: Ken Kesey
29. "You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn't it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. "She wrote about herself through the lens of her father."The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit."
Author: L.L. Barkat
30. "It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you'd shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher."
Author: Liane Moriarty
31. "In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial."
Author: Marya Hornbacher
32. "On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry her chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again. Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!"
Author: Michael Chabon
33. "Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good."
Author: Nick Hornby
34. "Rather surprisingly, to anyone who is most familiar with textbook mitochondria, many simple single-celled eukaryotes have mitochondria that operate in the absence of oxygen. Instead of using oxygen to burn up food, these ‘anaerobic' mitochondria use other simple compounds like nitrate or nitrite. In most other respects, they operate in a very similar fashion to our own mitochondria, and are unquestionably related. So the spectrum stretches from aerobic mitochondria like our own, which are dependent on oxygen, through ‘anaerobic' mitochondria, which prefer to use other molecules like nitrates, to the hydrogenosomes, which work rather differently but are still related."
Author: Nick Lane
35. "It sounds like something on a very trite T-shirt, but life is what happens."
Author: Nigella Lawson
36. "He stepped back with exaggerated courtesy. But when I walked past him, he swatted my rump. Hard enough to sting."You need to be more careful," he growled. "Keep interfering in my business and you might get hurt."I said sweetly as I continued to Jesse's room, "The last man who swatted me like that is rotting in his grave.""I have no doubt about it." His voice was more satisfied then contrite."
Author: Patricia Briggs
37. "The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play."
Author: Patrick Marber
38. "It sounds so trite but in relationships, you have to communicate."
Author: Peter Krause
39. "The mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
40. "He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive."
Author: Richard Yates
41. "Very well! It shall be as you say. But my son, pray this works.I am praying. I'm talking to you, right?Oh...yes. Good point. Amphitrite - incoming!"
Author: Rick Riordan
42. "The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy."
Author: Robert E. Lee
43. "No matter how you disguise this trite bullshit, it's my life, Jeff. Penned in an awkward manner. It's things I didn't want to see in black-and-white print. You're lucky after three hundred years that I've mellowed. In my human days, I'd have slit your throat, pulled your tongue through the opening, and left you tied to a tree for the wolves to eat. (Rafael)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon
44. "On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny. "
Author: Sloane Crosley
45. "It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments."
Author: Susan Vreeland
46. "Then it hit me and I grinned at him. "You want to suck my dick!"His face grew redder. "You don't have to say it like that," he grumbled.I almost felt contrite. "I'm sorry. How about you want to make love to my member with your oral cavity? Or how about you want to fellate me until I let loose my love juice? Is that better?"
Author: T.J. Klune
47. "THE CAUSE of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true."
Author: Ulysses S. Grant
48. "I know it sounds trite but I wanted to make a difference. Political debates with my father had been fraught because he was uncompromising and explosive but if he taught me one thing it was to air my views."
Author: Vince Cable
49. "This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you're facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist."
Author: Warren Rudman
50. "There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer."
Author: Yanni

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Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?"
Author: Christopher Hitchens

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