This stickler for etiquette was absolutely shocked; he held up his hands, began a declamation on the rules of evidence, and uttered so many Pharisaical platitudes that I only escaped annihilation by a hair's-breadth.

Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.

It was provoking, no doubt, to be kept talking platitudes to a silly old woman in the garden, while every moment drifted his heart's treasure farther and farther into the uncertainty he scarcely dared to contemplate.

And the homely dialect does undoubtedly naturalize the characters of his eclogues, and disguise the time-honoured platitudes that they repeat from their learned predecessors.

Let me warmly urge anybody with so mistaken an ambition, instead of painfully distilling poor platitudes of his own, to translate the shrewd saws of the wise browed Goethe.

From one scene, however, I cannot withhold my tribute of admirationthat in which William, alone, brokenhearted, and almost crazed with the ruin of everything that made up his life, creeps home to find his old associates still glibly echoing the platitudes in which he once believed.

It is always a rather foolish controversy, and I have no intention of entering into it, but its prevalence makes it desirable to emphasize a platitude.

Crossing the court, he stooped to kiss the shoulder of our host, who introduced him as his eldest son, the husband of one or two of the little pale wives with whom I had been exchanging platitudes.

But we need not follow the platitudes of Tamerlane and his companions, nor weep at the sententious wickedness of Bajazet, that ungrateful sovereign typifying Louis Quatorze, King of France, Prince of Gentlemen, and Right Royal Hater of His Protestant Majesty William of Orange.

He hated conversational platitudes and established conventions, and his nieces had endeared themselves to him more by their native originality and frank disregard of ordinary feminine limitations than in any other way.

He was a sort of artesian well of a man, and could not help spouting platitudes, that was all.

It is sad for a respectable functionary, who would ask for nothing better than to be servile or arrogant according to circumstances, to be in danger of lavishing his platitudes on a person who is perhaps going to rot forever in exile, and who is nothing more than a rascal, or to risk being insolent to a vagabond of a postscript who is capable of coming back a conqueror in six months' time, and of becoming the Government in his turn.

He had beyond most men the art of "making a platitude endurable by making it pompous."

They talked for more than half an hour, and Margaret did not even notice that he had not once alluded to her profession, and that she had so far forgotten herself for the time as not to miss the usual platitudes about her marvellous voice and her astoundingly successful career.

" Gross was an impressive talker, due to the fact that he plagiarized office platitudes; he ran on pompously, dropping trade mottoes and shop-worn bits of philosophy until young Mitchell, unable longer to endure the light of admiration he saw in Miss Harris's eyes, rolled up his napkin to the size of a croquette and interrupted by noisily shoving back his chair and muttering under his breath:

Being very susceptible to flattery, her praise of my production won a ready assent; but when I read her platitudes I was sorry I had changed, and still more so in the denouement.

" The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude are surely the only people for whom they are true.

Her caresses had no spiritual fervor, and her benedictions were unmeaning platitudes.

Later in the day, following other party leaders, Herr Haase, spokesman for the Socialists, got up in the House, voiced a few harmless platitudes about Socialist opposition to war on principle, and then pledged the party's 111 votes solidly to the War Credits for which the Government was asking.

Don't try to find things all askew; Don't be afraid of what is new; Nor banish as unsound, untrue, A platitude.

Peter was accustomed to write polite platitudes to his parent, and had presumably not intended that his letter to the canon should be actually read by Sir Timothy, when he had asked that the contents of it should be broken to him.

What is it that the author called the platitudes of marriage?

Voltaire's acts of imprudence were destined more than once to force him into leaving Paris; he all his life preserved such a horror of prison, that it made him commit more than one platitude.