Empty Phrases Quotes

It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ''weasel words.'' When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ''weasel word'' after another there is nothing left of the other.

The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless.

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

The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

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

When the ancient Masters said, "If you want to be given everything, give everything up," they weren't using empty phrases. Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.

For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

So there's nothing more vulgar than the sound of someone saying, God Bless America, someone who doesn't really believe it, but he thinks it will make him look good to other people. I think it's the most nauseating spectacle.

Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.

People are just repeating mantras like, 'get Brexit done,' 'strong and stable,' 'dither and delay'. There must be a way of satirizing it, and I long to see it, but it's gone beyond 'The Thick of It.'

It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It's in this smithy that our maturity is forged.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

We all know that little words or phrases can mean a lot, yet so few of us know just what to say. Phrases, such as 'chin up,' or 'it could be worse,' usually have the opposite effect; they feel tired and impersonal, even dismissive.