Facile Quotes

#1. Ah me! how easy it is (how much all have experienced it) to indulge in brave words in another person's trouble.
[Lat., Hei mihi, quam facile est (quamvis hic contigit omnes),
Alterius lucta fortia verba loqui!]

Ovid

#2. Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.

Henry Ward Beecher

#3. Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

Jerry Garcia

#4. Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.

Richard Dawkins

#5. Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

George Edward Woodberry

#6. The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.

Leo Strauss

#7. Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.

Faith Baldwin

#8. You might believe a good man easily, a great man with pleasure. -Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter

Tacitus

#9. A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#10. I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."

Colin Firth

#11. Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself
sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the
grains that make me what I am.

Virginia Woolf

#12. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Allan Bloom

#13. It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

Peter York

#14. Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

Emile Zola

#15. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

Barbara Kingsolver

#16. Sun Tzu said: The art of war recognises nine varieties of ground: (1) Dispersive ground; (2) facile ground; (3) contentious ground; (4) open ground; (5) ground of intersecting highways; (6) serious ground; (7) difficult ground; (8) hemmed-in ground; (9) desperate ground.

Sun Tzu

#17. To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.
[Lat., Simul flare sorbereque haud facile
Est: ego hic esse et illic simul, haud potui.]

Plautus

#18. It's easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that's really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality.

Lisa Yuskavage

#19. As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

Will Self

#20. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colourful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#21. Distinction doesn't consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those whose are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report

Thomas Hardy

#22. [T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#23. They do not easily rise whose abilities are repressed by poverty at home.
[Lat., Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstat
Res angusta domi.]

Juvenal

#24. Better to suffer the loneliness of the cold throne room than endure the isolation to be found within the crowds of facile courtiers.

Stuart Hill

#25. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

Carl Sagan

#26. There was something facile and shallow about male beauty, she thought.

William Boyd

#27. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

George Santayana

#28. It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

Charles Duhigg

#29. It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

Charlotte Bronte

#30. The unschooled European mind, inclined to rational reduction, to pigeonholing and simplification, readily pushes everything African into a single bag and is content with facile stereotypes.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#31. I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#32. The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

Robert Dessaix

#33. Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.

Neal Stephenson

#34. If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.'

Robert M. Gates

#35. All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

Umberto Eco

#36. I'm a slow learner. When people are so talented or facile at picking up an instrument and playing covers, like Yo La Tengo, I admire that. But I could never do that.

Kim Gordon

#37. He inspired no distrust; his good nature seemed all-pervading; he had the air of one who lavishes disinterested counsel, and ever so little exalts himself with his facile exuberance of speech. The Whirlpool

George Gissing

#38. Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Don DeLillo

#39. Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

George Gaylord Simpson

#40. It is too facile to say that the way to follow Tao is to simply go along with the flow of life. Sometimes, like the carp, we must know when to go it alone.

Ming-Dao Deng

#41. Det ille veniam facile, cui venia est opus - the one who needs pardon should readily grant it

Seneca.

#42. As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).

Kenny Smith

#43. He was in a full possession of facile, refined and agreeable intellect which he used to maintain his power and strengthen and increase his popularity.

Leo Tolstoy

#44. I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

Robert Rauschenberg

#45. You can never replace someone you love like that. Eventually the memories won't be so hard on you. With time, the memories will make you smile and you will be grateful for having them.

N.M. Facile

#46. A man is a penis-wrinkle when calling him a dickhead would be a compliment.

N.M. Facile

#47. Bad things open your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before.

N.M. Facile

#48. Whip 'em out boys. We'll measure them right here and now.

N.M. Facile

#49. This isn't over, Sylvia. I'll leave you now, but I'm watching. I will not let that bastard hurt you." I said this just as I reached the door. As she shut the door I heard a strangled whisper, "No, you're perfectly capable of doing that on your own.

N.M. Facile