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More "Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books



... words would be changed, and then whole sentences, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood, because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy

... a dress-suit; but in the matter of collars and cravats and shirts he knew the last word. But why should he wish to wear that mournfully conventional suit in which we are supposed to enjoy ourselves? She had told him not to bother about dress. Was it that very nonsense he dreaded, insidiously attacking the redoubts ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... all the untrained impulses and natural instincts of animals, there is surprisingly little sexual immorality among the tribes. It seems that the women are naturally chaste. For there is no conventional standard among their own people by which they are judged. If an unmarried squaw has a child, there are deploring clucks, but the girl's parents care tenderly for the little one and its advent makes no difference ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... for years one sees a family cover themselves over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and preserve the real relations of its members a secret from every eye! How often, too, have I remarked that, the more impenetrable (and therefore the more decorous) is the cloak, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... one operand in the accumulator. After the subroutine has been executed, the accumulator contains the answer. Thus floating point numbers are essentially handled as regular logical works. The format of the number allows magnitude comparisons to be made by conventional arithmetic as bit 0 is the sign of the number, bits 1 to 9 the exponent, and the remaining 26 bits, together with the sign bit, the mantissa in ones complement arithmetic. The arithmetic subroutines are: add, subtract, multiply, divide, ...
— Preliminary Specifications: Programmed Data Processor Model Three (PDP-3) - October, 1960 • Digital Equipment Corporation

... on our part could induce Her Majesty's Government to abandon, constitute such an undoubted and unjust attack on the independence of the South African Republic that no other course is left to this State than honourably to abide by its Conventional Agreements entered into with that Republic. On behalf of this Government, therefore, I beg to notify that, compelled thereto by the action of Her Majesty's Government, they intend to carry out the instructions of the Volksraad as set forth in the last ...
— Selected Official Documents of the South African Republic and Great Britain • Various

... of this country has taught me that its conventional gardeners are always jolly, and always three in number. Whether that conventionality has reference to the Three Graces, or to those very significant letters, L., S., D., I do not know. Those mystic letters are, however, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... millionaires made their appearance; cottages began to arise upon the rocks; a small steam-yacht plied like a water-bug between the different islands, and the place became continually more fashionable and conventional. Whittier, feeling that he did not belong to this new order of things, retired to a quiet little inn at West Ossipee, in the ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... of the high-wrought and conventional Elizabethan Pastoralism, which it would be ludicrous to criticise on the ground of the unshepherdlike or unreal character of some images suggested. Stanza 6 was probably inserted by ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... marriage, in a revolt of purity against sexual licence, and moreover effecting the change by force of arms! Bachofen would seem to have been touched with the Puritan spirit. I am convinced also that he understood very little of the nature of woman. Conventional morality has always acted on the side of the man, not the woman. The clue is, indeed, given in the woman's closer connection with the home, and in the idea that "she raises herself by the recognition of her motherhood." But the facts are capable of an entirely different interpretation. It will ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... born of plural marriage before January, 1896. The solemn benignity of the concession touched me, as it must have touched many, to the very heart of gratitude. By it, ten thousand children were taken from the outer darkness of this world's conventional exclusion and placed within the honored relations of mankind. It was a tribute to the purity and sincerity of the Mormon women who had borne the cross of plural marriage, believing that God had commanded their suffering. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... now began to gather, and soon the double parlor held an assemblage of twenty-five or thirty persons. They formed a picturesque group: conventional but graceful in dress; animated in movement; full of good-natured laughter, but quite un-American in the beautiful modulation of their speaking tones; chiefly noticeable, however, to a stranger, in the vast variety of color in skin, which imparted to the throng a ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... pale, thin man, with one of those engaging and not uncommon faces which, in mould of feature, in mildness of expression, and still more in the cut of hair and beard, bear so marked a likeness to the conventional Christ-portrait: this neighbour looked on with only a languid interest, which seemed unable to get the upper hand of melancholy thoughts. Maurice, who believed his feelings shared by all about him, was chilled ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... it is true, a limit to this tendency to uniformity. The Leech or Doctor preserved his character intact: his darker habiliments, peculiar hat, and the bottle of physic slung under his arm, could never be mistaken. And the same might be said of the conventional figure of Father Christmas, with his gigantic club, an older man, who accompanied the band as general protector in long night journeys from parish to parish, and was bearer of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... about one o'clock. Two hours later two prospectors, in conventional blue shirts and trousers, each with a pack over his back, were seen in the neighborhood of Scott's Flat. They excited no suspicion, as no one at Scott's Flat had heard anything about the hold-up; and even if news had come, there was nothing suspicious in the appearance of ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall

... the only yadoya I have been at from which there has been any view. The villages are nearly always in the valleys, and the best rooms are at the back, and have their prospects limited by the paling of the conventional garden. If it were not for the fleas, which are here in legions, I should stay longer, for the view of the Aidzu snow is delicious, and, as there are only two other houses, one can ramble without ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... following Sunday at noon, and was received by both husband and wife for the conventional few minutes. Being the official holiday, it was recognised as the correct day for men to pay formal visits, and by an unwritten law, at the warmest hour in ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... of Slafe, still solemnly recording the event, camera before him in the position of present arms, did not sober my intoxication, though circumspection caused me to act in a more conventional way. I freed him from his harness, for he was too busy taking views of the grass, the sky, the animals and me to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... the moonlight at the edge of the wood and the accident of our position made me wonder if Jervaise's soul also hesitated between some gloomy prison of conventional success and the freedom of beautiful desires. I could find no words, however, to press that speculation and instead I attempted, rather nervously, to point the way towards what I regarded as the natural ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... accordance with the peace agreement, the Palestinian Authority is not permitted conventional military forces; there are, however, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... state and he could without flinching tell how Alexander waded over his knees in blood; but rather than take off his coat where the world would have seen him he would have died. He was just that modest and conventional. He had to come to his classes through the back of the campus up the hill; and they do say that one day, when half a dozen of the Kappa Kap Pajama girls were sitting on the low stone wall at the foot of the hill swinging their feet, he cruised about the horizon for a quarter ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... is the only thing that matters, and this cannot be achieved by adhering to conventional canons." It is unfortunate that this variant rests on very slight authority, for the sense yielded is certainly much more satisfactory. Napoleon, as we know, according to the veterans of the old school whom he defeated, won his battles by violating ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu

... facts; and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved mosaics of the north[152] transept, executed very certainly not long after the event had taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of the Bayeux tapestry, and showing, in a conventional manner, the interior of the church, as it then was, filled by the people, first in prayer, then in thanksgiving, the pillar standing open before them, and the Doge, in the midst of them, distinguished by his crimson ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... accepted on trust, especially when, as in this case, it is by implication self-arrogated. The modesty of this thaumaturgic traveller in confining the execution of his detailed scrutiny of a whole community to the moderate progression of some conventional vehicle, drawn by some conventional quadruped or the other, does injustice to powers which, if possessed at all, might have compassed the same achievement in the swifter transit of an express train, or, better still perhaps, from the empyrean elevation of a balloon! Yet is Mr. Froude ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... no case to become parties to a regular correspondence. He is a great letter-writer himself, but never answers an epistle, unless it contain queries as to matters of fact, or be an invitation to a ball or a dinner,—unless, in a word, real, not what he considers conventional politeness requires; in which event, his reply is despatched at once. Under all other circumstances, he ignores the last missive from him or her to whom his envelope is addressed. He studiously frames his own communications ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... the butler panting up as fast as his short legs and red nose would permit. He would have stopped to question Donal, who hastened past him, and in the refuge of his own room, sat down to think. Had his conventional dignity been with him a matter of importance, he would have left the castle the moment he got his things together; but he thought much more of Davie, and ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... Paper with a conventional pattern painted or printed on it may be used for end papers. If such a design is simple, such as a sprig repeated all over, or an arrangement of stars or dots, it may look very well; but over elaborate end papers, ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell

... tenderness, das Zartlichkeit." It made him sad to see Liebchen dead, that was full of sensibility, and Veronica come back with dignity, she being a conventional hen and ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... north were wild and almost lawless places, abounding in desperate characters, ready to shoot on the slightest provocation. But here all was order, and it was little different from one of the many small conventional towns in Eastern Canada. There were several up-to-date stores, a large post office, bank, churches, and comfortable dwelling houses, though many of the latter were built of logs. The Royal Northwest Mounted Police had their ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody

... pleasant, cordial voice, which made the simplest thing she said seem real and hearty, rather than conventional, introduced him: ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... least taste. Draughtsmen and painters value them highly. No matter whether reproduced on a large canvas or in a little woodcut, their proportions please. The roof is much neglected in modern houses; it is either conventional, or it is full indeed of gables, but gables that do not agree, as it were, with each other—that are obviously put there on purpose to look artistic, and fail altogether. Now, the ancient roofs were true ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the mother did not. She expected from all people certain conventional reactions to life. A boy was your son, you scolded him and he trembled and looked at the floor. When you had scolded enough he wept and all was forgiven. After the weeping and when he had gone to bed, you crept into ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... have in order to possess such cars, with their attendant footman and chauffeur; but that income, whatever it was, became her ideal. Money! Lots of money! With money you could have comfort. When she said that, and was warned by conventional wiseacres that money did not produce happiness, she sneered at the timid ones. "Bet I'd be happy," she said. "What's happiness?" She wondered what it was. For her it had been oblivion in Toby's ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... of such sculpture as M. Rodin's no more resembles the contortions of the Dresden Museum giants than it does the composure of M. Delaplanche. The baroque is only violent instead of placid commonplace, and is as conventional as any professor of sculpture could desire. Expression means individual character completely exhibited rather than conventionally suggested. It is certainly not too much to say that in the sculpture of the present day the sense ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... was, he must console himself with the thought that, married or not, they were indissolubly bound: he knew now better than before, that no other woman would ever exist for him; and surely, in the case of an all-absorbing passion such as this, the overstepping of conventional boundaries would not be counted too heavily against them: laws and conventions existed only for the weak and vacillating loves of the rest ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... space, which is applicable to physical objects, to states of consciousness, to which it is really inapplicable. Objects occupying space are marked out as external to one another, but this cannot be said of conscious states. Yet, in our ordinary speech and conventional view of things, we think of conscious states as separated from one another and as spread out like "things," in a fictitious, homogeneous medium to which we give the name Time. Bergson says, "At any rate, we cannot finally admit two forms of the homogeneous, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... in the mountains, and one of the best hunters with whom I ever traveled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and could tell them as they were, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter

... Athenian temples, rich backgrounds of red or blue serving to throw the sculptural adornments into vivid relief. Buffalo was in this a commentary on classic art, revealing what fine effects may be produced by out-of-door coloring when suited to surroundings. We saw that in our timid, conventional avoidance of exterior colors we had missed something; that cheerful colors might well supplant on our houses the eternal sombre of gray and brown, as they so often and so ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... of the "Philosophie Zoologique," {235a} said truly that Lamarck's theory had never yet had the honour of being seriously discussed. It never has—not at least in connection with the name of its propounder. To mention Lamarck's name in the presence of the conventional English society naturalist has always been like shaking a red rag at a cow; he is at once infuriated; "as if it were possible," to quote from Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, whose defence of Lamarck is one of the best things ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... replied, relieved that his irregular confidence had resulted in the conventional decision, and that he had not brought on himself a responsibility shared with her. "You had best step into the office. You can do no ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... rode together, John lagging a good deal behind (that bay horse of John's never could walk with White Stockings), I could not help thinking how much I had misunderstood Captain Lovell's character. What a deal of feeling—almost of romance—there was under that conventional exterior which he wore before the world! I liked him so much more now I came to know him better. I was quite sorry when we had to wish him "good-night" and John and I rode thoughtfully home through the quiet streets. I thought my cousin's manner was altered too, though I scarce knew how. His ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... Satire of Juvenal—was published in May, 1738. The plan was doubtless suggested by Pope's imitations of Horace, which had recently appeared. Though necessarily following the lines of Juvenal's poem, and conforming to the conventional fashion of the time, both in sentiment and versification, the poem has a biographical significance. It is indeed odd to find Johnson, who afterwards thought of London as a lover of his mistress, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... Georgia's interest is not remote; it is immediate. If we denied Georgia as parens patriae the right to invoke the original jurisdiction of the Court in a matter of that gravity, we would whittle the concept of justiciability down to the stature of minor or conventional controversies. There is no ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... below do not follow the conventional lines which ordain that a menu shall include, at least, soup, savoury and sweet dishes. The hardworking housewife can afford neither the time nor the material to serve up so many dishes at one meal; ...
— The Healthy Life Cook Book, 2d ed. • Florence Daniel

... in quick exclamation, followed, however, by an apologetic cough and the somewhat forced and conventional remark: "You find ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... factitious and artificial unity for one of spiritual depth and reality. The fruits of the tree of life are not to be successfully thieved. In dishonest hands they become ashes and bitterness. He who has more faith in an Act of Parliament than in God and the universe may be a good conventional believer; but, in truth, the choice he makes is the essence of all denial and even of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... earth which lay between the two camps. Looking down at the great, widely spreading cracks in the hungry soil, the result of a seven-months' continuous drought, Harrington almost unconsciously bent his head and thought that surely God would send rain. He was not a religious man in the conventional sense—he had never been inside a church in his life—but the memory of his dead mother's belief in God's mercy and goodness was ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke

... After a moment's hesitation, she bought a couple of bananas for a few cents from a fruit-stand at the corner, and coming back, gave the larger one to the beggar who sat complaining in the sun. Then, withdrawing to a conventional distance in the shadow of the steeple, she waited patiently for the slow hours to wear away. Not until the long shadow pointed straight from west to east did the ancient vehicle rattle down the street and the driver pull up for her at the old ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... city, Gabriella reflected while she embraced Jane, was as nothing compared to the incredible change in Charley himself. Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... the reign of terror in France, to the massacres of September, to the wholesale executions of conventional times; to find the mob insulting the victims, and the executioner himself adding personal affront to the disgusting fulfilment of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... minx I had once thought her, but tonight in her plain white frock and sober conventional surroundings she seemed to show something of the quiet poise of a nurse or a nun. She seemed to exemplify the thought that the ideal woman is both wood-nymph and madonna. By contrast to the Nietzschian intriguer I had left that morning at Briar ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... millionaire,—young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and much sought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polo together, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs that he did not propose to become the conventional English gentleman. He refused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of England were at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had not time to be a squire. Besides, every ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... at him across the table; and if ever a face cried "Don't!" with all the eloquence of pleading eyes and parted lips, Mollie's said it at that moment. The message was so unmistakable and ardent that it demanded obedience, and to his own surprise Jack found himself murmuring conventional words of thanks, instead of the heated disclaimer which ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... remembered what Conrad Lagrange had said about her fad. But after so frankly exhibiting herself before him, dressed as she was in a gown that was deliberately planned to advertise her physical charms, to be particular about baring her shoulders in a conventional costume—! ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... On the other hand, Mr. Blank, who represents railway interests in the United States Senate, is sleek, polished and well-dressed, but he is neither very wise nor very good. He is a gentleman only in the conventional, ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... sudden changes of expression, depending, apparently, on the varying state of her emotions, and betraying an intensity more akin to the Oriental temperament than to ours. There was in her something subtle and fierce; yet overlaying it, like a smooth and silken skin, were the conventional polish and bearing of an American school graduate. She was, in deed, noticeably artificial and self-conscious in manner and in the intonations of her speech; though it was an aesthetic delight to see her move or pose, ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... the remainder, Tunis and Algeria. Peoples of the same type inhabited the whole region, but while in Tunis and Algeria they were being brought under the influence of law and order, in Morocco they remained in anarchy. Only a conventional line divided Morocco from Algeria, and the anarchy among the tribesmen on one side of the line inevitably had an unhappy effect upon the people on the other side of the line. More than once France had been compelled, for the sake of Algeria, ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... Jesus stay outside Bethany and summon Martha and Mary to come to Him? Apparently that He might keep Himself apart from the noisy crowd of conventional mourners whose presence affronted the majesty and sanctity of sorrow, and that He might speak to the hearts of the two real mourners. A divine decorum forbade Him to go to the house. The Life-bringer ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... be praised!" Mrs. Ellmother burst out—and then, when it was too late, remembered the conventional restraints appropriate to the occasion. "Gracious, what a fool I am!" she said to herself. "Beautiful weather, Miss Emily, isn't it?" she continued, in a desperate hurry to change ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins

... the stage where two young officers of Houssas sat primly side by side on the verandah sipping their coffee. Neither spoke, and the seance might have ended with the conventional "Good night" and that punctilious salute which Bones invariably gave, and which Hamilton as punctiliously returned, but for the apparition of a dark figure which crossed the broad space of parade ground hesitatingly as though not certain of his way, and finally came ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... serious than it appears superficially. Rousseau's idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... an unfortunate devil; but a sort of conventional non-combatant. I shared the hardships, the glory, the equivocal victories (where we killed and drove countless numbers of rebels—who were not), and, woe is me! the capitulation of Burgoyne. But let that pass-which was more than the Yankees would allow us to do. You know not where I could have seen ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... omitted. The inflexional -r of the nominative singular masculine is also omitted, whether it appears as -r or is assimilated to a preceding consonant (as in Odinn, Eysteinn, Heindall, Egill) in the Norse form, with the single exception of the name Tyr, where I use the form which has become conventional ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday

... Morris excelled. He educated the popular taste by bringing forth the beauties of the simpler forms of the floral and vegetable world; he delighted especially in displaying the acanthus in varied conventional forms. Every rug he designed bears witness to his enthusiasm for harmony. Too aesthetic, some critics declare him to have been; but no one can deny the importance of his creations, for England needed to be awakened to a knowledge of her own inability to appreciate artistic decoration of the ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt

... being deeply stung with the thought that the people who looked at him probably knew a fact tantamount to an accusation against him as a fellow with low designs which were to be frustrated by a disposal of property. Like most people who assert their freedom with regard to conventional distinction, he was prepared to be sudden and quick at quarrel with any one who might hint that he had personal reasons for that assertion—that there was anything in his blood, his bearing, or his character to which he gave the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... did not seem anything strange in the fact that for a moment, after the first greeting, they stood without thinking of any of the commonplaces of intercourse. Then Pateley, more accustomed to overlay the realities of life by the conventional outside, recovered himself and said in an ordinary tone, looking ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... too,—all our own as yet, for the world has not discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a tiny monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but shaped on ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... Washington coat of arms had blazoned upon it "3 Cinque foiles," which was the herald's way of saying that the bearer was a landholder and cultivator, and when Washington had a book-plate made for himself he added to the conventional design of the arms spears of wheat and other plants, as an indication of his favorite labor. During his career he acted several parts, but in none did he find such pleasure as in farming, and late in life he said, "I think with you, that the life of a husbandman of all others is ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... obvious that a connecting rod, a crank, and a sufficiently heavy flywheel might have been used in a conventional Newcomen engine in order to supply power to a rotating shaft, but contemporary evidence makes it clear that this solution was by no means obvious to Watt nor ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... and brought up in the deepest solitude, far from the vices and the falsehoods of the world, by the loving woman whom you knew. Society did justice to her conventional charm, for that is what pleases society; but I knew secretly her precious soul, I could cherish the mother who made my childhood a joy without bitterness, and I knew why I cherished her. Was not that to love doubly? Yes, I loved her, I feared her, I respected her; yet nothing oppressed ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... I am sure he would shake his head and tell you there was nothing but bears around the hotel. For this was the occasion when Nimrod spent the entire day in the garbage heap watching the bears, while I did the conventional thing and ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... with the collection of synonyms applying to his idea and mood, and so building them up gradually, with many erasures, corrections, and substitutions, into the finished poem. Much of the vigor of his style is due to his escape from conventional literary phrase-making and his return to the racy idiom of common life. His verse, apparently inchoate and so different from classical poetic forms, is shaped with a cunning incredible skill. And more than that, it ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... curtains at the door, the great savage strode down the room, holding out a telegram. Rewa Gunga looked as if he would have snatched it, but King's hand was held out first and Ismail gave it to him. With a murmur of conventional apology King tore the envelope and in a second his eyes were ablaze with something more than wonder. A mystery, added to a mystery, stirred all the zeal in him. But in a second he had sweated his ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... looked on him as their just master. From thence he invaded Glengarry, who was again re-collecting his forces; but at his coming they dissipated and fled. He pursued Glengarry to Blairy in Moray, where he took him; but willing to have his nephew's estate settled with conventional right rather than legal, he took Low-countrymen as sureties for Glengarry's peaceable deportment, and then contracted with him for the reversion of the former wadsets which Colin of Kintail had acquired of him, and for a ratification ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... am uncertain how much I should tell about Claire Lepage. It is a story which is popular in a certain sort of novel, but I have no wish for that easy success. Towards Claire herself I had no trace of the conventional attitude, whether of contempt or of curiosity. She was to me the product of a social system, of the great New Nineveh which I was investigating. And later on, when I knew her, she was a weak sister whom I ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... the miscreant was facing Sally as he bent over the table and fumbled with the lock of the jewel-case, and she made good use of this chance to memorise a countenance of mildly sardonic cast, not unhandsome—the face of a conventional modern voluptuary, self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfish—rather attractive withal in the eyes of an excited ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... ordinary old uneducated Negro tell those inimitable animal stories, brought to literary existence in "Uncle Remus," with such quaint humor, delicious conceit and masterly delineation of plot, character and incident that nothing but the conventional rating of Aesop's Fables could put them in the same class. Then, there are more Negro inventors than the world supposes. This faculty is impossible without a well-ordered imagination held in leash by a good memory ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... past observing the idiosyncrasies of slaves; and, if his own attitude was acceptable, even to himself, his admiration for that of his hostess amounted to absolute bitterness. That she, a mere girl, should rise and come forward with so conventional yet friendly a greeting, that neither her lip should tremble nor her cheek flush, was little short of intolerable. Nevertheless it helped to brace his own resolves yet more firmly. Such poise, after all that had been between them, could have its source ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... that the machine would not rise until he could get a speed of 35 miles an hour, and his estimate was correct. Two six-bladed propellers were placed side by side between the two main planes of the machine, which was supported on a triangular wheeled undercarriage and steered by fairly conventional tail planes. Moy realised that he could not get sufficient power to achieve flight, but he went on experimenting in various directions, and left much data concerning his experiments which has not yet been deemed worthy of publication, but which still contains a mass of information that is of practical ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... would not have this. It was not done. He waived conducting his negotiations through a second, but that was as far as his conventional soul would go. He held out for ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... if you were awfully conventional," George grumbled; and his disappointment was deeper than he was willing to let her see—though she probably did see. "Well, we'll ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... atmosphere, the sunshine, and singing birds—the tout ensemble was inexpressibly beautiful. On my way back to the hotel I passed a Christian church and felt ashamed of the wretched architecture, in the usual conventional style, made of stone with white-plastered walls, hard and unattractive. Never have I been among a people so close to nature, strikingly intelligent, friendly, and the most aesthetic of ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... Find declared in the sub-title. The title itself is my own contrivance, (can't call it invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that's merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man's word for it ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... strangely like the woman of his dream love. He went in, awkward and embarrassed, and bought it. When he took it home he did not know where to put it. It was out of place among the dim old engravings of bewigged portraits and conventional landscapes on the walls of Golden Milestone. As he pondered the matter in his garden that evening he had an inspiration. The sunset, flaming on the windows of the west gable, kindled them into burning rose. Amid the splendour he fancied Alice's fair face peeping archly down at him ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Brothers & Barking—now superannuated and laid on the shelf. A gayer, fiercer, simpler life, quick with violences of vivacious sound and vivid colour, the excitement of it heightened by clear shining southern sunshine and blue-black shadow—a life undreamed of by conventional, slow-moving, rather vulgar middle-class London—to which, on the face of it, he appeared as emphatically to belong—awoke and cried ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... and then made a little confidential gesture. "I'd better tell you all about the thing," he said. "Our folks were people of some little standing in the county. In fact, as they were far from rich, they had just standing enough to embarrass them. In most respects they were ultra-conventional with old-fashioned ideas, and, though there was no open break, I'm afraid I didn't get on with them quite as well as I should have done, which is why I came out to Canada. They started me on the land decently, and twice when we'd harvest ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... of the discourse was thus announced in the most impressive manner, and with all that conventional rhetoric of which the Bishop of Arras was considered a consummate master. Not a word was said on the subject which was nearest the hearts of the Netherlanders—the withdrawal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... marked degree. The Court of the Universe will never be the resting place of the masses of the people, in spite of the recently added attraction of the band stand, a mixture of Roman and Arabic architecture out of keeping with the surroundings. The conventional architectural motives of this great court do not help very much in tempting one to stay, and if it were not for the great arches on the east and west and the very fine view toward the Column of Progress, I would feel tempted to classify it as a piece of architectural design ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... Vida Levering was only eighteen, she had tried to make something like a conventional maid out of the faithful Northumbrian. Rachel Wark had entered Lady Levering's service just before Vida's birth, and had helped to nurse her mistress through a mortal illness ten years later. After Sir Hervey Levering lost his wife, Wark became in ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... you were human, that is all. The artist, shivering in his conventional attic, dreaming of Fame!-do you think he is not hoping she will come to his loving arms in the form Jove came to Danae? Do you think he is not reckoning also upon the good dinners and the big cigars, the fur coat and the diamond studs, ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... cannibal isles" rides by, nor do anything odd or queer or unconventional. To the mother who believes that good manners can be taught in books and conned in dancing schools, there is something to satisfy the heart's finest craving in a strictly conventional daughter, who thinks and acts and speaks by rule, and whose life is like the life of an apricot, canned, or a music box wound up with a key. But to my thinking, my dear, good manners are not put on and off like varying fashions, nor done up like sweetmeats, pound for ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... "soft" ground,[18] consists of two parts wax, one part mastic, and one part asphaltum. There are countless formulae for such grounds, but virtually all are permutations of the same three ingredients, with only slight differences in the proportions.[19] The ground given as Rembrandt's is a thoroughly conventional one. ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse

... much within the sphere of home as possible and out of society of the hoydenish girls who, moving in the so-called best circles, have the free and easy manners of the denizens of a public garden rather than the modest demeanor of unsullied maidenhood. She was a sweet exception to the loud, womanish, conventional girl we meet everywhere—on the street, in places, of public amusement and in the drawing-room—a fragrant human flower with the bloom of gentle girlhood ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... exceedingly simple, and devoid of ornament of any kind, save an occasional pilaster or flying buttress. The streets were broad, and laid out to cut the city into lozenge-shaped sections, instead of the conventional squares. In the center of the city stood a great lozenge-shaped building with a smooth, arched roof. From every section of the city, great swarms of people were flocking in the direction of the spot toward which the Ertak was settling, on foot and in long, slim vehicles ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... Morton home was cheerful with sunshine. It brightened the conventional flowers of the old crimson Brussels carpet into a semblance of life. It caught the gold outline of the wall paper and lingered there—even the somber steel engravings reflected the light from the polished glass over them. Mrs. Morton sat in her low rocking ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... arabesques on books, and only drew the line at massive gold stamps. His own taste combined the gloomy and the grotesque, his clothes and his bindings alike being covered with skulls and cross-bones, and spangles to represent tears, with other conventional emblems of sorrow. ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... dress and with long, flowing hair passes among the spectators and gathers a few shillings. Not far away is observed Punch and Judy in the height of a successful quarrel to the music of a harp and a violin. The automatic contestants pound and pommel each other after the conventional fashion. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... rested on those who have risen above the conventional level and sought new spheres for thought and action, and especially on the few who demand complete equality in political rights. The leaders in this movement have been women of superior mental and physical organization, of good social standing and education, remarkable ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... authority, put a case; produce an instance &c n.; elucidate, explain. Adj. conformable to rule; regular &c 136; according to regulation, according to rule, according to Hoyle, according to Cocker, according to Gunter; en regle [Fr.], selon les regles [Fr.], well regulated, orderly; symmetric &c 242. conventional &c (customary) 613; of daily occurrence, of everyday occurrence; in the natural order of things; ordinary, common, habitual, usual, everyday, workaday. in the order of the day; naturalized. typical, normal, nominal, formal; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... He let Clementine talk, listened deferentially as to a superior, did not differ with her in anything, and waited to be questioned before he spoke at all. He seemed actually stupid to the countess, whose coquettish little ways missed their mark in presence of such frigid gravity and conventional respect. In vain Adam kept saying: "Do be lively, Thaddeus; one would really suppose you were not at home. You must have made a wager to disconcert Clementine." Thaddeus continued heavy and half asleep. When the servants left the room at the end of the dessert the captain explained that his habits ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac

... unaccountably. Therefore all we who are women or priests do what we will in Philistia, and the men there obey us. And it is we, the priests of Philistia, who do not think you can possibly have any flesh and blood under a shirt which we recognize to be a conventional figure of speech. It does not stand to reason. And certainly you could not ever prove such a thing by mathematics; and to ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... soar above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort of reason, and the rudest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said untruthfully. "Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I do ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... not the inestimable advantage of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian philosophy—does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we all ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... thrust these ladies in his path, and no doubt he liked them the better because they did not live as other people lived. Their solitude, the close vicinity of the ocean, the feeling that in meeting them none of the ordinary conventional usages of society were needed, the wildness and the strangeness of the scene, all had charms which he admitted to himself. And he knew that the girl was very lovely. Of course he said so to himself and to others. To take ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope

... fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that the haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the conditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled—a society sufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules of intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and a climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and the unresponsive body. Here the cold humid airs have produced ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... Asian salvationism. And though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare, the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all. Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the "great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus—the Christ uncrucified, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... degenerated from century to century. The growing Christian religion, which forbade the picturing of any living beauty, gave the death-blow to such excellence as remained. A style of painting followed which received the name of Greek Byzantine. In it was no study of life; all was most strikingly conventional, and it grew steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... up his turnip." Leonard was more hurt by the jeer at his old patron's gift than pleased by his uncle's. But Richard Avenel had no conception of sentiment. It was not for many days that Leonard could reconcile himself to his uncle's manner. Not that the peasant could pretend to judge of its mere conventional defects; but there is an ill breeding to which, whatever our rank and nurture, we are almost equally sensitive,—the ill breeding that comes from want of consideration for others. Now, the squire was as homely in his way as Richard Avenel, but the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... could not help thinking that there was much of the bizarre about every thing I saw—but then the world is made up of all kinds of persons, with all modes of thought, and all sorts of conventional customs. I had travelled, too, so much, as to be quite an adept at the nil admirari; so I took my seat very coolly at the right hand of my host, and, having an excellent appetite, did justice to the good ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... stayed away many minutes longer. She went back at once, entered by the garden window just as Margaret was finishing Rosina's song, and remained standing behind her till she had sung the last note. English people rarely applaud conventional drawing-room music, but this had been something more, and the Craythew guests clapped their hands loudly, and even the elderly wife of the scientific peer emitted distinctly audible sounds of satisfaction. Lady Maud bent her handsome ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... wore English riding breeches and leggins. Otherwise he was dressed as a Texas cowboy of the past generation. His sombrero was almost Mexican in its size and ornateness. But his rifle was of the latest American pattern, and in place of the conventional Colt's he carried an automatic pistol. As his horse patiently clambered with him up towards the top of the escarpment the man gazed indolently about between half-closed eyelids and inhaled the smoke from an unbroken "chain" ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... and ebony carried all before it. The Italian work of this kind is often most beautifully engraved, but less accurate than that produced in France. The later Italian marquetry does not lose decorative effect though the figure drawing becomes very conventional, and the curves of ornament are often cut with a mechanical sweep. A good deal of it is in only two colours, a return to the simplicity ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... are important, because none is necessary. Their different characters have fair play, and each is beautiful in its minute indications, for nothing is enforced or conventional; but everything, however slight, grows from the essential ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... savages receiving their enemy into their hospitable hut, sharing with him their miserable meal, and, their couch undisturbed by remorse, sleeping close to him the calm sleep of the innocent. These virtues are as much above the virtues of conventional life as the soul of tho man in his natural state is above that of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... force to dominate mankind? Comfort, prosperity, luxury, a well-fed and securely sheltered existence, not without the embellishments and concentrations of art and literature, and perhaps some conventional type of religion—all these we can purchase at a price, but at what a price! At the sacrifice of what makes life, national or personal, alone worth living. My Lord Mayor and citizens of London, we are not going to make that sacrifice (loud and prolonged cheers, the audience rising and waving ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... nor tradition, nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was not what should be believed, or what ought to be true, but what is true. Her yes and no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unexpected dissent from ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... good qualities are spontaneous. Such as natural sweetness of temper—natural delicacy of feeling—natural intrepidity; others are the result of habit, and end by being spontaneous—by being a second nature: justly are habits called so. Gentleness of tone and manner—attention to conventional proprieties—to people's little wants and feelings—are of these. This same politeness being a sort of summary of such, I will end this little didactic digression by advising all those who have the rearing of the young in their hands, carefully to form them ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... be the consequences of such a state of things? Attachments will be formed early. But, instead of making all kinds of calculations concerning money, social position, etc.; instead of concealing their thoughts in the form of conventional politeness; instead of avoiding an honest explanation of the knotty point, or, at the most passing over this explanation like a cat on hot cinders; instead of trying to dazzle by their charms the one they wish to capture, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... is a representation of a thoroughly typical conventional fetich of the black Eagle (K'iae[']-k'iae-li kwin-ne) of the Lower regions. It is of calcite, stained lustrous black. A cotton cord around the neck supplies the place of ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... ought to run such a race; they would also be the first to trip him up if he took them at their word, and then afterwards upbraid him for not having won. Achievement of any kind would be impossible for him unless he was free from those who would be for ever dragging him back into the conventional. The conventional had been tried already and had ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... stranger, going abroad in closed carriages or heavily veiled with hoods, and talking to men with their faces hid by a fan, a screen, or a sliding door, these degrees of intimacy being nicely adjusted to the rank and station of the person addressed. Love-making and wooing were governed by strict and conventional etiquette, and an interchange of letters of a very literary and artificial type and of poems usually took the place of personal meetings. Indeed, literary skill and appreciation of Chinese poetry and art were the main things ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... he has in hand. Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his words. No one in England before had so much as he had the power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it. No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to those necessities of flattery, which cost him ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... Bachya founded his ethical system on the Talmud and on the philosophical notions current in his day, but he evolved out of these elements an original view of life. The inner duties dictated by conscience were set above all conventional morality. Bachya probed the very heart of religion. His soul was filled with God, and this communion, despite the ascetic feelings to which it gave rise, was to Bachya an exceeding joy. His book thrills the reader with the author's own chastened ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... the counter but his spirit hand is unable to lift it. He suffers tortures of Tantalus until in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire. Then he is free to go on so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged from that evil without intervention of an angry deity or a conventional devil with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer punishment, but under the immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered exactly according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would scarcely miss the liquor which he cannot ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... the wife of G'mami, had seen her lord depart in the canoe for burial in the middle island and had wailed her conventional grief, she washed the dust from her body at the river's edge and went back to her hut. And all that was grief for the dead man was washed away with ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... dearly, and she wished her to come to live with her as her daughter after her own, daughter, Madeleine, had married, but Mrs. Curtis was determined that the little captain should learn to be less impetuous and more conventional. ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... members of the destitute class, and, having nothing to give them, are plunged into remorse; little boys creeping into the larder to steal jam, eat soft soap by mistake and never are greedy again; and so forth. All the conventional images and morals are employed. The whole book is one long and emphatic division of sheep from goats. 'The Journal' is not perhaps exciting, but it reflects the quieter family life of a century ago, and incidentally portrays the thorough ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... out of his house, out of his office, but not out of his life. She had come here with the deliberate intention of wrecking that, and she would succeed probably, for she would have the blind, hideous force of conventional morality on her side. She would destroy his life—that life till lately so valueless to him; that dreary stretch made barren so many years by her hateful influence, but which, in spite of it, at Saidie's touch, had now bloomed into a garden of flowers. The thought of Saidie strengthened ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines —perhaps to typify the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... of the rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... with rising up to establish marriage, in a revolt of purity against sexual licence, and moreover effecting the change by force of arms! Bachofen would seem to have been touched with the Puritan spirit. I am convinced also that he understood very little of the nature of woman. Conventional morality has always acted on the side of the man, not the woman. The clue is, indeed, given in the woman's closer connection with the home, and in the idea that "she raises herself by the recognition of her motherhood." ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... dissatisfied lately. Of course I don't understand all this Camp Fire idea seems to mean to her, I suppose I would have to be a girl again to understand thoroughly, but there may be possibilities in it. Even a conventional society woman longs sometimes to get away from her monotonous life, and surely you will find romance and adventure awaiting you in the woods. I have decided I shall not stand in Betty's way, I shall go away this summer ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook

... opening at the throat and arms, and also the hem of the garment, being richly ornamented with embroidery in heavy gold thread. This garment was confined at the waist by a massive belt of solid gold composed of square placques hinged together, and each elaborately sculptured with conventional representations of the sun. Over this was worn a long cloak, dyed blue, also woven of vicuna wool, but without ornament of any description. Their heads were bare, and the lobe of each ear was pierced and distended ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... together in murmurs, and the clicking of the knives on the plates became painful. Sewell kept himself from looking at Barker, whom he nevertheless knew to be changing his knife and fork from one hand to the other, as doubt after doubt took him as to their conventional use, and to be getting very little good of his dinner in the process of settling these questions. The door-bell rang, and the sound of a whispered conference between the visitor and the servant at the threshold penetrated to the dining-room. Some one softly entered, and then ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... Hannele, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama. Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from Clarissa Harlowe to The House with the Green Shutters; whereas in many plays the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest resides ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... never left her and she paid him a conventional little compliment on his reading, then asked him if he believed that people who could love like that had ever lived, or if such dramas were the peculiar prerogative of the ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... to say, thought it all jealousy. She wasn't the kind of girl who could stand disgrace. . . . She came to him one day and told him that she was going to have a baby. He laughed at her in the regular old conventional way . . . and that very afternoon, after he had seen her, he met me—there ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... wish to see callers, the maid or whoever answers the door should be so informed; the conventional "Not at home" being perfectly proper; it is merely a polite way of saying it is not convenient to receive anyone. But for the maid to say "I will see, if Mrs. A is at home," and return to say she is not at home or not receiving, is a grave discourtesy. Nor should one keep a visitor waiting while ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... Mr. Chelm was the conventional idea of a successful lawyer,—withered, non-committal, and a little fusty; but technicalities had failed to harden his heart or obscure his good sense. He had a sunny smile, which refreshed my sad spirit when I called upon him shortly after the funeral to inform ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... also of a type not dissimilar. It was a conventional gathering of rich nobodies, each a big frog in his own little puddle, none known far beyond it and none with sufficient intellect or ability to create for himself any position in the world save that won by the accident of ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... the corpses,moreover, necessitated the employment of at least half a dozen workmen to wash it, cut it open, soak it, dry it, and apply the usual bandages before placing the amulets upon the canonically prescribed places, and using the conventional prayers. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Diard was now an accidental circumstance, not a participator in her life, and since he had ceased to be the father and the head of the family, Juana felt bound to him by no tie other than that imposed by conventional laws. Nevertheless, she brought up her children to the highest respect for paternal authority, however imaginary it was for them. In this she was greatly seconded by her husband's continual absence. If he had been much in the home Diard would have neutralized his wife's efforts. The boys ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... in Fairy deftly. "She isn't going to do the housework, or the managing, or anything. She's just our chaperon. It isn't proper for us to live without one, you know. We're too young. It isn't—conventional." ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston

... trusting nature, should have quietly won from the other side of the house a victory of almost equal importance? And further than this—what if the lord were to perish in some brawl or by the hired assassin of a rival house; and AEnone, released from her thraldom, and despising conventional scruples—as again was not uncommon among the Roman ladies of that day—were to exalt her favorite with legal honors, and thus make herself, Leta, his slave? This, to be sure, was an improbable chance; but a mind as active ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that it is difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt

... steps, hoping to be able to make them recover their senses, a force of purely conventional emotion impelling me. It was no business of mine; I didn't want to interfere, and I felt like a man hastening to separate half a dozen fighting dogs too large to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... form of Wooda Bay); but there has been an outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the picturesque which has overtaken Ilfracombe and Torquay, and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... of London has done a useful service in causing the various decisions of the present Court of Appeal to be collected into a volume. There is such an obvious convenience about the plan that it hardly needed the conventional reason given for it, that "the knowledge generally possessed on the subject of the Court is vague, and the sources from which accurate information can be obtained are little understood; and that people who discuss it ought in the first place to know what the Court ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... clock or thereabout, as I sat here enjoying the refreshing solace of tea and basking in the mild spring air wafted to me through my opened windows, the telephone bell rang. Arising promptly, I went to where the instrument is affixed to the wall and responded to the call in the conventional manner by placing the receiver to my ear, applying my lips to the transmitter and uttering the word "Halloa!" twice, or possibly thrice repeated. Over the wire then a female voice spoke, enquiring if this ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... enclosed. For look you, sir, you and my father were right when you both agreed that the mere book-life was not meant for me. And yet what is not book-life, to a young man who would make his way through the ordinary and conventional paths to fortune? All the professions are so book-lined, book-hemmed, book- choked, that wherever these strong hands of mine stretch towards action, they find themselves met by octavo ramparts, flanked with quarto crenellations. For first, this college life, opening to scholarships, and ending, perchance, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the General was evidently anxious that Garnesk should make his examination as soon as possible, hospitality forced him to suggest dinner first, and I was surprised at the alacrity with which the visitor concurred, knowing, as I did, his intense interest in the case. But, after a few conventional remarks to the General and Myra, I was about to show him to his room when he ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to me." If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a long effort. His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who cannot remember whether ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell

... proud and rather sad smile at this sudden change from the conventional to the passionate; and the direct and fiery charge of her kinswoman ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... according as he pleases. In fact, there is no other way of solving it. In my professorial mood, I should cite the cavern and the "downward leaping" waters against the hypothesis that the Bandusian Fount stood on either of these modern sites; in favour of it, one might argue that the conventional rhetoric of all Roman art may have added these embellishing touches, and cite, in confirmation thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... way of describing the physical appearance of a man or woman, when he allowed himself to do it at all, which was seldom, was what one might call the ideal or conventional way. A good example is to be found in Hamlet's description of his father; he ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... salt-water impulses, begotten of a twelve or fifteen-months' voyage, have mostly vanished. Steam has greatly revolutionized Jack's sweet-hearting. He comes to port every fortnight, or so; he wears dry goods and jewelry of the latest mode; and he marries a wife, or divorces a wife, with the same conventional sangfroid of any mercantile "drummer" who travels by railroad. The conjugal history of that distinguished son of Neptune, Captain Oliver Perry Hazard, now to be related, haply has a delectable smack of mercantile jack's old-time methods, mingled with the shrewder utilitarianism ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... shown inline in [brackets]. The random use of asterisks is as in the original. The 1653 text used brackets to supplement marginal quotation marks. These have been replaced by conventional "quotation marks". A handful of superscripts (w^{th}) have been "unpacked" to the complete word; titles such as "M^r." are ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton

... form: Republic of Albania conventional short form: Albania local long form: Republika e Shqiperise local short form: Shqiperia former: People's Socialist Republic ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... pointed out that the law of England "never recognized any such office as that of Prime-minister. In the eyes of the law the ministers were all on an equality." And the position, such as it was, being a conventional one, was not necessarily connected with the office of First Lord of the Treasury. "In a recent instance his late right honorable friend, Mr. Canning, had determined to hold the office of Prime-minister with that of ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... keenly sharpened the publicity sense of the developing advertising director. One book could best be advertised by the conventional means of the display advertisement; another, like Triumphant Democracy, was best served by sending out to the newspapers a "broadside" of pungent extracts; public curiosity in a novel like The Lady, or the Tiger? was, of course, whetted by the publication of literary notes as to the real denouement ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... behind which he heard voices. A burly, good-natured looking man with a derby hat in his hand was talking to a dapper, quick-eyed personage whose carefully trimmed beard and immaculately white waistcoat gave him the conventional "professional" look. Near a window was a big chair, among the pillows of which reclined a young girl with a pale, sweet face and that appearance of fragility which comes of long-continued illness; beside her stood an anxious-looking young man whose haggard ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre

... svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see with such eyes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... overpowered by the weight of numbers, who see nothing more in Christianity than a mild religiousness, and who demand nothing more in themselves or in their fellow-Christians than the participation in a conventional worship, the acceptance of traditional beliefs, and the living of an honest life. Yet nothing is more certain than that the enthusiasts are right. Any impartial survey—such as the unique analysis in "Ecce Homo"—of the claims of Christ ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... early Heralds would have applied a similar knowledge had they been able to have acquired it. Heraldic animals of every kind—lions, eagles, dolphins, and all others—must be so far subjected to a conventional treatment, that they will not exhibit a strictly natural appearance: and, on the other hand, being carefully preserved from all exaggerated conventionalisms, they must approach as near to Nature as a definite conventional rendering of natural truth will ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... representation but a thing. On it you fix your attention; with it you "unite." Yet, did you look at the wrong side, at the many short ends, the clumsy joins and patches, this simple philosophy might be disturbed. You would be forced to acknowledge the conventional character of the picture you have made so cleverly, the wholesale waste of material involved in the weaving of it: for only a few amongst the wealth of impressions we receive are seized and incorporated ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... me with my special knowledge of her past. It would be too much to say that I was deeply interested; but Mrs. Lascelles had inspired me with a certain sympathy and dispassionate regard. Cultivated she was not, in the conventional sense, but she knew more than can be imbibed from books. She knew life at first hand, had drained the cup for herself, and yet could savour the lees. Not that she enlarged any further on her own past. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung

... monetary pounds were expressed as an italicized "l." after the number. For the text version, I am using the more conventional L100 form ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... institution of caste was not artificial or conventional, but that it began with the simple division of freemen and slaves, which we find among all ancient nations. This division, as he supposes, existed among the Hindus before they settled in India. It became positive law after their emigration from the northern mountains into India, and ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... were a few small tables. In the centre people walked to and fro. At the bottom, at the end opposite the door, was a long table furnished with benches, which occupied the whole width of the wall, behind which sat the "bureau." "Sitting" is merely the conventional term. The "bureau" did not "sit;" like the rest of the Assembly it was on its feet. The secretaries, M.M. Chapot, Moulin, and Grimault wrote standing. At certain moments the two Vice-Presidents mounted on the benches so as to be better seen from all points of the room. The table ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... by the other, and ruling both; ruling both by the same principle of action, and by the influence of the same quality which creates the arbitress of fashion in all countries, by courage to break through the conventional customs of an artificial class, and by talents to ridicule all those who dare follow her innovating example; attracting universal notice by her own singularity, and at the same time conciliating the support of those from whom she dares to differ, by employing ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... joking. You are a born queen and you oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice it is to ride with ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... these events became known in France, the Conventional Assembly, which had then succeeded the Legislature, seeing no hope of reconciliation on either side, knew not what other course to take than to do justice, whatever the consequences might be. They resolved accordingly, in the month of April, that the decree of 1791, which had been first ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin

... slightly troubled look, for she did not yet feel quite at home in her broken English, and feared that her husband might laugh at her mistakes, though nothing was further from the mind of the stout hunter than to laugh at his pretty bride. He did indeed sometimes indulge the propensity in that strange conventional region "his sleeve," but no owl of the desert was more solemn in countenance than Big Tim when Softswan perpetrated her ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... point of repaying her kindness with a conventional little compliment, but thought better of it, and expressed his meaning in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... adds, "just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form.' But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness—"frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told—but is this part of a Browning legend?—with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... not mean Etiquette. This is only a conventional set of rules adopted by what is called "good society;" and many of the rules of etiquette are of the essence of rudeness. Etiquette does not permit genteel people to recognize in the streets a man with a shabby coat though he ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... of two parts wax, one part mastic, and one part asphaltum. There are countless formulae for such grounds, but virtually all are permutations of the same three ingredients, with only slight differences in the proportions.[19] The ground given as Rembrandt's is a thoroughly conventional one. ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse

... commonplace but useful metaphor the meaning here is, first, that to catch the vulgar eye a quantity of,—so-called,—light and shade is added by Tenniel. It is effective to an ignorant eye, and is ingeniously disposed; but it is entirely conventional and false, unendurable by any person ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... music is at the mercy of many circumstances, the influence of which is felt, in some degree, even in those arts whose principles have long been fixed and ascertained, and whose rules are not merely conventional. The love of novelty, which the weariness caused by a constant repetition of the same musical phrase or idea renders more exigeant in this than in other arts, the want or impossibility of having any classic examples which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... devoted his life to the boy's training. All conventional education was wrong in principle. Schools and colleges and the study of the classics were drivelling folly, with next to nothing to do with life. Travel was the great teacher. "You shall travel as far as the sun," he said. So the boy ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... men were born equal, etc. Mr. Sumner was an idealist—neither a constitutionalist nor a practical statesman. He could pull down, but he could not construct—could declare what he considered humane, right, and proper, and act upon it regardless of constitutional compromises or conventional regulations which were the framework of the Government. No man connected with the Administration, or in either branch of Congress, was more thoroughly acquainted with our treaties, so familiar with the traditions of the Government, or ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... In the printed book, all references to plays give the Act in lower-case Roman numerals and the Scene in small capital Roman numerals; the two look identical except for the dots over the i's. For this plain-text version, the conventional "IV.iv" sequence was ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... admiration which is felt at the sight of unusual feminine charms. The incident simply goes to show that everywhere in Spain there is tacit recognition of the general inferiority of women. In the laboring and peasant classes, where the women work with the men, such lapses from the conventional standard of good manners would not cause so much comment; but under these circumstances the dangers and the annoyances are not so great, as these women of the people, with their practical experience in life, ignorant as they ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... transfigured. Our door was besieged with visitors, our evenings bespoken by innumerable invitations; social civilities and courtesies poured in upon us from every side in an incessant stream; I was sought and petted and caressed by persons of conventional and real distinction, and every night that I did not act I might, if my parents had thought it prudent to let me do so, have passed in all the gayety of the fashionable world and the great London season. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... out of the ordinary groove are not apt to be attractive to the average English mind. There are conventional charities in which they may indulge,—there are Sunday-schools, and rheumatic old women, and flannel night-caps, and Dorcas societies, and such things to which people are used and which are likely to alarm ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... was bred," she replied in that plain manner of hers, so plain indeed that conventional people sometimes complained of it as rude. "That's good ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... see the others off at Idlewild. He knew they'd expect him to and, since it would be the last conventional gesture he'd have to make, he might as well conform to their notions of what was ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith

... is only a conventional imitation of the Doctor's style of talking. He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk. He used very often to have it all his own way. If he came back to us we must remember that to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... allowances for conventional exaggerations, it is clear from the correspondence that there was deep love between Marcus and his preceptor. The letters cover several years in succession, but soon after the birth of Marcus's daughter, Faustina, there is a large gap. It does not follow that the letters ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... stern, after the fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key to sea mastery in the shape of a new ship that would take sail and answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert

... bottom of a mould with aspic to the depth of one-fourth an inch. Set the mould in ice water, and, when the aspic is set, arrange upon it a decoration of cooked vegetables cut in shapes with French cutter, or fashion a conventional design or some flower. Dogwood blossoms provide a simple pattern, and one easily carried out. Cut the four petals from a thin slice of cooked turnip and the centre of the blossom from carrot or lemon peel. Fasten each piece in place with liquid jelly, and, when set, cover with more jelly. ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill

... the most remarkable composition of Mozart's youthful age, and though he wrote it under Gluck's influence, there is many a spark of his own original genius, and often he breaks the bonds of conventional form and rises to heights hitherto unanticipated. The public in general does not estimate the opera very highly, in consequence Idomeneus was only represented in Dresden, after the long interval of 21 years, to find the house empty and the applause lukewarm. But the true ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... iconoclastic than any of the Christian or the Mohammedan denominations in the sense that it opposes the acceptance of the petrified idea of Deity, so conventional and formal that it carries no inner conviction of the believers. Faith dies out whenever one comes to stick to one's fixed and immutable idea of Deity, and to deceive oneself, taking bigotry for genuine faith. Faith must be living and growing, and the living and growing faith should ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... broached higher things. She spoke of God and religion. The untutored child of the forest rose with the occasion. There was nothing conventional in her mind or words on these topics—as how could there be under the wayward teaching of Batoche? But her intuitions were crystal clear. There were no breaks, no obscurations in her spiritual vision. It was evident that she had studied and communed direct ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... it were echoes of the romances which I had read on Victoria's recommendation; the reminiscence was particularly strong in this last exclamation. However, it is not safe to conclude that feelings are not sincere because they are expressed in conventional phrases. These formulas are moulds into which our words run easily; though the moulds be hollow, the stuff that fills them may be ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... more—is now demanded of him than formerly. But to those possessed of what is known as the Instinct of the Theatre, or Scenic Instinct, the gestures and attitudes of the operatic stage, being largely conventional, are soon acquired. Scenic accomplishments are undoubtedly necessary to the stage-singer, but his mimetic studies should not preclude him from making himself a thorough master of the vocal side of his ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... ill-educated men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then in some man's work, in some ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... fervour girls of tender years re-unite some day after a separation of months need not, of course, be explained. Presently, she entered the apartments, paid her respects and inquired how they all were. But after this conventional interchange of salutations, old lady Chia pressed her to take off her outer garments as the weather was so close. Shih Hsiang-yuen lost no time in rising to her feet and loosening her clothes. "I don't see why," Madame ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... the arrival of his parents that he could scarcely compose himself sufficiently to follow the seder and ask the conventional question concerning the significance of the Pesach festival. In reply, the head of the house recited from his Hagada how the Lord punished Pharaoh for his obduracy, how the children of Israel were eventually led from captivity, how ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... Budh-gaya, where under the bo tree Buddha attained to enlightenment, and S[a]rn[a]th, where he began his preaching. Yet the worship at neither place to-day is Buddhist. At the scene of Gautama's enlightenment, where he became Buddha or Enlightened, one of the conventional statues of Buddha is actually marked and worshipped as Vishnu, the Hindu deity, the Preserver in the Hindu triad. Even at that most holy shrine of Buddhism, Hinduism has supplanted it, for popular Hinduism ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... concede that the essence of the duel is an armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I am using it, to the duels of German officers or even to the broadsword combats that are conventional among the German students. I do not see why a young Prussian should not have scars all over his face if he likes them; nay, they are often the redeeming points of interest on an otherwise somewhat ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton

... world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love—these three. Are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... way over to Mrs. Grant with the conventional smile, and then, once without the drawing-room, hurried down to the door and the night air. In the hall I recognised, standing waiting for his carriage, a familiar figure. It was a man I had known intimately in India: he was home now on furlough, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... there is enough on the face of this communication to show that the Duke of Wellington took a narrow, and, so to speak, technical, view of the relative positions of himself and Mr. Canning; that the latter expected a more conventional and generous construction of his position and proposal from one with whom he was ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... chief readers of fiction; and it is women whom one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite society. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while they are sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever. I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... very different qualities of things in one unifying synthesis—a process having nearly the same theoretical value as a memoria technica, which, by substituting letters for figures, helps us to retain the latter in our minds. This does not mean that figures are, in fact, letters, but it is a conventional substitution which has a practical advantage. What memoria technica is to the ordinary memory, the theory of mechanics should ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... the propounders of the code of revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said, are founded on contract for mutual protection. Good and evil are conventional terms, for the thunderbolts of heaven fall alike on the just and the unjust. The objection to wrongdoing is not the act, but in its consequences to the wrongdoer. Wise men contrive laws, not to bind, but to protect themselves; and when they prove ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought good company, when I have ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... under which lie half-concealed,—not at all concealed from those who have often watched him at his work,—the glance, the tone, the spring, which are to tear that unfortunate witness into pieces, without infringing any one of those conventional rules which have been laid down for the guidance ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... extend beyond the details necessary to distinguish one species from another, or to describe the salient features of a plant in technical language; whose acquaintance with botanical science might almost be said to consist in the conventional application of a number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt to render intelligible,—as a barren field not ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... of curious phenomena. I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... of its having been made when it was, and being what it is. In his opinion it was made at the happy juncture when our language had attained adequate expansion and flexibility, and when at the same time its idiomatic strength was unimpaired by excess of technical distinctions and conventional refinements; and these circumstances, though of course infinitely subordinate to the spiritual influence of its subject-matter, he considered to be highly important in connection with a volume which naturally became a universally recognised standard of the language; for thus the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... and to our application of the notion of space, which is applicable to physical objects, to states of consciousness, to which it is really inapplicable. Objects occupying space are marked out as external to one another, but this cannot be said of conscious states. Yet, in our ordinary speech and conventional view of things, we think of conscious states as separated from one another and as spread out like "things," in a fictitious, homogeneous medium to which we give the name Time. Bergson says, "At any rate, we cannot finally admit two forms of the homogeneous, Time and Space, without first ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... charming than ever, since the conversation which had made her to some extent the possessor of a heart worthy to be the envy of every woman. They sang an Italian duet with so much expression that the audience applauded enthusiastically. Their adieux were in a conventional tone, which concealed their happiness. In short, this day had been to Emilie like a chain binding her more closely than ever to the Stranger's fate. The strength and dignity he had displayed in the scene when they had confessed their feelings had ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac

... count, then, so much with conventional people?" he demanded. "For me it has no significance in relation to feeling. If you would only look at me instead of down at those small hands, then you would not be able to tell ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... is this slight difference between the conventional Yankee and the average Home Ruler, that whilst the former swears "by Gum," the latter swears by ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various

... conscientious objector. They had been under the impression that his public career had been one long orgie of conscientious objection to everything that did not emanate from his own capacious brain. Even his hat and his waistcoat proclaim his defiance of conventional opinion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various

... wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... the male have a very conspicuous value for the group when exercised for the benefit of the group, they become particularly harmful when directed against the safety or interests of the group or the members of the group, and we find that civil and criminal law, and contract, and also conventional morality, are closely connected with the motility of the male. The establishment of moral standards is mediated through the sense of strain—strain to the personal self, and strain to the social self. Whether a man is injured ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... a harbor which he called Porto Securo, and taking possession of the country for the crown of Portugal, dispatched a ship to Lisbon with the important tidings. [99] In this way did the Brazils come into the possession of Portugal, being to the eastward of the conventional line settled with Spain as the boundaries of their respective territories. Dr. Robertson, in recording this voyage of Cabral, concludes with one of his just ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... Oriental's fatalistic attitude towards disease and death. Perhaps only those who have had close dealings with the British officer in time of action or emergency realise, to the full, the effective qualities hidden under a careless or conventional exterior:—the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and irrepressible spirit of enterprise, which—it has been aptly said—make him, at his best, the most romantic figure of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... genuine sense of the word, "Cobbler" Horn was a Christian gentleman; and he would have sustained the character in any position in which he might have been placed. But he had a feeling akin to contempt for the punctilious and conventional squeamishness of polite society. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... it all in accordance with your own judgment and do not allow yourself to be talked into the proper and conventional, everything will be quite right, and the way I want it to be; and I shall derive immense enjoyment from the beautiful property. Hitherto I have lived in a thoughtless way and without any feeling of ownership; I have tripped lightly over the earth and have never felt at home on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of it, had come upon the stage, that the requisite impulse was given. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Merimee, Alfred de Vigny, and other young men of genius, were just opening the assault on the citadel of classicisme. Conventional rules were set at defiance; the authorities that had so long held sway were summoned to abdicate; nature, truth, above all passion, were invoked as the sources of inspiration, the law-givers of the imagination, the sole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... above Cass Lake. We found his hut, but not himself, at the river's outlet. The lodge is neatly built of bark. It was surrounded by good patches of corn, potatoes, wheat, beans and wild raspberries. There is a stable for a horse and a cow, and all about were the conventional traps of a civilized biped who lives upon a blending of wit, woodcraft and industry. We greatly wished to see this hermit, whose nearest neighbors are thirty miles away. His dog welcomed us with all the passion of canine hunger and days of isolation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... was exceedingly simple, and devoid of ornament of any kind, save an occasional pilaster or flying buttress. The streets were broad, and laid out to cut the city into lozenge-shaped sections, instead of the conventional squares. In the center of the city stood a great lozenge-shaped building with a smooth, arched roof. From every section of the city, great swarms of people were flocking in the direction of the spot toward which the Ertak was settling, on foot and in long, slim vehicles ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright









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