|
|
|
More "Frivolity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... nor Mrs. Carter exactly said so, yet we gathered the idea that those were days of much dress and frivolity. It seems that ships came from everywhere with handsome fabrics and costly trifles; and that rich colonials strove so manfully and so womanfully to follow the capricious foreign fashions (by means of dressed dolls received from Paris and London) that usually they were not more ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The face of the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Marie Antoinette are among the historical personages who have most influenced the destinies of the world. His dulness, torpidity and indecision, and her frivolity, narrow-minded prejudices and suspiciousness, are among the causes of our present calamities. They are among the causes of a state of things which has inflicted on us, and threatens to inflict on all Europe, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... in a fair fight, M. de Duc," replied the young Marquis, awed in spite of all his frivolity, his light-heartedness, by this ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother's complexion was pink, and the daughter's was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity, and the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a good position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers of people. Little, if any, community of feeling subsisted between them and Estella, but the understanding was established that they were necessary to her, and that she ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... of life, higher than holiness or usefulness, because it must include both. To us it is so unfamiliar that we do not know it from frivolity; we seek the excitement of some pleasing sensation, and, rising to its stimulus, we fall afterwards into the reaction of misery. Happiness is the poise, calm, strength, and spring of the life fully in harmony with all ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... within the door and bay a deep, guttural response to Brother Spence; or two or three kids would come tumbling over the forms and jumping and bucking in the open space by the wheezy and venerable organ, spirits of thoughtless frivolity in ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... at Anagnia of an equestrian family. He was a man of loose morality, not without intellectual gifts, who by indulging in frivolity posed as a wit. In Nero's time he had acted in a harlequinade at the Juvenalian Games.[170] At first he pleaded compulsion, but afterwards he acted voluntarily, and his performances were rather clever than respectable. Rising to the command of a legion, he supported Verginius[171] and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... be any other place, and we enter upon the events attending a young lady's entrance into society. This might all be very pretty and pleasant, except for the deadly seriousness of the author. It is entirely frivolous and unimportant, but frivolity may be made charming and full of suggestion. Points of etiquette and behavior engage the minds, hearts, and passions of the personages of the story. It is a sort of animated illustration of the little book called "Don't." For example, "Don't leave your overcoat and rubbers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... us that Guynemer was a believer who accomplished his religious exercises regularly, without ostentation and without weakness. "How many times he has stopped me at night," he writes, "as I passed near his bed! He wanted a quiet conscience, without reproach. His usual frivolity left him at the door of the chapel. He believed in the presence of God in this holy place and respected it.... His Christian sentiments were to be a sustaining power in his aerial battles, and he would fight with the more ardor if his conscience ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... it and withdrew—at first to gay society in Paris. Here he might naturally have sunk into the gutter with his companions, but for a great mental shock which became the main epoch and turning-point of his life, the crisis which diverted him from frivolity to seriousness. It was a purely intellectual emotion, not excited by anything in the visible or tangible world; nor could it be called conversion in the common acceptation of that term. He tells us that on the 10th ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... remark were a generalisation, it was certainly an audacious one, but Dick was thinking only of a personal application. Daisy's words, as he understood their meaning, were working on the better nature which lay below his frivolity. He began to suffer genuine shame and remorse at the idea that he had caused suffering—lasting pain—to this poor unsophisticated child who had loved him so readily. Moved by this honourable, if ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... was only a little bit drunk he inclined to frivolity and gaiety, and was given to playing the fiddle and dancing, but when he was very drunk, he was very solemn, and intensely religious. He gave himself to the singing of psalms, and if propped up would preach a sermon worthy of Doctor ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... actor identifies himself with the personages he represents. He renders all their sentiments. This role is the most powerful, but, before making it the object of his choice, there must be severe study; he must not run the risk of frivolity. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... heart dead within him, but he thought it none the less necessary to humor the Duchess, to laugh when she laughed, and shed tears when she wept; groaning in spirit, all the same, over the feminine frivolity which could find matter for a jest while setting about a matter so serious. What would he not have done to save the Count? While Chesnel dressed; Mme. de Maufrigneuse sipped the cup of coffee and cream which Brigitte brought her, and agreed with herself that provincial women cooks are superior ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... With the decay of the ancient concept of women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity—this notion is ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... every Christian woman. For her own sake, for the sake of all she loves, for the sake of her country, for the service of Christ and His Church, she is bound to uphold this standard at a high point—a point entirely above suspicion. This task is of importance incalculable. But, owing to the frivolity of some women, and the very loose ideas of many men, it is no easy task. Undoubtedly, the very great majority of women are born modest at heart. Their nature is by many degrees less coarse than ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the snap-shotter when, LORD BOB lamenting the "ingrained frivolity of the Radicals in this grave crisis," ARTHUR MARKHAM interposed with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... uselessness of being singular, and the folly of adopting a mode of life that makes you a laughing-stock. But this eighteen-year-old girl stood firm. She had resolved to live the Christ-life and devote her energies to lessening the pains of earth. Life was too short for frivolity; no one could afford to compromise with evil. She became the friend of children; the champion of the unfortunate; she sided with the weak; she was their friend and comforter. Her life became a cry in favor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... genius, eloquence, and versatility of Thiers. Mole belonged to an ancient and noble family, and his splendid chateau was filled with historical monuments. He had all the affability of manners which marked the man of high birth, without their frivolity. One of the first acts of his administration was the liberation of political prisoners, among whom was the famous Prince Polignac, the prime minister of Charles X. The old king himself died, about the same time, an exile in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... legates to Provence, who preached, discussed, and threatened, and met a freedom of thought and resistance to authority which Rome was not willing to brook. Bitter controversy was now substituted for the amiable frivolity of the tensons, and theological disputes superseded those on points of gallantry. The long struggle between the poetry of the troubadours and the preaching of the monks came to a crisis; the severe satires ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... South Wind and the Sun, Each so loves the other one, For all his jolly folly, And frivolity and fun, That our love for them they weigh As their fickle fancies may, And when at last we love them most, ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... efforts to maintain and educate the orphans. Even when the police official was spending his evenings at the theatre, the worthy actor generally filled his place in the family circle, and it seems had frequently to appease my mother, who, rightly or wrongly, complained of the frivolity of her husband. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... arisen from chivalry, still remained on the surface, but its language was that of cold, unmeaning flattery; and, from being the arbiters of honour, they became the mere ministers of amusement. They were again consigned to that frivolity, into which they relapse as easily as men do into ferocity. The respect they inspired, was felt individually or occasionally, but not for their sex. Any thing serious addressed to them, was introduced with an apology, or in the manner we now address children whom we desire to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of frivolity, but she rose, looked at her wrist-watch and guessed she'd have a few minutes before dinner, to fool ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... old hand now, and didn't even know into what category she really fitted. Was it, after all, impossible that behind all this frivolity the desire to take up the struggle for existence on cleanly terms ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... one knew him well, effectually concealed them. Coleman, though too volatile to make a real friend of, was a very agreeable companion, and, if it were ever possible to get him to be serious for a minute, showed that beneath the frivolity of his manner lay a basis of clear good sense and right feeling, which only required calling forth to render him a much higher character than he appeared at present. For the rest, I was alternately bullied and patronised by Lawless (though ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... instant the above dialogue—from the frivolity of which the universally-learned readers of modern times will, we fear, recoil with contempt—was interrupted by a movement on the part of its hero which showed that his occupation was at an end. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... instead of re-establishing order at Naples by his presence, speedily returned to Palermo, to indulge in his favourite amusements. Nelson, and the ambassador's family, accompanied the court; and Troubridge remained, groaning over the villany and frivolity of those with whom he was compelled to deal. A party of officers applied to him for a passage to Palermo, to see the procession of St. Rosalia: he recommended them to exercise their troops, and not behave like children. It was grief enough ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... composition, now imminent, with the powers that be; but he should bestir himself to withstand the pressure exerted by Giles, by Medora herself, by Bond, by mischievous Clytie Summers, by the whole idle horde of studio loungers to force him into such an atmosphere of frivolity, license and dissipation as could not but inwrap one of those ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... grins, sort of sly and sheepish, like they wasn't used to indulgin' in such frivolity. They seemed to enjoy it, though, and the first thing I know I'm bein' put through a sort of highbrow third degree, the object being to show up what an empty loft I wear my ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... captain, 'it is so; own it: frivolity's the fruit of that training that's all for the flesh. But dip you into some o' my books on my shelves here, and learn to see living man half skeleton, like life and shadow, and never to living man need ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... continued, in a tone which seemed to imply that he deemed it necessary to apologize for the apparent frivolity of Brother Rabbit,—"en yit de time come w'en ole Brer Rabbit 'gun ter put dis en dat tergedder, en de notion strak 'im dat he better be home lookin' atter de intruss er he fambly, 'stidder trapesin' en trollopin' 'roun' ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... thing to take a servant—Alfy was really that, of course—to a Maitland party. Yet the child had just as good blood in her veins as many others who would attend, even if her lot in life were less fortunate. Besides, was it right to disturb her quiet habits by such frivolity? While the matter was pending, Alfaretta could only calm her perturbed mind by gathering every belated daisy she could find and testing her fortune upon its white petals. "Shall I be let to go? Shall I not?" Mostly, the daisies said: "I shall!" ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... or drove. He wanted to be irreproachable and, if that involved friendlessness, it could not be helped. Besides, he had no very high opinion of the English. So far as he could see, they cared for nothing but fox-hunting and Sunday observances; they oscillated between an undue frivolity and an undue gloom; if you spoke to them of friendly joyousness they stared; and they did not understand either the Laws of Thought or the wit of a German University. Since it was clear that with such people he could have ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... be safe, And gay without frivolity." If we do, I think they are pretty sure, whether young or old, to tie bunches of wild flowers to their crooks. But, after all, for a war shepherdess, garments such as my Downland Amoret had on were more appropriate. Anyway, the brave old ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... at the end of this description does not greatly lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison's picture, as he is careful to tell us of 'ordinary women.' Much must be allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for this weakness in the 'feminine world' half his vocation as a moralist in the Spectator would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays of the women with whom he was acquainted be ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... approaching her own secrets or character, into frank talk about himself. All unconsciously he began to lay bare to his listener the infirmities of his erring, open heart. Silently she looked down, and plumbed them all,—the frivolity, the recklessness, the half gay, half mournful sense of waste and ruin. There, blooming amongst the wrecks, she saw the fairest flowers of noble manhood profuse and fragrant still,—generosity and courage and disregard for self. Spendthrift and gambler on one side the medal; gentleman ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Samuel, lived in the household at Mount Vernon and evidently was a great cross, for we find Washington pleading as an excuse for her frivolity that "she was not brung up right, she has no disposition, and takes no care of her clothes, which are dabbed about in every corner, and the best are always in use. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... agreed that the War has given women great chances, and that women for the most part have taken them. Where they have not, but have preferred frivolity, it is not always their own fault, but the result of outside pressure. Such a paragraph, for example, as the following, by "Lady Di," in The Sunday Evening Telegram, is hardly a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... advice of a book entitled Education out of School Hours, was determined that every moment of the day should be filled with some occupation that led to culture. She carefully explained that the word "recreation" meant "re-creation"—a creating again, not a mere period of frivolity or lotus-eating, and advocated that all intervals of leisure should be devoted to intellectual interests. She frowned on girls who sauntered arm-in-arm round the garden, or sat giggling in the summer-house, and suggested suitable employments for their idle hands and brains. "Never waste a precious ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... necessarily of contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their background, but are abruptly different from each other, like the clown among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness. A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... will leave your mother and sisters to give you all domestic news. Tell Annette I have been looking for her in every stage since her letter last fall, and that I hope for her arrival daily. Nipper is well, and endeavors, by stern gravity, to repress the frivolity of Baxter. All unite in much love, and I ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... the example of Alfieri, there was another motive at work—a determination to prove to the world that he was the master of his own temperament, and that, if he chose, he could cast away frivolity and cynicism, and clothe himself with austerity "as with a garment." He had been taken to task for "treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices" (Blackwood's Edin. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint, pedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved enough, whose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems, by contrast with the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or play. Some of the figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, a little fantastic. Certain objects reappearing from scene to scene—love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and lovers' toys—hint obscurely at ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... took only a second glance to assure herself of what Judy had done and she frowned and compressed her lips. When the service was over, she made a little impromptu address to the students. College, she said, was a place for serious work and not for frivolity. Of course there were no objections to innocent fun, but absurdities would not be tolerated. All the time she was speaking she was looking straight at Judy, who, with chin resting on her hand and eyelids drooped, apparently read a hymn book. That afternoon Miss ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... they rose, and hastened shivering to the chapel. Never did they speak, but to their confessor; until, in his last hour, each was privileged to give to the prior his dying messages. Hither, from the active and gay world of philosophy and frivolity would suddenly retire from time to time some young officer, scholar, or courtier. Here, bound by irrevocable vows, he could weep over his sins, or gnash his teeth at the folly that had brought him, until he found peace at last in ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... revolution in the spiritual condition of the enormous majority of the people of all lands. Its aim is to produce a change not only in the opinions, feelings, and principles of these vast populations, but to alter the whole course of their lives, so that instead of spending their time in frivolity and pleasure-seeking, if not in the grossest forms of vice, they shall spend it in the service of their generation and in the worship of God. So far it has mainly operated in professedly Christian countries, where the overwhelming majority of the people have ceased, publicly, at any ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... whim. I was disgusted with London and society after my return from the front. Those who have been through this terrible war learn to see most things at their true worth, and the frivolity, the snobbishness, and the shams of London society at such a time sickened and disgusted me. They tried to lionise me in drawing rooms and make me talk for their entertainment. They put my photograph in the illustrated papers, and interviewed me, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... I went to the "Frivolity," to see the latest rays of the lamp of burlesque. That scene, at any rate, was familiar. There, in all their spotless panoply of expressionless face, and irreproachable shirt-front, sat the golden lads of the Metropolis in their rows, images of bored ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... be any objection to it. But when one knows a person's opinion of frivolity, always to be thought frivolous by the person ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and restless publicity—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of the most discerning eagerness for knowledge, but without any suitable male society, it is no wonder that the young man went astray. In comparison with other German courts, the Prussian might be regarded as very virtuous: but frivolity toward women and a lack of reserve in the discussion of the most dubious relations were pronounced even there. After a visit to the dissolute court of Dresden, Prince Frederick began to behave like other princes of his time, and generally found good comrades ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... solid learning cannot but make woman as well as man more humble; ... and it must be owned that if a little superficial knowledge has rendered some of our sex vain, it equally renders some of theirs insupportable." With all the sex's frivolity, she adds, women have not been found to spend their lives on mere entia rationis splitting hairs and weighing motes like the Schoolmen. She concludes that men deprive women of education lest they should oust them "from those public offices which they fill so miserably." She ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... some accusation Lord Cloverton has made against me. I tremble lest I may be unable to do so. Of what frivolity do I stand accused?" and she smiled at the Ambassador with an innocent expression on her face pleading ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... health; and in the autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school at Farmington. During the brief months of her absence she had marvellously acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldliness of manner and a certain frivolity that seemed to put those who surrounded her on a lower plane. She was only seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role she played. First there were murmurs, then sustained applause. I scarcely recognized her: she had taken wings and soared far above ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... justification by love and its good works, he was in danger of being misunderstood by strangers, as though he held the bare knowledge and assent to be sufficient for justification, and such preaching would indeed have led to frivolity and disorderly conduct. But even apart from the question whether or not the brother of the Elector was disturbed by such scruples, Luther must have welcomed the opportunity, when the summons came to him, to ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... frightened glances were continually turned upon Sadie. There is surely some wrecker angel which can only gather her best treasures in moments of disaster. For here were all these worldlings going to their doom, and already frivolity and selfishness had passed away from them, and each was thinking and grieving only for the other. Sadie thought of her aunt, her aunt thought of Sadie, the men thought of the women, Belmont thought of his wife,—and then he thought of something else also, and he kicked his ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... parties which have kept their names and confused their principles, so that no man may distinguish them except as the Ins and Outs. An age of greedy privilege and sullen poverty, of blatant luxury and curious envy, of rising palaces and vanishing homes, of stupid frivolity and idiotic publicomania; in which four hundred gilded fribbles give monkey-dinners and Louis XV. revels, while four million ungilded gossips gape at them and read about them in the newspapers. An age when princes of finance buy protection from the representatives of a ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... only those sin against this commandment who grossly misuse and desecrate the holy day, as those who on account of their greed or frivolity neglect to hear God's Word or lie in taverns and are dead drunk like swine; but also that other crowd, who listen to God's Word as to any other trifle, and only from custom come to preaching, and go away again, and at the end of the year know as little ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... with dull disfavour. He would himself have given more than the sum mentioned to have compassed the same end, but for different reasons, and his own reasons were so grave that the youth's frivolity ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... no more hear of the government being divided among the select party, like a twelfth cake, nor see the interests of a nation which represents the interests of the globe, compromised to suit the contending claims of full-dressed frivolity. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... plays. Indeed, he was careful to cultivate the society of young noblemen, and this he was able to do by virtue of his theatrical successes, and, more helpful still, by a levity of character which stuck to him despite his great earnestness in many directions. Perhaps his frivolity and his love of pleasure, including the delights of the gaming table, may have been half assumed; perhaps he was only playing one of his many parts. He certainly succeeded in the role; he enlivened ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... his wishes, I passed another year at a very fashionable school—a year of girlish frivolity, in which my last chance of acquiring knowledge as a means of future independence was wholly thrown away. Before the close of this year I received another letter from George, which somewhat surprised, but did not at all dishearten me. It ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... then came exciting times. Some members thought it of great importance not to offend new States by giving them no recognition on the flag. Others called it dishonorable to waste time over what one man called "a consummate piece of frivolity," when matters "of infinitely greater consequence" ought to be discussed. Another declared that the Senate sent the bill for the want of something better to do. Yet another honorable member did not think it worth while either ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... by, there's a new thing on at the Frivolity—awfully good," he said. "Miss Foster might like to see it. We could make up a little ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... is one thing; and for another the feeling of personal freedom is essential, and that feeling has only recently begun to develop in me. I used not to have it before; its place was successfully filled by my frivolity, carelessness, and lack ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... His fondness and petting were the same, but she perceived that he found in his sister a companionship of which she did not feel capable. But to Theodora herself, whenever she succeeded in engrossing Arthur, it seemed a victory of sisterly affection and sense over beauty and frivolity. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... warnings of what was brewing. But Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, who in frivolity seemed a contemporary embodiment of Nero, deemed cheap wit a sufficient reply to all remonstrances, and had to confess afterwards that he had utterly miscalculated the forces with which he had to deal. He was completely taken by surprise when, on ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... the characters of those with whom he lives or converses, must keep up the appearance of a kind of recklessness and frivolity, for the mind closes itself up like the hedgehog, at the least sensible touch of observation, and will not be afterwards drawn out. Men have been known in the middle of a discovery of their character, to be stopped short by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... sometimes, but never "talked" them, and seldom failed to introduce the names of one or more of the forty-three duchesses, countesses and marquises whose peace of mind he boasted of having wrecked for ever. Is it not strange that such frothy frivolity could have obtained dominion for more than fifty years over the most critical people in the world? But Montrond always declared that no man in France would ever take the trouble to read a book if once he had taken the trouble to read the preface. Even by the capricious and pedantic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... things were changed; in their time there was energy; there were great crimes indeed, but the Church was active. The bad was very bad, but the good was very good, there were real broad questions then of right and wrong, not the coldness and frivolity, where all was so worthless that there was scarce a possibility of caring or seeing which part ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... towns in England. They are fond of their ornaments, merely because they are good, and not because they embellish their persons; and are more gratified to inspire the women with jealousy of these exterior advantages, than the men with love. All the frivolity which often (excuse me, Madam) renders the society of modest women so stupid in England, here seemed to throw still more leaden fetters on their charms. Not being an adept in gallantry, I found that I could only keep myself awake in their company ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the brim; it had a Standard which has transformed human existence to its very root; it has made inadequate what hitherto seemed to bring entire happiness; it has set limits to all petty natural culture; it has stamped as frivolity, not only all absorption in the mere pleasures of life, but has also reduced the whole prior circle of man to the mere world of sense. Such a valuation holds us fast and refuses to be weakened by us when all the dogmas and usages of the Church are detected ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... enhance his personal attractions increased, Donald's ever-growing anxiety led him to become more than ever impatient of such things and eager to hasten forward. He became provoked at his companion's frivolity, and regretted ever having consented to travel with him. When he finally discovered the prints of Indian moccasins about one of Cuyler's fires, the ashes of which were still hot, he grew so apprehensive of evil, and so impatient to get on, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... was a kindred spirit—a woman with whom conversation would be a pleasure; with whom it would be possible to discourse on terms of mental comradeship. He was partial to comely women, but he did not approve of frivolity except ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... your glad light eyes will be dim with tears, and the easy path you have striven to walk will be thickly strewn with thorn; and whether you deserve it or not, life will have for you a mournful earnestness, but notwithstanding all your frivolity and flippancy there is fine gold in your character, which the fire ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... self-denial. Upon book or newspaper she never cast a glance, but trusted wholly to the stars for her sublime knowledge. Her nights she usually spent in absorbed communion with these silent but eloquent teachers, and took her rest during the daytime. She spoke contemptuously of the frivolity and benighted ignorance of the modern Europeans, and gave as a proof their ignorance not only of astrology, but of the common and every-day phenomena produced by the magic art. She evidently desired her hearer to believe that she had at her command ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of her very limited faith, that the serious concerns of life are of interest only to fools, and should, therefore (though the inference is not obvious), be entirely neglected by herself, and that frivolity and fashion are the twin deities before whom every self-respecting woman must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... your hands I commit the most precious jewel that was ever intrusted to the custody of a friend. You are the arbiter of my fate. More, much more than my life is in your disposal. If you should betray me, you will commit a crime, that laughs to scorn the frivolity of all former baseness. You will inflict upon me a torture, in comparison of which all the laborious punishments that tyrants have invented, are couches of luxury, are ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... little German was our arithmetic-master; a very good one, whose patience was often sorely tried by our stupidity or frivolity. On such occasions he rained epithets on us, which, from his imperfect knowledge of English, were often comical, and roused more amusement than shame. But for Eleanor he never had a harsh word. She was thoroughly fond of arithmetic, and "gave her mind ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... if he introduced some striking or amusing addition to the ordinary shows, the more popular he became for the time being. In the Roman world you must pay for your ambitions, and this was the most approved way of paying. We might moralise over the enormous frivolity which could waste day after day thousands and thousands of pounds upon such transitory pleasures, instead of conferring lasting benefits in the way of hospitals or schools. But it is not the object of this book to moralise. We may feel confident ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... spirit of the foreigner a kind of gross levity, an affectation of frivolity with respect to women, and a continual habit of vulgar vanity, which seems to run through all ranks and ages of the continental world. What can be more offensively trifling, than the conduct which Napoleon narrates of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... at last abandoning his silence, "you talk a great deal too much and you often err through excessive confidence and frivolity." ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... productive of suffering and unhappiness. The ancient Greeks required that the husband should be twenty years older than the wife; but this custom was no more reasonable than that of another nation which required that only old and young should marry, so that the sobriety of the old might restrain the frivolity of the young. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Change is what he needs very badly. Change! Oh, if everybody could have that when they need it! How it does make lives over! I know—how I do know! It's the deadly monotony that kills. Jean will bloom under the old farmhouse roof, away from all the fuss and frivolity she's so tired of." ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... most solid elements of poise is, without doubt, a well-defined ambition, that is to say, one that is divested of the drawbacks of frivolity and directly winged toward the goal of ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... attended. The eye, movements, and gestures of the great courtier were so composed, so regularly observant of all etiquette belonging to his situation, as to form a marked and strong contrast with the forward gaiety and frivolity by which he recommended himself to the favour of his "dear dad and gossip," King James. A singular fate attended this accomplished courtier, in being at once the reigning favourite of a father and son so very opposite in manners, that, to ingratiate himself with the youthful Prince, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... thing only is forbidden, to treat these substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on the way to more exacting topics. The mystics, and the mystical poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity. Recognising that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between all physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them over that mysterious frontier. Their failures ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... the habit of regularly swarming, like bees, under the form of the Ver Sacrum. On the north, again, were the Etruscan hill towns, with their lords, pirates by sea, and probably marauders by land; for the period of a more degenerate luxury and frivolity may be regarded as subsequent to their subjugation by the Romans; at any rate, when they first appear upon the scene they are a conquering race. The wars with the AEqui and Volsci have been ludicrously multiplied and exaggerated by Livy; but even without ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... it." Tim looked sheepish, tucked down his head, and said he couldn't sing, but this encouraging invitation of the master's was echoed all round the table. It was a conversational opportunity: everybody could say, "Come, Tim," except Alick, who never relaxed into the frivolity of unnecessary speech. At last, Tim's next neighbour, Ben Tholoway, began to give emphasis to his speech by nudges, at which Tim, growing rather savage, said, "Let me alooan, will ye? Else I'll ma' ye sing a toon ye wonna like." A good-tempered waggoner's patience has limits, and Tim ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... you are personally concerned is your own frivolity; though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of your early training. But the fact remains the same, that here, in Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in nowise care for the history of your country, for its present dangers, or its present ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... ball and Sybil's interest in it were a great relief to Madeleine's mind, and she now turned her whole soul to frivolity. Never, since she was seventeen, had she thought or talked so much about a ball, as now about this ball to the Grand-Duchess. She wore out her own brain in the effort to amuse Sybil. She took her to call on the Princess; she would ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... that I had a gleam of hope when I took her on the Continent, thinking it just possible that by removing her from her old associations, I might win her back to a sense of duty. I would have borne her frivolity; I would have endured to be bound for life to a doll or a log, if only she ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and frivolity, feasting and gossip are in strange contrast to the grey gown of the Jesuit priest hurrying from the monastery opposite, to shrive some sinner, or to administer "Extreme Unction" to some dying saint. Within the convent walls pious sisters, followers of Mademoiselle Mance and Madame ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... know you do not wish to tell me the real reason, and will drop it, but I shall not be deceived. I haven't studied my kind for this long without knowing at least the a-b-c of human nature. You use your cap and bells and an air of frivolity to conceal your true character from the world, as other men cloak themselves in an ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan,[498] who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... despised—even hated! It is a sad truth, that there is something in the solemn aspect of ancient architecture which, in rebuking frivolity and chastening gayety, has become at this time literally repulsive to a large majority of the population of Europe. Examine the direction which is taken by all the influences of fortune and of fancy, wherever they concern themselves with art, and it will be found that the real, earnest ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... sorrows of a class of men, Who, though they bow to fashion and frivolity, No fancied claims or woes fictitious pen, But wrongs ell-wide, and of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the farmer ape the fashion, and the frivolity of the butterflies of town life, or permit his family to do it? It is the sheerest possible folly in him to do so. Yet, it is a folly into which many are imperceptibly gliding, and which, if not reformed, will ultimately lead to great ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... uttered almost with a womanly tenderness, not without its influence upon the company. Some phrase spoken of Frivolity's mouth had touched this group of outcasts and spoken straight to their hearts. They bandied, pleasantries no more, but lighting the cigars—the Lady Sarah boldly charging a small clay pipe—they ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... laughed loudly and talked with an audacious freedom that was often the cause of his expulsion from respectable company. A glass or two of wine seemed quite to turn his brain; he was alert then for any frivolity, and he was not always content with so restricted a libation, when the consequences were even more ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... of vice, and they move:—in England! Pulpit-preaching has no effect. For gross maladies, gross remedies. You may judge of what you are by the quality of the cure. Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint—it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make. It may still be the saving of you—on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not observed that it aims at higher. And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is off to the East, has accepted a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... strength of intellect. His weaker nature became more and more subject to one endowed with gifts far superior to his own. In every hour of perplexity, in every serious moment, when the better nature of the king gained a transient ascendency, he turned from the frivolity of the gay and thoughtless beings fluttering around him to Mary Mancini for ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... die before she is settled in life, crosses my mind when I am in a serious mood. That she will marry well, there is little doubt, for she possesses beauty in a rare degree, and has been reared as an English girl should be, not to frivolity and foppery. She was trained by her mother, who save for the mad act she was persuaded into by me, was all goodness and refinement, for the first twelve years of her life, and since then by an admirable ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... one who afterwards became one of the most dashing officers in the Federal cavalry service during the war for the Union. It tells of the vicissitudes of a life restless but resolute, and which bears the stamp of heroism and success. There are stories of school-days full of the activity and frivolity of youth, of failure and fortune, and a graphic sketch of the turning point in Glazier's career, which came with the rebellion. From the day he entered the ranks of the Harris Light Cavalry his course was steadily onward and upward, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... and duties and aspirations and hopes as far removed in importance from mere temporal matters as the heaven is higher than the earth. Oh, what high treason to the deity whom the preacher invokes, what stupidity, what frivolity, what insincerity, what incapacity of realizing what is truly great, when he descends from the lofty themes of salvation and moral accountability, to dwell on the platitudes of aesthetic culture, the beauties ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... overheard, "Edwin P. Brewster is turning handsprings in his grave over the way he is going it," Monty resolved to redeem himself in the eyes of his critics. He would show them that his brain was not wholly given over to frivolity. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... evident enjoyment. Tex regarded him with a frown: "For a Siwash you're plumb mirthful an' joyous minded. In fact I ain't noticed any one so wrapped up in glee for quite a spell. Suppose you just loosen up an' let me in on the frivolity, an' at the same time kind of let it appear where you put in the day. I mistrusted my packin' a pair of purple ones wouldn't give you the whoopin' cough, so I just sauntered over an' took a look at the cayuses. Yourn's be'n rode ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... oracular lips of the commander that became immortal on the frontier and made the petitioners nearly frantic. For a week the trio was the butt of all the wits at Fort Warrener. And yet the entire commissioned force felt that they were being kept at the grindstone because of the frivolity of these few youngsters, and they did not like it. All the same the cavalrymen stuck up for their colonel, and the infantrymen respected him, and the matinees were business-like and profitable. They were rarely unpleasant in any feature; ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... in Paris, I cannot help feeling a good deal of sympathy for them, notwithstanding their childish vanity, their mendacity, and their frivolity. I sincerely trust, therefore, if they do seriously resist their besiegers, that the assurances of the Government that there are ample supplies of food and of ammunition, are not part of the system of official lying which was pursued by their predecessors; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... he lived with his mother in 1778 and 1779, was a disappointment, for he despised the French nation. His deep, simple, German nature revolted from Parisian frivolity, in which he found only sensuality and coarseness, disguised under a thin veneering of social grace. He abhorred French music in these bitter terms: "The French are and always will be downright donkeys. They cannot sing, they scream." It was just at this time that Gluck and ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... her, I was in a state of some perplexity, for I could not follow the bent of her thoughts, nor appreciate the feelings that moved her. I was, however, considerably touched, and upbraided myself for not having hitherto done justice to the depth and sincerity of nature which underlay her external frivolity. I expressed this self-condemnation to Denny Swinton, but he met it very coldly, and would not be drawn into any discussion of the subject. Denny was not wont to conceal his opinions, and had never pretended to be enthusiastic about my engagement. This attitude of his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery, but even ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... manifest to our eyes, set a perpetual example of a right life. We bid them be the ornaments of our State. Too often they do not attain to our ideal. They give, it may be, a half-hearted devotion to soldiering, or pursue pleasure merely—tales of their frivolity raising now and again the anger of a public swift to envy them their temptations. But against this admirable Prince no such charges can be made. Never (as yet, at least) has he cared to 'play at soldiers.' By no means has he shocked the Puritans. Though it is no secret that he prefers ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... where he was soon joined by Elmer. The disgraced preacher and the reformed convict had struck up a fast friendship. They sat with their backs towards the Jasper B., and Cleggett supposed from their attitude that they were sternly condemnatory of the frivolity and festivity ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Colonel Lennox since that fatal day which seemed to have divided them for ever. At first she felt uneasy and embarrassed, but there was so much good sense and good feeling in the tone of his conversation—it was so far removed either from pedantry or frivolity, that all disagreeable ideas soon gave way to the pleasure she had in conversing with one whose turn of mind seemed so similar to her own; and it was not till she had parted from him at the gate of Beech Park she had time to wonder how she could possibly have ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... suits a lazy man," said Sol, and he walked away jauntily. Under his apparent frivolity he concealed his joy at the find, which he knew to be of such vast importance. He approached the dusky group, and his really tender heart was stirred with pity for the rescued captives. Long Jim and Silent Tom held the smaller two on their ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Stonebridge House, where his friendship had been my one comfort and hope; of our early days in London, when it seemed as if, with one another for company, nothing could come amiss, and no hardship could be quite intolerable; of his illness and absence, and my gradual yielding to frivolity and extravagance; then of his return and confidence in me. Would that he had never told me that wretched secret! If he had only known to whom he was telling it, to what a pitiful, weak, vain nature he was confiding it, he would have bitten ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... neighbor. But loving our own selfish ease, we excuse ourselves, and so judge ourselves unworthy of the happiness we should enjoy in doing the kind action. He comes in some deep conviction, calling us to a new life. We feel that we ought to leave our frivolity, and live for God and eternity—live for what is real and permanent. But we stifle these convictions, and go back to our old lives, and so judge that we are not worthy to become the friends and fellow-workers ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... and difficult to furnish with even this little handful of guests; but it was a proper and necessary attention to the colonel; conversation not too dull, nor yet too bright for ease, but passing gracefully from one agreeable topic to another without earnestness, a restless virtue, or frivolity, which also goes against serenity. Now it touched upon the prospects of young A. B. in the demise of his uncle; now upon the probable seriousness of C. D. in his attentions to E. F.; now upon G.'s amusing mishaps during a late tour in Switzerland, which ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Ruth's frivolity and worldliness at Fallkill traveled to Philadelphia in due time, and occasioned no little undertalk among ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of those squat, heathen, Satsuma vases, inlaid with distorted figures and symbols and toned in all luridness of color, into which has been tossed a poor sort of flower plucked from any bush the owner happened to pass, which has been salted down in frivolity—or perhaps something stronger. I'll keep the lid on to-night, for you ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer shade still than the dash.... But what on earth are we talking about?" And the Chairman of the Corps Committee pulled himself up in deprecation of our frivolity, which I recognized by acknowledging that we might indeed hear more about the work done and doing at the front by Richard Norton and his energetic and devoted co-workers. Then I plunged recklessly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... predecessors, had wasted eight months of most precious time; they had heard and made orations, they had read and written protocols, they had witnessed banquets, masquerades, and revels of stupendous frivolity, in honour of the English Garter, brought solemnly to the Valois by Lord Derby, accompanied by one hundred gentlemen "marvellously, sumptuously, and richly accoutred," during that dreadful winter ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... just when we did," said Lucile, peeping around a corner of the cabin. "I see old lady Banks in the distance. 'Pray, and may I inquire the cause of all this frivolity?'" and she imitated the old lady so perfectly that they went off into ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... as a PUN. After breakfast, one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some of the questions and their answers. I subjoin two or three of them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the presence of more reflective natures.—It was asked, "Why tertian and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects." Some interesting ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his desire to be a hermit, might feel that love was better than wisdom. And if Yathodaya had been other than she was—who can tell?—perhaps after all the king might have succeeded; but it was not to be so. For to Yathodaya, too, life was a very solemn thing, not to be thrown away in laughter and frivolity, but to be used as a great gift worthy of all care. To the prince in his trouble there came a kindred soul, and though from the palace all the teachers of religion, all who would influence the prince against the desires of ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... and the charming Madame de Boufflers had drawn him into a correspondence, marked by almost passionate enthusiasm on her part, and as fair an imitation of enthusiasm as Hume was capable of, on his. In the extraordinary mixture of learning, wit, humanity, frivolity, and profligacy which then characterised the highest French society, a new sensation was worth anything, and it mattered little whether the cause thereof was a philosopher or a poodle; so Hume had a great success in the Parisian world. Great nobles feted ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the Roman composers were—workers for hire and of inferior social position—were obliged even perhaps against their own better judgment and their own better taste to accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and, when they had found their fitting sphere, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... commoner who styles himself a marquis; he arrogates to himself a quality he does not possess. He thinks himself more worthy than his neighbour. One can forgive such foolishness in women; their frailty and their frivolity render them excusable; the poor creatures pass from a lover to a director in good faith: but one cannot pardon the rogues who direct them, who abuse their ignorance, who establish the throne of their pride on the credulity of the sex. They resolve themselves into ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... down to chess and then Fyne's everlasting gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter he was only capable over a chessboard. Certain positions of the game struck him as humorous, which nothing ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... imported into England by the young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish, travelled to Italy. From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, this foul tide had begun to set toward England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston's 'Satires,' certain members of the higher classes had, by the beginning of James's reign, learnt nearly all which the Italians had to teach ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... was little hope of sleeping in Market Town, and to-morrow was the hiring fair; it was deplorable to think how much time had been wasted by the frivolity of Alexander. ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... if we had once made the effort to find meaning of any sort in it; nor can it be considered the most profitable use of school time, thus to 'like folly show' to unknit juvenile brains the abstract and high thought of mature and great minds, who uttered them with no foolishness or frivolity in their intentions! We see reasons to expect substantial advantages from Mr. Willson's books; and we believe teachers will appreciate and use them. We could wish they had not gone so far to mechanicalize the pupil's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the same place again and the same thing would happen. I'm not blaming her. God knows I don't blame her. I blame myself for being a blind ass. I hope she'll be happy, poor little girl. I want her to be. With all her irresponsibleness and her outside naughtiness and frivolity, her carelessness of men's feelings, her nonsense, and her teasing, pretty ways, I know that she is good at heart, sound, and sane and sweet. I want ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... the marriage of winsome, wilful Kate to strong and good David. Complications arise by which David marries her younger sister Marcia instead and it is only after a period of trials and heartaches that Marcia wins her husband's love when he comes to understand her worthiness and Kate's heartless frivolity and duplicity. The Chicago Tribune pronounces Marcia "One of the most lovable heroines that ever lived her life in ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... transcends the nursery tale from which he came, and carries to us all the implications of suffering and love that surround the aging of parents and the growth of children. Cleopatra is a wanton, but no analysis can explain the subtleties with which the idealism and animalism, the sacrifice and frivolity—and how much else—of human passion are bound together in the few hundred lines which she speaks. It is impossible to affirm that each of the great characters is thoroughly consistent or offers a strictly accurate motivation. Rather, they are magnificent portraits—like the ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... sunset! Her husband thinks much to that effect, as he turns to blow the smoke on order into the face that is so close to his, as they lean arm-in-arm on the parapet the sun has left his warmth on, and means to take his eyes off in half an hour. They really look quite a young couple, and the frivolity of their conduct adds to the effect. Nobody would believe in her grown-up daughter, to see that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... never be a true artist. Directly she rises to any height she goes off and gets married, ten to one to some idiot, who interferes in all her arrangements, and so her career is spoiled. I did think Mademoiselle Laurentia was above such frivolity. I imagined that, at last, I had discovered a true artist, one to whom her art was everything. No, I am again mistaken, and Mademoiselle Laurentia—why, she is not even going to marry a duke, there might be some sense in that, but only a ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time, so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is capable. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... parasitism. She must achieve conscious independence whether in or out of the family. Unquestionably there came with the Revolution a vision of a new woman—a woman from whom all of the willfulness and frivolity and helplessness of the "Lady" of the old regime should be stripped, while all her qualities of gentleness and charm should be preserved. The old-world lady was to be merged into a woman strong, capable, severely beautiful, a creature who had all of the virtues ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... back, Frivolity and Show. It is a day of Spring; I want to see my roses blow, And hear the blackbird sing. I wish to prune my apple-trees, And nail my peaches straight; Keep to the causeway, if you please— I've shut ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... Jenny's old admiration for Robin Featherstone, which had been already shaken, vanished that day. The Spirit of God, who had touched her heart through the preacher, led her to see that folly, vanity, and frivolity were utterly out of concord with Him. And then came a feeling of regret for the unkind flippancy with which she had treated Tom Fenton. Jenny knew that Tom was a Christian man; it had been one reason why she despised him, ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... middle-aged sergeants forsook their families and businesses at the very outset of the War, without a moment's hesitation, is a signal proof of their character. No men were ever greater lovers of peace. Some philosophers have seen or tried to see in the War a judgment on the luxury and frivolity of pre-War England, on her neglect of defence, and her absorption in opulence. Were this the case, it would be ironical to reflect how the North Country homes, first and most cruelly scourged by the War, were homes to which the so-called "sins of society" were least known and ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... of Klopstock, terrible as the fiends of Milton.... The distractions of a busy and contentious life break up our passions. A woman, on the contrary, broods over her passions; they are a fixed point on which her idleness or the frivolity of her duties holds her attention fast.... Impenetrable in dissimulation, cruel in vengeance, tenacious in their designs, without scruples about the means of success, animated by a deep and secret hatred against the despotism of man—it seems as if ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... and he longed to take his poor little sister Netta away from the contamination of such society. But she came downstairs after luncheon was over, gay and bright in dress and person, and ready for any amount of frivolity. Her countenance clouded over, when she heard how soon the party was to be broken up; but when Howel assured her he should be only a week absent, and that he would take her to town ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... manner in which it is obscured and perverted: cursed effects of fashionable education! of which both sexes are the advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could foresee that Theo. would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope, by her, to convince the world what neither sex appear ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... realities. Everything else is mimetic, phantasmal, tinkling. Deeply do the masters of the drama move us; but the Gospel cleaves, inworks, regenerates. In the theatre, the leading characters go off in death and despair, or with empty conceits and a forced frivolity; in the Gospel, tranquilly, grandly, they are dismissed to a serener life and a nobler probation. Who has not pitied the ravings of Lear and the agonies of Othello? The Gospel pities, but, by a magnificence of plot altogether ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... should have fancied careless of its subject, and even ignorant of its existence, but to whom I was personally bound to give some answer as to the book and its worth. It was making many unsettled and unhappy; it was (even worse) pandering to the cynicism and frivolity of many who were already too cynical and frivolous; and, much as I shrank from descending into the arena of religious controversy, I felt bound to say a few plain words on it, at least to my ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... of trifling importance furnished them with a topic of conversation for hours. The new dress in which the duchess had appeared, the pleasure with which the marquise seemed to receive the attentions of the chevalier, interested this little world, which had not been cured of its frivolity by its misfortunes, as much as the heroism which the last person condemned had displayed on ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... before luncheon, and the time was not wholly uneventful; at any rate, there were little thrills. A decided pull happened to the Black Dog rod, but the fish was away before I could take it up. A similar bit of frivolity was practised by another fish ten minutes later at my middle rod, which, I forgot to say, had brought the well-mended kelt to bank. Going to land for the midday rest, as it was not quite one o'clock, I put up a rod which I wished ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... mode of life. I could not so suddenly tear myself away from my fancied wealth, could not so readily separate the props of my morality and happiness from the pleasing dream with which everything within me was so closely bound up. I longed for the frivolity which seems to render the existence of most of those about me endurable to themselves. Everything which precluded reflection was welcome to me. Shall I confess it to you? I wished to lower myself, in order to destroy this source of my griefs, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hotels of this tiny summer resort are of brick. It has an old, well-established look; a place of relaxation with restraint, not of ungirdled frivolity. The plain Dutch people love their holidays, but they take them serenely and by rule: long walks and bicycle-rides, placid and nourishing picnics in the woods or by the sea, afternoon tea-parties in ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... dressed in the character, his appearance was so striking that his mother could not refrain from some little admiration. As for Hester, she was in transports. Stephen was human, and young. But still the frivolity of it all troubled him. He had inherited from Colonel Wilton Brice, the Puritan, other things beside clothes. And he felt in his heart as he walked soberly to the hall that this was no time for fancy dress balls. All intention of going was banished by the time his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... problem with another question: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity—this ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... emerged from the gulf of that speculative despondency, and were buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigour. Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder pre-eminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... sheepish, tucked down his head, and said he couldn't sing, but this encouraging invitation of the master's was echoed all round the table. It was a conversational opportunity: everybody could say, "Come, Tim," except Alick, who never relaxed into the frivolity of unnecessary speech. At last, Tim's next neighbour, Ben Tholoway, began to give emphasis to his speech by nudges, at which Tim, growing rather savage, said, "Let me alooan, will ye? Else I'll ma' ye sing a toon ye wonna like." A good-tempered waggoner's patience has limits, and ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... pain that I heard Wendell Phillips say on our platform, 'Albany can not help you; your throne is the world of fashion!'—meaning women. If we are given over to fashion, frivolity, and vice, does it follow that rights and privileges, duties and responsibilities will not help us? If just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, and taxation without representation is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to show Gordon about and make him take an interest in the babies, but he wouldn't glance at them. He thinks I came just to spite him, which, of course, I did. Your siren call would never have lured me from the path of frivolity had Gordon not been so unpleasantly hilarious at the idea of my being able to manage an orphan asylum. I came here to show him that I could; and now, when I can show him, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the hillside high above it. He counted the sheep on the green field over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no opinions upon Luther to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... individual and society, it is passing strange that while the individual is expected to possess a high standard of character, society itself may indulge in all sorts of questionable practices without so much as a challenge. Many a person winks at the frivolity and immorality of society, while at the same time he expects the most circumspect behavior on the part of his neighbor. The existence of these two standards which ought to coincide but which in reality ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... the Queen appears to have thought that she was beginning to drift on to rocks of serious political mistakes and misfortunes as well as into rapids of frivolity, when the good, wise Pilot came to take the ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... away—the triumphant woman. The two women represented the two kinds of love—the love that is serious, the love that is light. And experience had taught her why it is that human nature soon tires of intensity, turns to frivolity. She felt that, if she could act, she would try to show that not Turiddu's fickleness nor his contempt of the woman who had yielded, but Santuzza's sad intensity and Lola's butterfly gayety had cost Santuzza her lover and her lover ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... clothes—the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a rich man's son would have other gifts in abundance—there remained only the trinkets George and George's parents had given her. All through luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed frivolity which Gabriella found more than usually depressing, rippled on over the warmed-over salmon, the girl mentally arranged and sorted in their cases a diamond brooch, an amethyst necklace, a bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz heart she occasionally wore on a gold chain, which she valued because ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... music, except psalm-tunes, to be directly from the devil. Even as to the psalm-tunes themselves, it seemed to him a dreadful thing that worship could not be conducted without this compromise with evil, this snare to catch the ear; and he harboured in the depth of his soul thoughts about the probable frivolity of David, which he hardly voiced even to himself. The fiddle, in particular, he held to be positively devilish, both in its origin and influence; those who played this unholy instrument were bound to no good place, and were sure to gain their port, in his opinion. Being thus minded, it was ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... sometimes tries to thwart us when we want to make things easy for her. Her better nature had a fearful tussle with her common sense about five years ago, when Aunt Jessie asked her to go abroad; and it nearly overcame her frivolity and her vanity last winter when I met her at the dock and insisted upon having her spend the winter with me, and our second cousin, Alicia Broome, offered to be responsible for her wardrobe. But, thanks be," she added, laughing, "the ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... by music; and, if I had been consulted, I should not have advised the Marcia Reale Italiana, because that composition, on account of its inherent frivolity, has always seemed to me unfit for the accompaniment of any manifestation of power. To despise Bellini because he is not Schubert would be to adopt the attitude of the buffo's critic who escaped from Paris in the teatrino at Palermo; nevertheless the countrymen of Schubert have ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... this bewildering effect of frivolity, the first term I'd make use of in describing Vick's character would be Touch-me-not. I believe there's a flower called that—noli me tangere—or some such name. Well, that's Vicky Van. She'd laugh and jest with you, and then if ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... Space in its columns was given to well-written articles by contributors interested in the success of the cause, and many able editorials appeared, embodying strong arguments in favor of the reform, or answering the opposing bitterness and frivolity of its contemporary the Rocky Mountain News. The interest in the proposed innovation was indeed quite general throughout the territory, but wherever the subject was discussed, in the legislative halls, in private conversation, editorial column, or correspondence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... hardly be too frank in its confession of rudeness, hardly too rich in its changefulness, hardly too faithful in its naturalism; but it may go too far in its rigidity, and, like the great Puritan spirit in its extreme, lose itself either in frivolity of division, or perversity of purpose.[67] It actually did so in its later times; but it is gladdening to remember that in its utmost nobleness, the very temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the Protestant ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor one. Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarotti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature. The Bolognese academy in painting. After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento—barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation—Jesuitry translated ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Nero, and the director-in-chief of the imperial pleasures; accused of treason, and dreading death at the hands of the emperor his master, he opened his veins, and by bandaging them bled slowly to death, showing the while the same frivolity as throughout his life; he left behind him a work, extant now only in fragments, but enough to expose the abyss of profligacy in which the Roman world was then sunk at that crisis of its ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... here, that they may be able to talk statecraft there; how princely compacts and contracts of marriage are made at sulphur springs; all these and such like leaked out as small-talk with a young and pretty woman, whose frivolity of manner went bail for the safety of the confidence, and went far to persuade Walpole, that though bank-stock might be a surer investment, there were paying qualities in certain women that in the end promised larger returns than mere money and higher rewards than mere wealth. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Augustus and hated Tiberius; they had killed Caligula and jeered at Claudius; Nero seemed to be the first of the Roman Emperors who stood a chance of becoming popular. Contrary to Agrippina's ideas, it was his frivolity that pleased the great masses, because this frivolity corresponded to the slow but progressive decay of the old Roman virtues in them. They expected from Nero a less hard, less severe, less parsimonious ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... answered. "In Paris your sister appeared to me to be a charming student of frivolity. Here she seems to have developed into a brilliant woman with more character and steadfastness than I should ever have given her credit for. Her features are the same, yet the change has written its mark into her face. Do you know, Lady Ferringhall, I ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Wind and the Sun, Each so loves the other one, For all his jolly folly, And frivolity and fun, That our love for them they weigh As their fickle fancies may, And when at last we love them most, They laugh ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... forwarding their business letters. Mr. Root says there would often be twenty-five one dollar "Pony" stamps and the same number of Government stamps—a total in postage of twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents—on a single envelope. Not much frivolity passed ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... assemblage, there were a great many of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off round the pulpit; and then came five or ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a generalisation, it was certainly an audacious one, but Dick was thinking only of a personal application. Daisy's words, as he understood their meaning, were working on the better nature which lay below his frivolity. He began to suffer genuine shame and remorse at the idea that he had caused suffering—lasting pain—to this poor unsophisticated child who had loved him so readily. Moved by this honourable, if tardy, compunction, ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... events rests with the Belgian Government, who with criminal frivolity have given to the Belgian people instructions contrary to law of nations and incited the resistance, and who, in spite of our repeated warnings, even after the fall of Luettich, (Liege,) have done nothing to induce them to ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the whole business of the tree as a piece of useless frivolity unworthy the time and attention of grown-up people. And she went about the share in it which she had been persuaded to undertake with a stolid and supercilious manner which went far to spoil ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... be kind and respectful. Never do or say anything wilfully to wound and give pain to the feelings. Remember that the sharpest grief of life, as well as its greatest happiness, is connected with the love-making period in the life of all good young people, and never treat with frivolity or rudeness any earnest feeling on the part of anyone. The young girl who can rudely repulse the sincere advance of any honorable young man has some defect in her moral and affectional nature And as for any ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... to make a pet of me. I had been ill in their house, and I must get well in their house. They would warrant to make the time pleasant. So the Tyrrells were bidden to come and stay a month. Grace Tyrrell arrived with her high spirits, her frivolity, her odour of the world, took me in her hands, and placed herself at once between me and Rachel. She found me weak, irritable, wobegone. She questioned, petted, coaxed. Partly through curiosity, and partly ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... the numbers fell off every quarter of an hour, till we were left with a very select party; the only recipients, by-the-by, of "bakhshsh." The Sub-Lieutenant Mohammed Effendi mounted a donkey the moment he stepped out of the R.R. carriage; and, utterly disregarding so vexatious a frivolity as asking leave, rode off to his home at Torah. His example was followed by the Sergeant Mabrk Awaz. And yet both these men had the impudence to call upon me at the hotel, and to apply for especial Shahdahs, or "testimonials" of good conduct. In short, we ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... does not understand. For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from a feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness, frivolity, and discontent. I am persuaded, and my experience has been confirmed by experienced physicians, that the want of wholesome occupation lies at the root of the languid debility of which we hear so ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... at Hull. Unfortunately for the lad of sixteen, so sadly bereft of his good mother's care and influence, he was thrown among gay companions, who in a new country gave free rein to their passions, in wild orgies by day and night. His evenings were spent in dancing and playing cards, yet amidst the frivolity he was unhappy, and he betook himself to prayer, that he might be able to break the ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... principles, so that no man may distinguish them except as the Ins and Outs. An age of greedy privilege and sullen poverty, of blatant luxury and curious envy, of rising palaces and vanishing homes, of stupid frivolity and idiotic publicomania; in which four hundred gilded fribbles give monkey-dinners and Louis XV. revels, while four million ungilded gossips gape at them and read about them in the newspapers. An age when princes of finance buy protection from the ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... the remarks of La Huguerye's editor, the Baron de Ruble, are a sufficient answer: "No other historian of the period, Catholic or Huguenot, has accused the Queen of Navarre of so much jealousy, frivolity, and spite. To the calumnies of La Huguerye we should oppose the verdict which every impartial judge can pronounce respecting this princess, in accordance with the letters published by the Marquis de Rochambeau ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... of life. This is the only part in me which has never changed. I left their care with my moral sense so well prepared to stand any test, that this precious jewel passed uninjured through the crucible of Parisian frivolity. I was so well prepared for the good and for the true that I could not possibly have followed a career which was not devoted to the things of the mind. My teachers rendered me so unfit for any secular work that I was perforce embarked upon a spiritual career. The ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... interested him. She was considered superficial and frivolous, but he did not think her really so. There was too much system in her frivolity and superficiality. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... play and told the story of Loyalheart's eventful pilgrimage through the Land of College, accompanied by her faithful friends, Honor, Forbearance, Silence and Good Humor. Her heroic efforts to keep her four friends with her in spite of the plots of Snobbery, Gossip, Jealousy, Frivolity and Treachery, and her readiness to extend a helping hand to Diffidence, Poverty and Misunderstood, result in the creation of an illusive being known to her only as the Spirit, a white-robed apparition which visits her more frequently as she approaches the end of her pilgrimage. At the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... capriciously, clandestinely, without giving notice, when she had left her to understand that she was simply spending three or four days in town. It was bad taste and bad form, it was cabotin and had the mark of Selina's complete, irremediable frivolity—the worst accusation (Laura tried to cling to that opinion) that she laid herself open to. Of course frivolity that was never ashamed of itself was like a neglected cold—you could die of it morally as well as of anything else. Laura knew this and it was why she was inexpressibly ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... said, looked upon a book or a newspaper, but trusted alone to the stars for her sublime knowledge; she usually passed the nights in communing with these heavenly teachers, and lay at rest during the daytime. She spoke with great contempt of the frivolity and benighted ignorance of the modern Europeans, and mentioned in proof of this, that they were not only untaught in astrology, but were unacquainted with the common and every-day phenomena produced by magic art. She spoke as if she would make me understand that all sorcerous spells were ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... centuries are as nothing; the strange garb and the stranger mental and spiritual dress fade, and we have here a mere woman, affected, as every true sister of hers to-day would be, by the helpless wailing. God has put that instinct there. Alas that it ever should be choked by frivolity or pride, and frozen by indifference and self-indulgence! Gentle souls spring up in unfavourable soil. Rameses was a strange father for such a daughter. How came this dove in the vulture's cage? Her sweet pity beside his cold craft and cruelty is like the lamb ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... gallantry and deference which had arisen from chivalry, still remained on the surface, but its language was that of cold, unmeaning flattery; and, from being the arbiters of honour, they became the mere ministers of amusement. They were again consigned to that frivolity, into which they relapse as easily as men do into ferocity. The respect they inspired, was felt individually or occasionally, but not for their sex. Any thing serious addressed to them, was introduced with an apology, or in the manner we now address children whom we desire to flatter. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... that indignation he conceived grief and brought forth iniquity.[769] And he became a talebearer among the peoples,[770] now disparaging secretly,[771] now speaking evil openly; drawing attention to Malachy's frivolity, shuddering at the novelty, exaggerating the expense. With such poisonous words as these he was urging and inducing many to put a stop to it: "Follow me, and what ought not to be done by any but ourselves let us not permit to be done against ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... profoundly as we see him ill and helpless in Zola's Debacle, most of us, if we are candid, will confess that the Second Empire, especially the Paris of Morny and Hausmann, of cynicism and splendour, of frivolity and chicane, of servile obsequiousness and haughty pretension, the France and the Paris that drew to themselves the eyes of all Europe and particularly the eyes of the watchful Bismarck, have for us a fascination almost ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... must with such a protagonist as the Marchesino—a situation might arise in which Doro's enmity must come out into the open and be dealt with drastically. Till then was it not best to ignore it, to fall in with his apparent frivolity? Before Artois could decide—for his natural temper and an under-sense of prudence and contempt pulled different ways—the Marchesino suddenly released his arm, leaned over the balcony rail, and looked eagerly down the road. A carriage had just rattled up ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... up to grow wheat at a guinea a bushel, and much worthless land was sown with corn. Manure was procured from the most remote quarters, and we are told a new science rose up, agricultural chemistry, which, 'with much frivolity and many refinements remote from common sense, was not without great operation on ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... wide a band of white it would be decorous for her to sew in the neck of her new black meteor crepe. I see it coming that we will all have to unite in getting Sallie out of mourning and into the trappings of frivolity soon and I dread it. It takes so many opinions on any given subject to satisfy Sallie that she ought to keep ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... furnish with even this little handful of guests; but it was a proper and necessary attention to the colonel; conversation not too dull, nor yet too bright for ease, but passing gracefully from one agreeable topic to another without earnestness, a restless virtue, or frivolity, which also goes against serenity. Now it touched upon the prospects of young A. B. in the demise of his uncle; now upon the probable seriousness of C. D. in his attentions to E. F.; now upon G.'s amusing mishaps during ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... A year ago he felt sure that Mrs. Hilmer was the last woman in the world that Helen would have found bearable, much less attractive... He concluded that Helen was enjoying the novelty of watching Mrs. Hilmer nibble at a discreet feminine frivolity to which she was unaccustomed. After a while he looked for outward changes in Mrs. Hilmer's make-up. He figured that the shopping tours with Helen might be reflected in a sprightlier bonnet or a narrower ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... here. I didn't know you went in for frivolity of this sort—if you call it frivolous dining in solitary state. Come over and join us. We're just having a bite before the show. You remember Mademoiselle Labelle, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and so dejected, and his use of the word Abroad (as if it were a country in itself) always makes me laugh idiotically. I haven't seen him since, and it will be difficult to explain the apparent frivolity. ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... often almost as trivial and degrading as is our absorption in the present, and to prevent memory from becoming a minister of frivolity if not of sin, it is needful that such a question as that of our text be urgently asked by each of us. Memory must be in closest union with conscience, as all our faculties must be, or she is of little use. There is a mere sentimental ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... frontier and made the petitioners nearly frantic. For a week the trio was the butt of all the wits at Fort Warrener. And yet the entire commissioned force felt that they were being kept at the grindstone because of the frivolity of these few youngsters, and they did not like it. All the same the cavalrymen stuck up for their colonel, and the infantrymen respected him, and the matinees were business-like and profitable. They were rarely unpleasant in any feature; but this particular morning—two ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... himself for this speech; it was a frivolity that he had never before been guilty of. But with Sylvia Jackson there were no restraints, nor was his remark in the slightest degree extraordinary to her. She called out after ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... whatever was miraculous or supernatural in Christianity. There was much earnestness in some of its champions; nor was there any absence of warm attachment to the morality and religious influence of the Scriptures. Thus it differed widely from the flippancy and frivolity of the Deists of France. We cannot, however, consider Lord Herbert's serious reflections on the publication of his chief work as a fair specimen of the tone of his coadjutors. They were mostly inferior to him in this respect, though it would not ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and that, he made no doubt, with a due amplification of all the details. The crisis of the whole affair was reached when one day the young lawyer suddenly set off on a journey along with the lady, nobody knew whither. "That's the way frivolity goes on; the forward young gentleman will lose his business," said the knowing ones. But this was not the case; for not a little to the astonishment of the public, old Eichheimer himself attended to his foster-son's ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for them that the king, in spite of his ill-health, looked now with a favorable eye upon frivolity, and that a sport was toward with which their palates for pleasure were not already jaded, and they were as gleeful as children at the prospect ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... like a man after hard physical exercise; the sweat stood in drops on his brow, and Soames' smile seemed to say: "You've had a trying time, my friend ......What are you doing in the Park?" he asked. "We thought you despised such frivolity!" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the folly of adopting a mode of life that makes you a laughing-stock. But this eighteen-year-old girl stood firm. She had resolved to live the Christ-life and devote her energies to lessening the pains of earth. Life was too short for frivolity; no one could afford to compromise with evil. She became the friend of children; the champion of the unfortunate; she sided with the weak; she was their friend and comforter. Her life became a cry in favor of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... thought, "there's no use being angry or even annoyed at that butterfly of a girl. She doesn't mean anything anyway. Some day, she'll wake up and be serious, but now she's only a little bundle of frivolity." ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... is the first number of a strikingly meritorious and serious paper published by George S. Schilling. We here behold none of the frivolity which spoils the writings of those who view amateur journalism merely as a passing amusement. The Badger shows evidence of careful and tasteful editorship, combined with a commendable artistic sense in choice of paper ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... course I wouldn't mind. But the thought of a Christmas alone chilled my heart. I tried to be jolly, and gave my repertory on the mouth-organ, which promptly stopped all activities on the part of the round-eyed Queenie MacKenzie. But all that foolery was as forced as the frivolity of the French Revolution Conciergerie where the merry diners couldn't quite forget they were going to lose their heads ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... friend, whose frivolity had given him his chance, and whose anxiety to put himself on the right side by catching him again, dead or alive, very nearly brought his young life to a speedy end. For foolish Francois was wise this time, so wise, had he only ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... reminds one of that charming and amiable young lady in Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Dynamiter,' who amused herself in moments of temporary gaiety by blowing up inhabited houses, inmates and all, out of pure lightness of heart and girlish frivolity. An Indian mantis or praying insect, a little less wicked, though no less cruel than the spiders, deceives the flies who come to his arms under the false pretence of being a quiet leaf, upon which they may light in safety for rest and refreshment. Yet another abandoned ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... no chains," she said, bitterly, "and yet you are always in chains—in the chains of your debts, your love-affairs, and your frivolity. Oh, listen to me—heed my words for once. They are as solemn as though they were uttered on a death-bed, for we shall never see each other again. Fancy a mother were speaking to you—a mother tenderly loving you. For I confess to you that ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... dignity, "I have never flirted with anybody, and you grievously wrong the bassoon when you intimated that he, too, is capable of such frivolity." ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... complain of her reception of them. Her language on the subject is so measured and careful as to lead us almost inevitably to the inference that the reports which had excited such dissatisfaction at Vienna were not without foundation, but that the French gayety, even if often descending to frivolity, was more to her taste than the German solidity which her mother so highly esteemed, and that she had been at no great pains to hide a preference which must naturally he acceptable to those among whom her future life was to ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Welland's plans. Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal constituents of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... disposition was grave and reflective; and though he was not without wit, it was rarely used. He lived, necessarily, with the frivolous and the ostentatious, yet ostentation and frivolity were charges never brought against himself. As a diplomatist and a statesman, he was of the old and erroneous school of intriguers; but his favourite policy was the science of conciliation. He was one who would so far have suited the present age, that no ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great interests of life will agree that nothing gave them greater pleasure or more genuine education.... Perhaps one reason why some American children are aggressive and lacking in respect is the frivolity of the talk that goes on in some American families. If children are in the right atmosphere they will not be intrusive or impertinent. Make place for their interests, their questions, the problems of their experience; for there are young as well as old perplexities. Encourage them to talk, ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... called-animals having the power—some of them to a much larger extent than others—of changing their hues in order to match the gravel of the stream in which they swim or the leaves of the trees on which they feed. That is like what a great many of us do. Put us into a place where certain forms of frivolity or vice are common, and we go in for them. Take us away from these and we change our hue to something a little whiter. But all through we never know what it is to put forth a good solid force of resistance and to say, 'No! I will not!' or, what is sometimes quite as hard to say, 'Yes! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... benefactions, rendered Patipata as handsome as he was amiable, and the nuptials were celebrated with suitable pomp and festivity. We are informed that Papillette had, at first, some slight returns of her natural disposition; but in one year she became a mother, and from thenceforward never knew frivolity more. ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... works of art, which seem to be there by accident, the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble cut out, and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... with frivolity of this kind; and Tempest, ever since his recovery last term, had been rapidly regaining all his ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... the gay season of Edinburgh, Alicia expected to find all the vanity, emptiness, and frivolity of London dissipation, without its varied brilliancy and elegant luxury; yet, so much was it the habit of her mind to look to the fairest side of things, and to extract some advantage from every situation in which she was placed, that pensive and thoughtful as was her disposition, the discriminating ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... aiming at the conciliation of the equestrian order. This was, in fact, to be Cicero's political position in the future. The party of the Optimates—in spite of his disgust at the indifference and frivolity of many of them—was to be his party: his favourite constitutional object was to be to keep the equites and the senate on good terms: and his greatest embarrassment was how to reconcile this position with his personal loyalty to Pompey, and his ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... rule, she replied that the only change in her was that she had acquired more patience in proportion as more was required. The regime she condemned—and amid apparent prosperity had foretold the corrupting influence on the nation of the established ideal of frivolity, and that a crash of some kind must ensue. Her judgment on the Emperor, after his fall, is worth noting, if only because it is dispassionate. Since his elevation to the Imperial dignity she had lost all ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... felt his heart dead within him, but he thought it none the less necessary to humor the Duchess, to laugh when she laughed, and shed tears when she wept; groaning in spirit, all the same, over the feminine frivolity which could find matter for a jest while setting about a matter so serious. What would he not have done to save the Count? While Chesnel dressed; Mme. de Maufrigneuse sipped the cup of coffee and cream which Brigitte brought her, and agreed with ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... not quite sure whether she was proud of this unsuspected talent or not. She had written to Aunt Alvirah about her acting in the play, and the good woman had warned her seriously against the folly of vanity and the sin of frivolity. Aunt Alvirah had been brought up to doubt very much the morality of those who performed upon the stage for ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... the other, whose physical structure somewhat resembled a fat lath, and whose general contour made it self-evident that he was not given much to frivolity, jauntily-fitting coats and breeches, or perfumed ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the law does not trouble to distinguish between the honest and the dishonest person who claims psychic gifts. From the legal point of view it is all pretence. It is imperatively necessary that genuine psychic gifts should be protected from the depredations of frivolity as well as from the interference of an obsolete law. We have some idea of protecting great and uncommon gifts in music, mathematics, and poetry, but we leave psychic gifts without help or training. An institute for the study of Psychic Science in ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of foreign sheets and the coarseness of their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long tables of newspapers, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... most part they were young men, prosperous looking, and clad according to the requirements of fashion which prevailed in this little town. Shut in though it was from the pomps and vanities of the world by the encircling chains of blue ranges and the bending sky which rested upon their summits, the frivolity of the mode, though somewhat belated, found its way and ruled with imperative rigor. Good riders they were undoubtedly, accustomed to the saddle almost from infancy, and well mounted. A certain air of gallantry, always characteristic ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... time the Dictator remained in his seat lighting cigarrito after cigarrito, and puffing away at them furiously. The look of light frivolity had forsaken his face, which was now ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... squander his money, both capital and income (the latter if he possesses land), in luxurious jewellery and carpets, and in unhealthy bribery and corruption, or in satisfying caprices which his voluptuous nature may suggest. The result? The Persian is driven to live mostly for his vanity and frivolity—two unbusiness-like qualities not tending to the promotion of commercial enterprise on a large scale, although it is true that in a small way his failings give rise and life to certain industries. For instance, even in remote, poor and small centres where food is scarce and the buildings ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Clagny, of the Abbe Duret and the two chief magistrates, of a young doctor, and a young Assistant Judge—all blind admirers of Dinah's—there were occasions when, weary of discussion, they allowed themselves an excursion into the domain of agreeable frivolity which constitutes the common basis of worldly conversation. Monsieur Gravier called this "from grave to gay." The Abbe Duret's rubber made another pleasing variety on the monologues of the oracle. The three rivals, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... all the reckless frivolity of early years, when the old English festivities of Maying take place, reminding one of the old custom of bringing the May-pole from the neighbouring woods, when each of the eighty oxen yoked to the May-pole waggon had a nosegay of wild-flowers ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... the London streets were darkened by the cloud of sin that seems to rise as the sun sets; while the crowded ballrooms were one scene of gayety and frivolity; while tired souls went from earth to Heaven; while poverty, sickness, sorrow and death reigned over the whole city, Lady Marion, with her golden head bent and her white hands clasped, knelt praying. There was peace on her ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... we groped our way out of our frivolity. First came weariness, then impatience, and last a passing-away of all things old and a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... literature followed close upon that of the political power of Spain. The splendid empire of Charles V had sunk, from causes inherent in the policies of that over-ambitious monarch, through the somber bigotry of Philip II, the ineptitude of Philip III, the frivolity of Philip IV, to the imbecility of Charles II; and the death of the last of the Hapsburg rulers in 1700 left Spain in a deplorably enfeebled condition physically and intellectually. The War of the Succession (1701-1714) exhausted her internal strength still more, and the final acknowledgment ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... three foul corruptors of a language: caprice, affectation, and ignorance! Such fashionable cant terms as "theatricals," and "musicals," invented by the flippant Topham, still survive among his confraternity of frivolity. A lady eminent for the elegance of her taste, and of whom one of the best judges, the celebrated Miss Edgeworth, observed to me, that she spoke the purest and most idiomatic English she had ever ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... antagonisms of Puritanism in England and America. They can never be understood by moral triflers. They may not be approved by all the morally serious, but they will be understood by them. What are those three marked antagonisms? The antagonism to the stage, to popular frivolity, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the school were alike in their love and enthusiasm for literature; and really they seemed to have had a better mode of living and thinking than have the smart gentlemen who think that earnest and conscientious study is only a heavy species of frivolity. And let it be marked that this wide-spread company of private citizens and public writers by no means formed a mutual admiration society, for they criticised each other sharply and wisely; and the criticism was taken in good ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... to Atma. The frivolity of the Rajah was distasteful to him in connection with so grave a theme. His eyes involuntarily sought the glance of the young Englishman who had spoken. He was an officer in the British army and his name was Bertram. His expressive ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... period of ardent, laborious youth, he faithfully shut himself up in libraries, attended public lectures, and gave himself a solid foundation of learning, which sometimes awakened surprise when discovered under the elegant frivolity of the gay turfman. But while arming himself for the battle of life, he lost, little by little, what was more essential than the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Prussian influence, and will be able to describe events as they should be. I have made arrangements with the "Veteran Observer" of the Times to take charge of this column during my absence. If he can only curb his natural tendency toward frivolity and jocoseness, I am in hopes that he will be able to draw his salary as promptly and efficiently as though he were a younger man. Remarking, therefore, in the words of Kathleen Mavourneen, that my absence "may be four weeks, and it may be longer," I bid my readers ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... from the example of Alfieri, there was another motive at work—a determination to prove to the world that he was the master of his own temperament, and that, if he chose, he could cast away frivolity and cynicism, and clothe himself with austerity "as with a garment." He had been taken to task for "treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices" ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... other country, are happy in having the care of their material interests in their own hands, and especially in the consciousness that they are now the ruling class, and that bourgeois intelligence and respectability, rather than imperial frivolity or royal pietism, is the prevailing idea. Even Renan admits that "the present hour is sweet:" what troubles him is the thought of the future. But the republicans are not troubled at all. They don't intend to carry out any great reforms; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... hopeless alliances, and against the idolatry and the formalism which debased the people, the prophets contended with intense earnestness and unflinching courage. Amos, called from feeding his flocks, inveighed against frivolity and vice, misgovernment and fraud, in Israel. Hosea warned Menahem (743-737 B.C.) against invoking the help of Assyria against Damascus, but in vain. He was terribly punished by what he suffered from the Assyrians; but Jotham (740-736 B.C.) and Ahaz (736-728 B.C.), ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of its inmates. French novels and betting-books were their sermons, and he longed to take his poor little sister Netta away from the contamination of such society. But she came downstairs after luncheon was over, gay and bright in dress and person, and ready for any amount of frivolity. Her countenance clouded over, when she heard how soon the party was to be broken up; but when Howel assured her he should be only a week absent, and that he would take her to town ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... discussion of subjects of practical importance, while every one was manifestly seeking to know and do her duty, we could not but feel that the most determined opposer of 'women's meetings' would have found nothing to censure had he been present. There has been no frivolity, no fanaticism, no disorder. We are sure that not a wife or mother was there who was not at least as well disposed and prepared to discharge her relative duties as she would have been if she had ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... on mere carnal love, vanity or frivolity, on such attractions as are purely external, a sweet voice, personal beauty, superficial cleverness or outward show, is unworthy ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... adopt the only course left to them, and, bringing themselves down to the level of the men, feign a frivolity and a levity which occasionally call forth from a thinking man a criticism which is, in a sense, totally undeserved. What will not the untrained man under thirty-five have to answer for on ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... handsome soldier, pensive when away from the lady of his thoughts, but not when in her company." M. Reville goes on: "Such a character could not understand the sensitiveness, the shrinking, morbid melancholy of the husband thrust upon her. Her gaiety, her devotion to pleasure, the frivolity of her talk, could only pain more and more a man of a gloomy temperament, who took the greatest care of his health, who fretted himself over the most trivial details, and whose distrust amounted ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... in a merry mood, quite diverting his thoughts from Mexico and the future to the happenings of the hour. A reckless spirit of frivolity took possession of him, and he astonished his fellow traveller by the ebullience of his humor and the play of his extravagant fancy. He mimicked the speech and grotesque gestures of Plutarch, and laughed over the ludicrous ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... a class of men, Who, though they bow to fashion and frivolity, No fancied claims or woes fictitious pen, But wrongs ell-wide, and of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... his readers. Such was the series of essays, in which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise Lost. Such also was his famous paper, the Vision of Mirza, an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the lighter portions of the Spectator are those which have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and above all, a delightful talker, that Addison is best ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Tranquille, he published a little volume describing the whole affair, in which, with the irresponsible frivolity of a true Capuchin, he poked fun at those who could not swallow ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... see. It was a life more of appearance than reality. Beneath it lay an incurable frivolity which is common to the polite society of every country. But what made this society characteristic of its race was its indolence. The frivolity of the French is accompanied by a fever of the nerves—a perpetual agitation of the mind, even when it is empty. The brain of the Italian knows how to rest. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the midday meal; it may suit the managers, but the boys consider it a great hardship and would prefer being allowed to play. Altogether, whatever the intellectual results may be, the moral tendency of such an upbringing is damaging to the spirit of youth and must make for precocious frivolity and brutality. But the pedagogues of Italy are like her legislators: theorists. They close their eyes to the cardinal principles of all education—that the waste products and toxins of the imagination are best eliminated by motor activities, and ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... ... or rather I thought I understood, for how could I admit that Lupin, a man so essentially level-headed under his mask of frivolity, could waste his time upon such childish nonsense? What he was counting was the intermittent flashes of a ray of sunlight playing on the dingy front of the opposite house, at the height of ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... he drew his characters from life, did not draw wholesale; he would take only a portion of a character that pleased him and work it up in combination with another distinct character. It was thus he dealt with Leigh Hunt, borrowing his amusing, airy frivolity, and combining it with the meanness and heartlessness of Skimpole. I have always fancied that Dowler in "Pickwick" was founded—after this composite principle—on his true-hearted but imperious friend, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity. Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered—as much as he ever considered anything—that it was ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... plain, and without any ornamentation. It was built about a great, square chimney that was like a spine. There were six flues in this chimney, and a pot atop each flue. These little chimney pots breaking the severe outlines of the house, gave the only suggestion of lightness or frivolity about it. They were like the heads of impish children, peeping over ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... want you to bring them to me. I called you here to-night because to-morrow night folly and fashion will rule all in this city, and I must be there with the rest. Let me tell you, my boy, that when the men of this legislature awake, after that night of frivolity, it will be to open their eyes on some serious business. Not one word about what I intend to do until then. The session has been a very sweet cake till now—let the ball sugar-coat it! There'll be bitter eating provided day ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... respects the frivolity of the proof adduced, there was nothing to choose between Catholic and Protestant. Out of civil and canon law a net was woven through whose meshes there was no escape, and into it the victims were driven by popular clamor. Suspicion of witchcraft was justified by general ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... beg," exclaimed the Registrar, "that the sanctity of—the gravity of this ceremony is not disturbed by any foolish frivolity. You must remember ..." But at that moment the glassy look of the butcher's eyes reached the old gentleman's vision, and a heavy hiccup fell upon his ears. "I really think, Mr. Freeman, that that gentleman, one of the contracting parties I mean, is not in a fit state—is in a state bordering ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Women are more serious, not only about life, but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging, defensive stupidity which is the basis of the tired giant attitude, and all through the early 'nineties, during which the respectable frivolity of Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there was a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading, supported chiefly by women and supplied very largely by women, which gave the lie to the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among readers, women and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... a distant cousin of her husband, in whose household her son Walter had long before taken unwholesome lessons in fashion and extravagance. The Earl, now in his grand climacteric, had outlived his youthful frivolity, and though he had become a hard and austere man, was yet willing to do a kindness to his kinsman's widow by engaging a house for her, and offering for her grandson a squire's place which happened ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... in flesh and bloom, was not unpleasing: framed in natural curls, and showing (to sympathetic observers) a noble and pleasing dignity often, it must be avowed, contrasting strongly with the mingled frivolity and cynicism that marked his words. Being in mourning for the event of January he was clothed in purple velvet without lace or embroidery. Over his doublet hung a short cloak with a star on the left ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
Copyright © 2025 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
