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More "Supercilious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one imagine three human beings as astonished as we were to find ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a supercilious air, and I paid him back ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... chief characters, they must be painted in fainter colors—they should be suggested rather than presented in detail. It might be well to give a definite gesture to the Elephant—say, a characteristic movement with his trunk—a scowl to the Tiger, a supercilious and enigmatic smile to the Camel (suggested by Kipling's wonderful creation). But if a gesture were given to each of the animals, the effect would become monotonous, and the minor characters would crowd ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... throes of his mother's heart, felt at the loss of her son, was far surpassed by the indignation of his father, who, with his consanguineous prejudices, and supercilious contempt for riches unaccompanied by birth, deemed the claims of his son by blood far superior to the pretensions of the plebeian trader. He only saw in the confessions of his son, the result of a deep-laid ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... ageing skin that browned slowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew a Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while he ran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on the leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft oval cheeks and the blooming complexion ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... Gay's observations are moderate in tone. Defoe's Review (1704-13) and The Observator (1702-12), begun by John Tutchin, are noticed in rather supercilious fashion. The Examiner (1710-14) is damned with faint praise: though "all men, who speak without prejudice, allow it to be well written" and "under the eye of some great persons who sit at the helm of affairs," Gay's admiration is reserved for its two chief opponents, Addison's ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... awe, and they stood gazing at the pale, supercilious-looking creatures, who returned their gaze through monocles, lorgnettes, ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... pretty one, but the tide of youth was fast receding, leaving uncovered a bleak and barren shore, whose chief salients were a disdainful nose and a mouth which looked as if it might be able to say bitter things. The eyes, however, were still handsome, if supercilious, and her manners velvety. No doubt there were claws beneath the velvet, but they were not for April . . . only for the girl who was using April's name! They had not talked for five minutes before she realized that in this woman Diana had an enemy. Not that Mrs. Stanislaw's words ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He passed the girl and addressed ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... on the young man's face. Sentence of death would have been more welcome to him than this supercilious check to a hazardous attempt, which he had looked upon as daring and heroic. Among the Romans he caught sight of some laughing faces, and hurt, humiliated, confused, scarcely capable of speaking a word, and yet moved by the desire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... concomitants of fashion. The reverse is true. She is an interloper in the circles of good society, and the old fable of the ass in the lion's skin fits her precisely. Many a duchess in England is such an interloper; her supercilious airs betray the falsity of her politeness, but she is obliged by the rules of the Court at which she has been educated to "behave like a lady;" she has to counterfeit good-breeding; she cannot, she ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... wound and vex me with thy questions. Hath he not been gone these five months, and never a word, good or bad, hath been rendered to me? Nay, did he not, ere he went, so deport himself with most cold and supercilious arrogance, and even with ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Motherwell, in which he announced his readiness to accept any concession "which would shorten and smoothen the road to Home Rule." But it is significant that although Mr Dillon was in complete agreement with the Liberals "as to both policy and tactics," yet he devoted, with a rather supercilious levity, his speeches in Ireland to a demand for "Boer Home Rule as a minimum." This was the way in which the country was scandalously hoodwinked as to the real relations which existed ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... superiority. He was neither reserved nor impatient, but suffered her to "commune with him of all that was in her heart. And Solomon told her all her questions; there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not." It ill becomes those who can teach, to be supercilious and uncommunicative. As the rich are required to supply the necessities of the poor with a judicious liberality, being expressly appointed as the trustees of Providence, and dispensers of its bounty; and as those who withhold, when it is in the power of their hands ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... class. He was painfully proud, prouder than any of the nobles. Before entering the service he had made up his mind to "rise." He wanted to become an officer, so that the villagers would have to stand at attention before him, when he returned home. Therefore he gave Zagrubsky a supercilious look of contempt, and unceremoniously closed the pouch when the Pole wanted to take some tobacco. I was sorry for the Pole, and offered him some of my own tobacco. He did not fail to take it, but at the same time I heard him sizzle out "Zhid" from between his tightly closed lips. I ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... mixed feelings with which they regard the mother country. As with a son who is gone forth into the world, there is often on one side the conceit of youth and impatience of restraint, shown in uncalled for acts of self-assertion or in dogmatic speech; and on the other side a supercilious want of sympathy with the changed surroundings, the pursuits and the aspirations of the younger generation. It seems as if there were no bond left between the two. But a day of trial comes; parent or offspring is threatened by a stranger; and then it is seen that the old instinct and yearnings ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... habit of ascending to a superlunary home, was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no allusion to the books. Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and true, But now grown cold and supercilious) Praise Telly's charms of neck and arms— Well, by the dog! ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... and epicures, perhaps, the lordly canvas-back—though brown from the oven, I challenge the supercilious gourmet to distinguish between his favorite, and a fat American coot. But for me the loud-voiced mallard, with his bottle-green head and audaciously curling tail; for he ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... handed it to Mr. Hamlin. He read the letter, and found the inclosure contained a twenty-dollar gold-piece. A half-supercilious smile passed over his face at this revelation of the inadequate emoluments of literature and the trifling inducements to crime. Indeed, I fear the affair began to take a less serious moral ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... been heartier and more enthusiastic than was the appreciation of this Burmese dignitary. The soldier element was at first somewhat stiff, but as the dinner proceeded the generals warmed in conversation with the Resident. But the aides were obstinately supercilious, and only partially thawed in acknowledgment of compliments on the splendour of their jewelry. Functionaries attached to the personal suite of his Majesty wore huge ear-gems as a distinguishing mark. The aides had these in blazing diamonds, and were ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... being present when the merits of a book were canvassed. One person declared it to be insufferably dull, when another, who had published some novel, observed, with rather a supercilious air, "You know not how difficult it is to write a ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... was no bore to Carlisle. She recognized it as one of the triumphs of her life. The material dinner could of course be no better than the New Arlington could make it; but then the New Arlington was a hotel which supercilious tourists always mentioned with pleased surprise in their letters home; that is, if they had any homes and ever thought of writing to them. And Cousin Willie Kerr, having got "off" at three-thirty with carte blanche for the arrangements, that night proved that the world of Epicurus ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... bit his lower lip. It was agony to sit by and watch the cool, supercilious expression on the critic's face, the indifferent flick of the fingers with which the sheet ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... considerable uneasiness and solicitude. In a few moments, a slight stir, as of company taking leave, was heard in the front part of the house; and very soon a fashionably-dressed personage of a somewhat swaggering deportment, accompanied with many of those supercilious airs with which the colonial loyalists of the times often thought to dignify their carriage among despised republicans, made his appearance in the yard, where, equipped for riding, stood a stout, well-conditioned horse, which he approached and led out some distance ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... beaten; and it was an overwhelming, a public defeat that made his leadership ridiculous. His vanity was cut savagely; it was impossible for him to control himself to stay and witness the inevitable rout. He lounged down the wide aisle, his face masked in a supercilious smile, his glance contemptuously upon the jubilant barbs. They were thick about the doors, and as he passed among them he said, addressing no one in particular: "A revolt of the Helots." A barb raised a threatening ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... was a Whig and a friend of the Protestant succession. He was an orator, a courtier, a wit, and a man of letters. He was at the head of ton in days when, in order to be at the head of ton, it was not sufficient to be dull and supercilious. It was evident that he submitted impatiently to the ascendency of Walpole. He murmured against the Excise Bill. His brothers voted against it in the House of Commons. The Minister acted with characteristic caution and characteristic energy; caution in the conduct of public affairs; energy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... second's dreaming. "Gape and swallow," as Zinie Shadd said, from his end of the bench. The woman passed with a supercilious turn of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... oracle. I probed their heart, and flattered their caprice; Bestrewed with flowers the precipice's brink; Serving their passions, naught to me was sacred; Measure and weight I changed as they inclined. As much as Joad's unpliant humour pained The softness of their supercilious ear, So much I pleased them with my dexterous art; Concealing from their eyes the bitter truth; Lending convenient colour to their rage; And, lavish, above all, of wretches' blood. At length, to Baal, whom she had introduced, By Athaliah was a temple reared. Jerusalem did weep ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... swooped down and grounded gently within a hundred yards of the kneeling camel, who eyed it with the cold and supercilious disdain of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... contrary! He had been, but was gone! I plainly read the lie in their looks to each other. At that time it was new to me, and gave me great pain; but I soon became accustomed though never reconciled to their manners; which were characterized by that low cunning, that supercilious mixture of insolence and meanness, that is always detested by the honest and the open. A set of—Pshaw! They are unworthy ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... satisfied your critical scrutiny; but your feelings went not out towards her—they were, in a manner, chilled and repulsed. Look, now, at our own Kate Aubrey—nay, never fear to place her beside yon supercilious divinity—look at her, and your heart acknowledges her loveliness; your soul thrills at sight of her bewitching blue eyes—eyes now sparkling with excitement, then languishing with softness, in accordance with the varying emotions ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Richard,' said Brass, darting at him a supercilious and reproachful look, 'it's my opinion that you've mistaken your calling, and will ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the boys saw that there were two occupants on board her. One was a tall, well-dressed lad in yachting clothes, whose face, rather handsome otherwise, was marred by a supercilious sneer, as if he considered himself a great deal better than anyone else. The other was a somewhat elderly man whose hair appeared to be tinged with gray. His features were coarse, but he resembled the lad with him enough to make it ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... spacious marble steps, he saw that the hotel was indeed doing a big business, for already the lobby was thickly peopled and at the desk a group of new arrivals were plaintively arguing with a bored and supercilious room clerk. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... highest spirits, declared with much solemnity that he could already detect the smell of the salt sea air. They had their quarrels of course. It pleased a certain young lady to treat the south coast of England with much supercilious contempt. You would have imagined from her talk that there was something criminal in one's living even within twenty miles of the bleak downs, the shabby precipices, and the muddy sea which, according to her, were the only recognizable ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... influence was felt in the attitude of its bishops was one whose government sent out no diplomatists. While the Austrian Chancellor regarded the issue of the Council with a profane and supercilious eye, and so much indifference prevailed at Vienna that it was said that the ambassador at Rome did not read the decrees, and that Count Beust did not read his despatches, the Catholic statesmen in Hungary ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the lower class, or the great intellects and the less, was similar to the relative positions of teacher and pupil. I recognized in this social condition the great media of their marvelous approach to perfection. This aristocracy was never arrogant, never supercilious, never aggressive. It was what the philosophers of our world are: ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Wishings ain't really in the smart set and they say her husband ain't so rich, and she's horrid to her servants—don't give them cake. I don't care if I lost her head to do! I'm like that, as you know, particular when I'm particular, but—well—just supercilious and negligee when it don't count! Good gracious! [Laughing.] Oh, here's a letter for you I brought up for Lizzie. It's from the Phillypeenys and has a special delivery on. [GEORGIANA takes letter and opens it and reads it.] That's how it come at this hour. ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... half-naked savage challenged the Judge over the sea of moving heads, and drove away the supercilious smile ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind of dusky radiance over the traveller's path. Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness, of his pale colleague? And what will ever efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal tray heaped up with ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... furious; the stormy browbeating of the woman he loved set him a-tingle with the strongest desire he had ever known—a desire to fling himself upon this sneering wretch and vindicate his manhood by battle. His hands crawled in their restraint, in their lust to batter upon that supercilious face. But he dare not. He knew that an outbreak on his part would mean the death of their chance to regain ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Baron Van Arenberg joined the party, and, after saluting Jaqueline in a self-confident manner, stood listening with a supercilious air to ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... their way; the gamesters overlooked him, thinking he was no fish for their net; the chairmen, instead of Please your honour, d—-d him; and the pumpers, who attentively marked his nod before, now denied him a glass of water. Many of the clergy, those disciples of humility, looked upon him with a supercilious brow; the ladies too, who had before strove who should be his partner at the balls, could not bear the sight of so shocking a creature: thus despised is poverty and rags, though sometimes the veil of real merit; ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... who wished to have it supposed, that he was writing concerning a subject rather beneath his notice, and only felt himself called forth to do so by the dogmatism of those who laid down confident rules or laws in matters so trifling. This affectation of supercilious censure appears deeply to have provoked Dryden, and prompted the acrimony of the following Defence, which he prefixed to a second edition of the Indian Emperor published in 1668, probably shortly after the offence had been given. The angry friends were afterwards ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers of one faith from those of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... usually unable to conceive loftier services to mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire, while it implies a particularly shallow idea alike of the position of the mere literary life in the scale of things, and of the conditions under which the best literary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... superiors, it was no wonder she treated her children and inferiors with supercilious contempt. Her eldest daughter (121) and she were long at variance, and never reconciled. When the young Duchess exposed herself by placing a monument and silly epitaph, of her own composition and bad spelling, to Congreve, in Westminster Abbey, her mother, quoting the words, said, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... my readers into two classes, the indolent and the supercilious, and shall accordingly address them upon the present occasion. To the former I have nothing more to say, than to refer them back to the latter part of Chapter I., Part I. where, my dear ladies, you will ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... moment's respite, a habit that recalled his travels and made him interesting. He was on visiting terms with the authorities—the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-general, and the bishop but in every house he was frigid, polite, and slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the favors of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did they lose anything in reputation on that account; then when people began to talk about him and wish to know him, and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... tall. And Sargent, in his portrait of her, had caught with admirable art the indefinable, yet partly supercilious and scornful smile with which she looked down upon the world about her. She possessed the rare gift of combining conventionality with personal distinction in her dress. Her hair was almost Titian red in colour, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... still on the narrow pavement, pondering, and then, in excuse of his flagrant misbehaviour, murmured, "It was meant to be," and went by again. This time he fancied that he detected a somewhat supercilious expression in the dark eyes—a faint raising ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... haughty and dignified Lucian returns to us from his journey! He will not vouchsafe us a glance; he stands aloof, and will hold no further communion with us. Altogether a supercilious Lucian! The change is sudden. Might one inquire the cause of ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... help looking Half a Streets Length after any Man in a gay Dress. You cant behold a covetous Spirit walk by a Goldsmiths Shop without casting a wistful Eye at the Heaps upon the Counter. Does not a haughty Person shew the Temper of his Soul in the supercilious Rowl of his Eye? and how frequently in the Height of Passion does that moving Picture in our Head start and stare, gather a Redness and quick Flashes of Lightning, and make all its Humours sparkle with Fire, as Virgil finely ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... replaced when they're too far gone to stand another stitch. Peter was too small to do any responsible work, and he was getting too big to be paid in pennies and dimes. People didn't exactly know what to do with him. One can't be supercilious to a boy who is a Champneys born, but can one invite a boy who runs errands, is on very familiar footing with all the colored people in the county, and wears such clothes as Peter wore, to one's house, or to be one of the guests when a child of the family ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... heart was hot with rage, and the first impulse was to vent it upon this nearest of the supercilious Melroses. This was all Alice had wanted then, in sending that little overture of friendship: to tell the little nobody that she was nothing to the great family, after all, to prevent her from ever boasting even an illicit relationship! ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... impassable barrier between me and them—a sizar was not a proper associate for the favourites of fortune! But there was one young man, a year younger myself, of high birth, and the heir to considerable wealth, who did not regard me with the same supercilious insolence as the rest; his very rank, perhaps, made him indifferent to the little conventional formalities which influence persons who cannot play at football with this round world; he was the wildest youngster in the university—lamp-breaker—tandem-driver—mob-fighter—a ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Peter, between two heart-beats.—Yet he looked, in his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches—he looked a very embodiment of ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... more thick-skinned branch of the clan. But it bears hardly upon a young, self-conscious, and adolescent nation, which has not yet "found" itself as a whole; and which, though its native genius and genuine promise carry it far, still experiences a certain youthful diffidence under the supercilious condescension of the ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... rules of war require prompt and unquestioning obedience. You may sometimes think the command arbitrary and the officer supercilious, but it is yours to obey. An undisciplined army is a curse to its friends and a derision to its foes. Give your whole influence, therefore, to the maintenance of lawful authority and of strict order. Let your superiors feel assured that whatever ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... years of his political life. We shall not call it an affectation in the instance of so great a man, but it paid all the penalties of folly—and this was his propensity to feel, or at least to express, a personal affection for the men whom he politically followed. Even of Hamilton, the most supercilious and least loveable of mankind, Burke speaks with a tenderness absolutely ridiculous amongst politicians. Of Lord Rockingham he seldom speaks but in a tone of romance, singularly inapplicable to that formal and frigid figure of aristocracy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him, talking calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if he tried to take her hand or clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts of her father's homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to him with a supercilious, affronted air. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... but the principal speaker was evidently the superior of his companion, and although their attitude to each other was equal and familiar, it could be easily seen that he was the leader. He had a smooth, beardless face, with a critical expression of eye and mouth that might have been fastidious and supercilious but for the kindly, humorous perception that tempered it. His quick eye swept the apartment and then fixed itself upon the accordion, but a smile lit up his face ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... you to demand an account of us?" asked Tom Brixton, recklessly, in a supercilious tone that was ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... move, glanced at the butt of the automatic where it protruded from its holster, and smiled. Then he turned and raising his great bow, fitted an arrow and drew the shaft far back. His warriors, supercilious smiles upon their faces, stood silently watching him. His bow was the longest and the heaviest among them all. A mighty man indeed must he be to bend it; yet Al-tan drew the shaft back until the stone point ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... conduct must be carried on so secretly as to elude the college authorities. Those disposed to do evil represent only a very small proportion of the great body of students, but these give occasion for some supercilious and conceited correspondent of the public press severely to criticise the college government, and to give gross caricatures and exaggerated statements of the mischief done by this small percentage of students, and then include the entire academic body in ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... that he was addressed, but found that the summons was meant for a boy, rather good-looking but very slender, whose self-important attitude and supercilious look betrayed no slight amount of vanity, and who, to the apparent astonishment of the rest, was surveying the room and its appurtenances with a look ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Hugo decided; that's what she wanted to bring her to heel. And before very long he'd see that she got it. She shouldn't shelter herself for ever behind that supercilious beast, Ledgard. Hugo was quite ready to have been pleasant to Jan and to have met her more than half-way if she was reasonable, but since she had chosen to bring Ledgard into it, she should pay. After all, she was only a woman, and ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... silence, and a haughty scornful demeanour; which was so much the more disagreeable because there was nothing in his behaviour I could actually take hold of to find fault with: although his whole conduct was insolent and supercilious to the highest degree. His mother was very much agitated at receiving him on his arrival; if he felt any such agitation he certainly did not show it. He made her a very low and formal bow when he kissed ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indifference would have been beautiful in a gentleman who counted his fortune by millions; in a dollarless beggar who lived off alms it was detestable. Wherefore, the town, so far as Richard encountered it, left our silent, supercilious one to himself, which neglect dove-tailed with his humor and was the precise lonely thing he sought. This gave still further edge to the public's disregard; no one likes you to accept with grace what ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have I been ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... invisible belt stuffed to its capacity with banknotes and gold. Chilean ladies and Chilean gentlemen, dazzling Brazilian ladies and pompous Brazilian gentlemen, smug Argentinians, lordly Castilians, garrulous Portuguese, lofty English gentlemen and supercilious English ladies, friendly and irrepressible Americans,—all of them swinging their sea-legs with new-found abandon—clattered solidly around the wind-swept circuit. New faces appeared in the procession, new voices were raised with energy, new figures sprang into ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... no reply. And Soames gave him askance a look of dogged dislike—for in spite of his fastidious air and that supercilious, dandified taciturnity, Soames, with his set lips and squared chin, was not unlike ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Charles reformed the internal administration of his kingdom, and at length felt himself ready to begin again the conflict with England. Edward III. was old. The Black Prince was ill and gloomy, and his Aquitanian subjects disliked the supercilious ways of the English. Charles declared war (1369). The English landed at Calais. But the cities were defended by their strong walls; and the French army, under the Duke of Burgundy, in pursuance of the settled ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... with rather supercilious indifference. "I've always known the name, and I dare say I knew the man by sight, apart from his name. I know half the names and faces in the neighborhood in that ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) 105 than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I happened to hear of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... nothing, and Brooks was quite sure then that she was different. He realized too that her teeth were perfect, and her complexion, notwithstanding its pallor, was faultless. She would have been strikingly good-looking but for her mouth, and that—was it a discontented or a supercilious curl? At any rate it disappeared when ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... deeper things than his years warranted: "You certainly don't know what you are talking about," was her habitual snub. And, when Honore, not daring to argue further, took refuge in his sly, not to say supercilious, smile, she taxed him with overweeningness—an accusation that had some truth in it. She might well be excused for her scepticism, for the youth had also large ignorance in some of the commoner things of life, and, moreover, allowed himself to be taken in easily. Laure seems to have ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... before her; and she, bending herself towards him, let her lips touch his forehead. He threw his arms round her, and held her for one moment bent towards him. A supercilious, scornful expression, unobserved by her, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Greek idioms which abound in that masterpiece of the Roman stage with contempt, as beneath his notice; and disregard the names which betray a Grecian origin, the allusions to the habits of Grecian women, to the state of popular feeling at Athens, and the administration of Athenian law, with supercilious indifference. All this such a reasoner might do, and all this M. Neufchateau has done. But would such a tissue of cobweb fallacies disguise the truth from any man of ordinary taste and understanding? Such a man would appeal to the whole history of Terence; he would show that he was a diligent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... materially in their opinion of England and its institutions. Mr. Slick evidently viewed them with prejudice. Whether this arose from the supercilious manner of English tourists in America, or from the ridicule they have thrown upon Republican society, in the books of travels they have published, after their return to Europe, I could not discover; but it soon became manifest to me, that ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three kingdoms. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... aristocratic hauteur, until he suddenly recollects that his humble countryman has a vote at the elections; then he stops, enters into a brief conversation, examines the kitful of fruit through his glasses with supercilious disdain, but eventually purchases a chunk of melon, and goes on his ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... dismounts from Billy the pig, and, insolent brat, screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner, struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... audibly. Carmichael was playing the spoiled child—not being at all a mature or perfect character, then or now—and was ready to hit out at anybody. His bearing was for the first and only time in his life supercilious, and his sermons were a vicious attack on the doctrines most dear to the best of his people. His elders knew not what had come over him, although Elspeth Macfadyen was mysteriously apologetic, and in moments of sanity he despised himself. One day he came to a good resolution suddenly, and went ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and all their lovers with them, have tried to catch this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come fluttering down to them ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... recognize the State as a multiplication of their own families, and patriotism as the broadening of their love of home; to make them see that that mother will be most respected whose son does not, when a downy beard is grown, suddenly tower above her in the supercilious enjoyment of an artificial superiority—a superiority which consists simply, as Figaro says, in his having taken the trouble to be born; to make them see, finally, that in the highest exercise of all the powers with which God has endowed her, woman can no ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... apply the tenet; try if you can even attach any sense or semblance of meaning to the speeches which you are reading. What! were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended the truth:- were the impressive facts, the piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful reasoning with which the poor sufferer—smarting at once from his ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Laudersdale, without knowing how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every such rencontre;—and that it could not endure forever, another gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated himself,—Mr. Frederic Heath, the confidential clerk of Day, Knight, and Company,—a rather supercilious specimen, quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her from New York at her father's request, and who already betrayed every symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs. McLean's little women clamorously demanded and obtained a share ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... epidemic of murder which seems to have girdled the globe, the spirit of petty jealousy and assumed superiority with which Americans are treated in many European countries, has imbued this people with the idea that the quickest way to win the respect of their supercilious neighbors is to slaughter them. Uncle Sam is in an ugly humor and will suffer no legitimate casus belli to be side-tracked by arbitration. He is "dead tired" of having the European ants get on him—of being harried by petty powers whom he knows full ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it would—well it would deprive me of your company. I'm a sociable animal, Payne. I crave company; I like to have all sorts of people about me. Take Ramos, for instance; did you ever see a more supercilious, sneaky, disagreeable specimen of the half-breed Mexican? Neither have I. You, I suppose, wouldn't have him ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... bind that which God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam. In the Gospel we shall read a supercilious crew of Masters, whose holiness, or rather whose evil eye, grieving that God should be so facile to man, was to set straiter limits to obedience than God had set, to enslave the dignity of Man, to put a garrison upon his neck of empty ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Chesterton's sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not a brother; he is a supercilious aunt." ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming dawn it will be on the march for the Black Hills of Dakota, and the colonel has summoned the officers to his tent for some final instructions. It must ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Piccadilly. The horses paw the ground, and are impatient to be gone, as if conscious of the precious burden they convey. There is a peculiar secresy and despatch, significant and full of meaning, in all the proceedings concerning them. Even the outside passengers have an erect and supercilious air, as if proof against the accidents of the journey. In fact, it seems indifferent whether they are to encounter the summer's heat or winter's cold, since they are borne through the air in a winged chariot. The Mail-Carts drive up; the transfer of packages is made; and, at a signal given, they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... regard to scenery what Lessing says of pictures, we only see in both what we bring with us to the view. More disconcerting than the importunities of beggars and donkey-drivers are the supercilious remarks of tourists. To most, of course, the whole thing is "a sad disappointment." Everything must necessarily be a disappointment to some beholders; and with critics of a certain order, the mere fact of not being pleased implies superiority. The hour's walk from the village to the Cirque is ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... that this seeming tenderness for her reputation might be but wanton cruelty on her ladyship's part; a gratifying of her spleen against the girl by setting her in the pillory of public sight to the end that she should experience the insult of supercilious glances and lips that smile with an ostentation of furtiveness; a desire to put down her pride and break the spirit which my lady ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... places, our city clergymen merit arraignment at the bar of civilization for burying their talents, for trifling away the power which has been given them as standard bearers of the cause of human brotherhood and universal justice; for truckling to wealth and cringing before a cynical and supercilious element who, by an unhappy chance, wield some influence and succeed in making the superficial imagine they represent popular sentiment and culture. It is a crying shame to-day, that with the magnificent intellectual power ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Worse and worse. He had been fortified by the thought of the butler and footman. An hour under their supercilious eyes would mean the most impersonal kind of small talk. But they'd hardly stand ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... languid gaze of her dark, full eyes, a little supercilious, a little amused, faintly curious, and his own fell at once before their calm insolence. She was handsomely dressed. The delicate, white hand which held her novel was ablaze with many and wonderful rings. She was evidently tall, without doubt stately. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... who has known nothing of them, but has let his imagination run into very queer illusions. This passed harmless. Nobody was concerned to defend the actor's vocation where nobody followed it; but Mr. Jones was next so ill-advised as to turn to Miss Hague, and say with a supercilious air that since they last met he had been trying to read a novel, which he mentioned by name—a masterpiece of modern fiction—and really he could not see the good of such works. Miss Hague and he had disagreed on this subject before. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... was a man of thirty, at the most, with handsome features and a commanding, elegant figure. His physiognomy expressed both intelligence and wit, but often wore a mask of supercilious impertinence when addressing persons of the same stamp as ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... sound of advancing steps lifted Frederick's face from hers. Muttering an oath, he threw Tess forcibly from him, for there in the path was Ebenezer Waldstricker, about whose sagging lips played a supercilious smile. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... had got me well under way in conversation with Taylor, he excused himself hurriedly and went off, as I assumed, to be sure the station agent had received orders for attaching the private car to the Chicago express. Taylor proved to be a supercilious person,—I believe they call him Chilly Billy at the Metropolitan Club,—and our efforts to converse were pathetically unfruitful. He asked me the value of land in my county, and as my ignorance on this subject was vast and illimitable, ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... baronial; lofty-minded; highsouled, high-minded, high-mettled[obs3], high-handed, high-plumed, high-flown, high-toned. haughty lofty, high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, imperious, high and mighty, overweening, consequential; arrogant &c. 885; unblushing &c. 880. stiff, stiff-necked; starch; perked stuck-up; in buckram, strait- laced; prim &c. (affected) 855. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to as a preliminary? Shall we then persevere in the war with a spirit and energy worthy of the British name and character; or shall we, by sending couriers to Paris, prostrate ourselves at the feet of a stubborn, supercilious government? I hope there is not a hand in his majesty's council that would sign the proposal; that there is not a heart in this house which would sanction the measure; and that there is not an individual in this realm that would act as courier." In private, Fox confessed that this ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... smoothly-uttered compliments were not innuendoes. Henry was certain of being despised, and naturally chafed against the prospect of the future connection between the two medical men of the town; and though Tom was gone back to Cambridge, it was the rankling remembrance of his supercilious looks that, more than any present offence or independence of spirit, made the young surgeon kick against direction from the physician. Here, too, Averil was of the same mind. She had heard Tom May observe that his sister Gertrude would play quite well ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... engendered in him, as is too often the case with self-taught geniuses who suddenly rise into fame, a supercilious contempt for the ordinary transactions of life. "After all," he said, "contentment is ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... loose because the sorrow is another's; and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves. And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Wellmere had never been kept much in the field, or these notions, which he had brought with him from home, and which had been greatly increased by the vaporing of a garrisoned town, would have long since vanished. He listened to the warm reply of Captain Wharton with a supercilious ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Journal des Goncourt had barely been published a few hours when the news of Carnot's assassination reached Paris. Lastly, the personal qualities of the brothers—their ostentation of independence, their attitude of supercilious superiority, and, most of all, their fatal gift of irony—raised up innumerable enemies and alienated both actual and possible friends. They gave no quarter and they received none. All this is extremely human and ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... exercises. Rhyme, now: he had called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was making a goddess in his own image; poetry—Santa Cecilia! he was a poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were cold his ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and all their lovers with them, have tried to catch this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come fluttering down to them at last. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... all proclaimed their suspicions of the cavalier who had arrived last the night before. He had, they said, made so many inquiries about the young lady, whose supercilious conduct all in the salle-a-manger had been discussing on his entrance. They were talking about her as we left the room; he must have come in directly afterwards, and not until he had learnt all about her, had he spoken of the business which necessitated his departure at ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... fuss and to spare her feelings. It was, in fact, just like Gerald to keep perfect silence as to what had passed between himself and the brute. However, she was convinced that Gerald, so lithe and quick, had given that great brute with his supercilious ways as good as he ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... pocket. Broad-shouldered, sturdy, and well-built throughout, he walked with the stride of a man who is accustomed to cover long distances. Yet with him he had brought neither wallet nor gripsack, and somehow his supercilious, retrousse upper lip and thickly fringed eyes irritated me, and inclined me to be suspicious of, and even actively to dislike, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... pain and mental discomfort. But in another moment he was sitting upright, shaking a mandatory fist at Patsy as she disappeared through the door. "Remember—no help from the quality! I hate them as much as you do, and I won't have them coming around with their inquisitive, patronizing, supercilious offers of assistance to a—beggar. I tell you I want to be left alone! If you bring any one back with you I'll burn the stable down ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... amplified, saved us from the usual exactions. It is pleasant to give a present, but that pleasure the Banyai usually deny to strangers by making it a fine, and demanding it in such a supercilious way, that only a sorely cowed trader could bear it. They often refuse to touch what is offered—throw it down and leave it—sneer at the trader's slaves, and refuse a passage until the tribute is raised to the utmost ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Anne and Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... arguments and idle words, it is not to be presumed but that a man, so attended and feared, has not in him more than ordinary sufficiency; and that he to whom the king has given so many offices and commissions and charges, he so supercilious and proud, has not a great deal more in him, than another who salutes him at so great a distance, and who has no employment at all. Not only the words, but the grimaces also of these people, are considered and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... that of one who wished to have it supposed, that he was writing concerning a subject rather beneath his notice, and only felt himself called forth to do so by the dogmatism of those who laid down confident rules or laws in matters so trifling. This affectation of supercilious censure appears deeply to have provoked Dryden, and prompted the acrimony of the following Defence, which he prefixed to a second edition of the Indian Emperor published in 1668, probably shortly after the offence had been given. The angry friends were afterwards reconciled; and Dryden, listening ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... to Mr Gosport, who now approached her, "but for your explanatory observations, how much would the sudden loquacity of this supercilious lady, whom I had imagined all but dumb, ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... equipages, and pedestrians. Times without number he had viewed the currents and counter-currents of that scene, but never before had he so caught its vital spirit and meaning. Born of the elect,—reared and educated among them,—the supercilious superiority of his class was as much a part of him as his name. While he realized that physically the high and the low were constructed on practically the same plan, he had been wont to consider them as on totally separate mental planes. That the clerk and the roustabout on ten dollars ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... momentum of the junk-cart, and brought up squarely against the curb. Dragging the wheels, she gained the sidewalk and, beyond, the rims of the cart cut into soft earth. She crossed the vacant lot. A city's supercilious moon alone gave its half-light to the junkyard of Grit and here the woman unloaded the cart, carrying heavy unyielding things against her breast. She did not linger. She was trembling from fatigue and from emotions ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... terrible Joseph Scaliger, who was to pronounce him totally ignorant of Latinity, was at a comfortable distance in the next century. But when was the fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever quite contented with the ready praise of friends? That critical supercilious Politian—a fellow-browser, who was far from amiable—must be made aware that the solid secretary showed, in his leisure hours, a pleasant fertility in verses, which indicated pretty clearly how much he might do in that way if he were not a man ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the so-called literary world was well rid of Minerva and her yellow ribbon. The great poets would have been indifferent, the little poets jealous, the funny men furious, the philosophers satirical, the historians supercilious, and, finally, the jobs without end. Say, ingenuity and cleverness are to be rewarded by State tokens and prizes—and take for granted the Order of Minerva is established—who shall have it? A great philosopher? no doubt we cordially ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the hands both of its admirers and its enemies. Injudicious praise, no less than supercilious contempt, has reacted unfavorably on the fame of our poets. Again and again has some minor versifier been hailed as the "American Keats" or the "American Burns." Really excellent poets, though distinctly ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... would you but step with him into the press of adventurous legions, and make articulate the dream of men, and make splendid their triumph. He is the prophet of to-morrow, though you deny him to-day. He is not like to you, supercilious and aloof—he would have you for a passionate brother, would raise your spirit in ecstasy, flood your mind with thought, and touch your lips with fire. Because of his sensitiveness he knows every mood and ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... be supercilious," his host replied, with an amiable smile; "you will see things better through a glass of grog; and the state of the weather points to something dark. You have had a long journey, and the scenery is new. Rum shall it be, my friend? Your countenance ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... a fright, Hugo decided; that's what she wanted to bring her to heel. And before very long he'd see that she got it. She shouldn't shelter herself for ever behind that supercilious beast, Ledgard. Hugo was quite ready to have been pleasant to Jan and to have met her more than half-way if she was reasonable, but since she had chosen to bring Ledgard into it, she should pay. After all, she was only a woman, and you can always frighten a ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... insults might be shrieked and howled, dirt thrown with all the strength of hate, and neither shrieks nor dirt would reach across the gulf to Urquhart's. They simply didn't matter. Hilary, realising this, grew slowly, dully red, with the bitterness of mortified expectation. Urquhart's look at him, supercilious, contemptuous, aloof, slightly disgusted, hurt his vanity. He caught at the only weapon he had which could ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... schoolmaster, was also present; and as he claimed acquaintance with the classics, and could understand and read with something like correctness the Latin offices, which were frequently repeated on these occasions it would be utterly impossible to describe the lofty scorn and haughty supercilious contempt with which he contemplated poor Dennis, who kept muttering away at the Confiteor and De Profundis with a barbarity of pronunciation that rendered it impossible for human ears to understand a single word he said. Finigan, swollen with an indignation which ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the second and remaining verses with spirit, the choruses swelling louder and louder, and when he finished there was much hand- clapping. So at last he had a gleam of success, and Lionel Gould, who had been growing a little supercilious, returned partially to his old ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... too was a Whig and a friend of the Protestant succession. He was an orator, a courtier, a wit, and a man of letters. He was at the head of ton in days when, in order to be at the head of ton, it was not sufficient to be dull and supercilious. It was evident that he submitted impatiently to the ascendency of Walpole. He murmured against the Excise Bill. His brothers voted against it in the House of Commons. The Minister acted with characteristic caution and characteristic ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... when a loud-voiced person of quality, ignorant and supercilious, was inveighing against the want of taste commonly exhibited by artists when they chose their wives, saying they almost always selected inferior women. Procter, sitting next to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and, with a look expressive of ludicrous pity and contempt for the idiotic ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... downstairs, before Mr. Noah Hawker recovered from his surprise on learning that his gift was gold instead of a silver sixpence. It chanced that he was reduced to his last coppers, and so the half sovereign was a boon indeed. He nudged the elbow of a supercilious looking young gentleman in evening ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... three human beings as astonished as we were to find ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a supercilious air, and I paid him back with ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... faithfully shape her teaching by the learning of this world, though it may have been gathered together for the express purpose of overthrowing her. Atheistic scholars may be quoted in her councils; and supercilious and sceptical philologists, could they live another hundred years, might perhaps recognise their discoveries, even their words and phrases, embodied in an ecclesiastical definition. To the outer world such a definition would seem to be a mere natural ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... was evidence of a struggle with poverty in the tight-fitting lavender gloves, whose streaky lines bore witness to the imperfection of the cleaner's art. Elegant Parisians and the select of Brussels glanced at the military Englishman and his handsome daughter with some slight touch of supercilious surprise—one has no right to find shabbily-dressed young women in the golden temple—and it is scarcely necessary to state that it was from her own countrywomen the young person in alpaca received the most chilling glances. But those Parthian arrows shot from feminine eyes had little ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... even at the Council Table when his Majesty was present, but seemed to lord it over all the rest, not by the force of argument, but an assumed superiority to which he had no right. This nettled lord Falkland, and made him exert his spirit to humble and oppose the supercilious churchman. This conduct of his lordship's, gave Mr. Hampden occasion to court him to his party, who was justly placed by the brilliance of his powers, at the head of the opposition; but after a longer study of the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the narrow pavement, pondering, and then, in excuse of his flagrant misbehaviour, murmured, "It was meant to be," and went by again. This time he fancied that he detected a somewhat supercilious expression in the dark eyes—a faint raising ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment and sharpen it on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They begin by soft expressions of sympathy ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... stiffened old fingers and a great twisting of her grim mouth as she formed the capitals. Then Billy Louise wrote her name with a fine, schoolgirl ease and a little curl on the end of the last d. Seabeck took the paper from the tips of Billy Louise's supercilious fingers, returned with it to the desk for a blotter, hunted an envelope, folded the note carefully, ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the great Ranunculus to loose the binding chain of concupiscence, heaving the multitudinous aquacity upon the heads of this wicked and sententious generation, whelming these diametrical scoffers in a supercilious Constantinople!" ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... SENSED, to use a rustic expression, the presence of a class that was not palpably treasonable, but rather half cotton. But at Canada it comes out all wool. The hot South opens like a double rose, red and full. The English article is cooler and supercilious. I say nothing, for my role is to see; but Halicarnassus and the Anakim exchange views with the greatest nonchalance, in spite of pokes and scowls ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... her cause. The footman who opened the door might look as supercilious as he pleased, but he was obliged to deliver her messages, and Mrs. Ellsworthy, with a good-humored smile, consented to ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... one thing more," continued Sibyl, who felt much elated at being allowed to talk to one of the most supercilious of all the Specialities. "I couldn't get out of my head about Betty and the oak-tree; so just now—a few minutes ago—I got some of my friends to come with me, and we went to the oak-tree, and I stood on Mabel Lee's shoulder, and I poked and poked amongst the debris and rubbish in the hollow ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... His head was held stiffly, and his whole bearing betrayed a desire to make the most of his defective stature. His shake of the hand was an abrupt downward jerk, like a pull at a bell-rope. In the smile with which he met Mr. Wyvern a supercilious frame of mind was not altogether concealed; he seemed anxious to have it understood that in him the clerical attire inspired nothing whatever of superstitious reverence. Reverence, in truth, was not ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and turned the conversation to ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... o'clock Harry and his fiancee arrived at Rivermead Mansions in a taxi and told me that they had seen Moroni arrive at Stretton Street about half-past nine. He was admitted by a new and rather supercilious man-servant—for Horton did not now seem to be in the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... traditional touch of dim blue, dim gold, and glossy calf-skin. The fire was exactly correct and traditional; a small, quiet, steady fire, reflected by polished fire-irons. The oak desk was dark and old and altogether perfect; the chairs were gently supercilious. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... be so in this life, I think. While we are coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labelling his opinions—'he is Evangelical and narrow', or 'Latitudinarian and Pantheistic' or 'Anglican and supercilious'—that man, in his solitude, is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the Irish in Miss Flora Grady was aroused. She announced to Miss Angie Miller that he was a "stuck up smart-Aleck," and sooner or later he'd get a piece of her mind that would "take him down a couple of pegs." Miss Miller, while in complete accord with Flora's views, was content to speak of him as "supercilious." ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... savage challenged the Judge over the sea of moving heads, and drove away the supercilious smile from ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... her with longing and tripped awkwardly against her chair. Hammond walked past Maggie as if she did not exist to him. Maggie nodded affectionately to Priscilla and followed the back of Hammond's head and shoulders with a supercilious, amused smile. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... pavement, were thickly strewed with rice, and on this a band of starving children had pounced, and were scraping it up with their bony claws of hands, clutching it from each other, fighting for it, and devouring it raw, while a supercilious servant looked on as though he were amused. Beth's heart was wrung by the sight, and she hurried by, cursing the greedy rich who wallow in luxury while children starve in ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... as she saw the supercilious smile on the lips of Mrs. Temple and the amused stares of the other ladies of the party. They did not take any notice of the other people present any more than if they had been so many puppets set up to show off the teacher; their air of superiority was offensive. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... who, under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the title of a lady, wear the heart of an underbred snob. Having no natural dignity, they think to supply its place with arrogance. They mistake noisy bounce for self-possession, and supercilious rudeness as the sign of superiority. They encourage themselves in sleepy stupidity under the impression that they are acquiring aristocratic "repose." They would appear to have studied "attitude" from the pages of the London Journal, coquetry from barmaids—the commoner class of ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... Light Horse, that Captain Winwood was in America, in the smaller way his modesty permitted, what the Chevalier Bayard was in France, and Sir Philip Sidney in England. This has been received more than once (such is the malice of conscious inferiority) with derisive smiles or supercilious sneers; and not only by certain of his own countrymen, but even in my presence, when my friendship for Winwood, though I had been his rival in love and his enemy in war, was not less known than was ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... absurdities of the prevailing system, in combination with other lights and sources of intelligence, led at last to its being universally abandoned, consists of four individuals—on any of whom a literary Pharisee would look down with supercilious scorn:—a country gentleman, devoted to husbandry, and deep in platforms of hop gardens,[14]—a baronet, whose name for upwards of a century has been used as a synonyme for incurable political bigotry,[15]—a little, crooked, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... for them?" asks Mrs. Bethune, always with her supercilious smile, and in a tone that is almost a whisper, yet quite loud enough for Rylton, who ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... Philip's delays as affected; and she could not conceal her vexation, that, though she brought him a kingdom as her dowry, he treated her with such neglect that he had never yet favored her with a single letter.[**] Her fondness was but the more increased by this supercilious treatment; and when she found that her subjects had entertained the greatest aversion for the event to which she directed her fondest wishes, she made the whole English nation the object of her resentment. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... who is gazing in at the window also. See! he draws beside her. He coughs; she turns away from him. He draws near her again; she disregards him. He gleefully chucks her under the chin, and, retreating a few steps, nods and beckons with fantastic grimaces, while the girl bestows a contemptuous and supercilious look upon his wrinkled visage. She turns away with a flounce, and the old gentleman trots after her with a toothless chuckle. The pantaloon ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to sit there staring at us in that supercilious manner," said Colonel Talbot. "Shall I take the Invincibles, sir, and teach them ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... says an early Christian writer, "the supercilious looks of philosophers, whom we have known to be the corrupters of innocence, adulterers, and tyrants, and eloquent declaimers against vices of which they themselves are ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-battled, never-ending struggle of it be forgotten? 'It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were the same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact,—is dead; it is 'pure,' as dead ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... "one of them, from my post of observation behind the kitchen door, and he did appear so ridiculous with his gold eye-glasses, looking as solemn as an owl, and glancing around with that expression of supercilious curiosity, as though he expected to find us all wild Indians, or something of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... spirits, declared with much solemnity that he could already detect the smell of the salt sea air. They had their quarrels of course. It pleased a certain young lady to treat the south coast of England with much supercilious contempt. You would have imagined from her talk that there was something criminal in one's living even within twenty miles of the bleak downs, the shabby precipices, and the muddy sea which, according to her, were the only recognizable ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... he had received,—a feeling which plainly transpires in some of his replies, despite the forms of official respect that he scrupulously observed. Even in much later days, when his distinguished reputation might have enabled him to sustain with indifference this supercilious rudeness, he winced under it with over-sensitiveness. "Do not, my dear lord," he wrote to Earl Spencer a year after the battle of the Nile, "let the Admiralty write harshly to me—my generous soul cannot bear it, being conscious ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... or tobacco. All reprehensible conduct must be carried on so secretly as to elude the college authorities. Those disposed to do evil represent only a very small proportion of the great body of students, but these give occasion for some supercilious and conceited correspondent of the public press severely to criticise the college government, and to give gross caricatures and exaggerated statements of the mischief done by this small percentage of students, and then include the entire academic body in the same general censure. It is generally ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... its effect was intensified by the demeanour of the Lieutenant-Governor and several military officers who were in attendance upon him. It seemed to the deputation that those gentlemen regarded them with supercilious impertinence; as a something which viceroyalty must be content, for the nonce, to endure, but as being altogether beyond the pale of their sympathies or interests. Nothing could have been in worse ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... of aversion swept over Merry. He saw the person was a supercilious Frenchman, critical, sneering, insolent, a man intolerant with everything not of France and ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... presence of mind; and the wife of a peasant, when you enter her cottage, often greets you with a propriety of mien which favourably contrasts with your reception by some grand dame in some grand assembly, meeting her guests alternately with a caricature of courtesy or an exaggeradon of supercilious self-control. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... censoriousness and spiritual pride; and none who had studied the New Testament could have failed to observe that, while we are charged carefully to avoid whatever may give scandal to the feeble, we are taught by divine precept and example to make no concession to the supercilious and uncharitable Pharisee. Was every thing which was not of the essence of religion to be given up as soon as it became unpleasing to a knot of zealots whose heads had been turned by conceit and the love of novelty? Painted glass, music, holidays, fast days, were not of the essence of religion. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... advance is never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... neck to see the speaker; but she was hidden by her escort, in whose supercilious profile he recognized one of the officers in charge of his ward at ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... want Mr. Drummond, whoever he may be. I never heard of him in my life. I only want my aunt and cousins. Which of them are you, eh? Why, you must be Nan, I suppose?" And the big man looked down at her with a sort of supercilious good nature. The name gave Mattie ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... which many a diplomat has had to yield, to cover his weakness by proud words, and he managed to provoke Louis XIV. to angry remonstrances, and even to threats of war. It was to Clarendon personally that the French King ascribed the supercilious tone of the English demands, and it was his compliance that Louis and his Ministers chiefly sought to gain. The Powers abroad knew what Clarendon's work for the exiled Court had been. They could estimate the value of his statesmanship, and dreaded him as England's most efficacious Minister. But they ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition—to thunder forth accusations against men in power; to show up the worst side of everything that is produced; to pick holes in every coat; to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious; to damn with faint praise, or crush with open calumny! What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing? You condemn what I do, but put yourself in my position and do the reverse, and then see if ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... one may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!—It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... flight,' Spenser F. Q. iii. 4.] 'to reprehend,' to lay hold of one with the intention of forcibly pulling him back; 'to exonerate,' to discharge of a burden, ships being exonerated once; that 'to be examined' means to be weighed. They would be pleased to learn that a man is called 'supercilious,' because haughtiness with contempt of others expresses itself by the raising of the eyebrows or 'supercilium'; that 'subtle' (subtilis for subtexilis) is literally 'fine-spun'; that 'astonished' (attonitus) is ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... manliness in these Yarmouth boatmen, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and heroic endurance, take forms half-chivalrous half-sublime. It is one of the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at the close of Copperfield, when the body of the seducer is flung dead upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... money-lenders could not thrive if there were no borrowers: the gambler brings about his own ruin. The characteristics of the Jew are never more perceptible than when they come in contact with gentlemen to ruin them. On such occasions, the Jew is humble, supercilious, blunderingly flattering; and if he can become the agent of any dirty work, is only too happy to be so, in preference to a straightforward and honest transaction. No man is more vulgarly insulting to those dependent upon him than the Jew, who invariably cringes to his superiors; above ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... was supercilious until the station-house was reached. He had heard this blatant talk before. What was his surprise when Shirley telephoned to the head of the Department and then called ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... of that supercilious breed of Americans which toadies to an alleged European culture by finding fault with his own people," he hastened to assure her. "What distresses me is the knowledge that we are a very moral nation, that we have never subjugated weaker peoples, that we have never coveted our neighbor's ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... guest- chamber, those young clerks made wonderful leaps, from time to time, in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted, discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes present himself—a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station, like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... a supercilious voice, Mr. Godfrey was not there; he had left some time before; no, the speaker did not know where he was going, nor when he would ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... one end of the town to the other, crammed himself with bon-bons at a confectioner's, and went to a French restaurant, about which he had hitherto heard only vague and uncertain rumours, such as one hears of the Chinese empire. There he dined, assuming the while a haughty and supercilious air, and incessantly arranging his well-curled locks. There, too, he drank a bottle of champagne; a liquid he had hitherto known only by reputation. His head full of wine, he went out into the street, gay, bold, ready for any thing—able to face the devil, as the Russians say. On the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... spirit poring over. Always in my company he preserved the most rigid silence, and a haughty scornful demeanour; which was so much the more disagreeable because there was nothing in his behaviour I could actually take hold of to find fault with: although his whole conduct was insolent and supercilious to the highest degree. His mother was very much agitated at receiving him on his arrival; if he felt any such agitation he certainly did not show it. He made her a very low and formal bow when he kissed her hand; and, when I held out mine, put both ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that significance simply because he was not accustomed to see men as men. He had no real interest in man as man. He was not a lover of his kind. Hence, when the Son of Man came out of Nazareth, the Pharisee was too careless or too supercilious to regard Him with interest. The divine wonder passed him by; all he saw was a wandering fanatic with no place to lay His head. He could not pierce the disguise of circumstance, and bow in love and awe before the soul of Jesus because he ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... was regarding us with supercilious glances. I felt very indignant, and proposed opening the door and getting inside, whatever the seaman might say, but the doors were locked, and the shutters ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... "How could you know everything?" she remarked. "She is, of course, the offspring of a concubine, but as a mere girl, she can't be placed on the same footing as a man! By and bye, when any one aspires to her hand, the sort of supercilious parties, who now tread the world, will, as a first step, ask whether this young lady is the child of a No. 1 or No. 2 wife. And many of these won't have anything to say to her, as she is the child, of a No. 2. But really people haven't any idea that, not to speak of her as the offspring of a secondary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... accepted by the careless observer as one of the concomitants of fashion. The reverse is true. She is an interloper in the circles of good society, and the old fable of the ass in the lion's skin fits her precisely. Many a duchess in England is such an interloper; her supercilious airs betray the falsity of her politeness, but she is obliged by the rules of the Court at which she has been educated to "behave like a lady;" she has to counterfeit good-breeding; she cannot, she dare not, behave as a woman who has suddenly become ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and answered that I could. He saw the move, glanced at the butt of the automatic where it protruded from its holster, and smiled. Then he turned and raising his great bow, fitted an arrow and drew the shaft far back. His warriors, supercilious smiles upon their faces, stood silently watching him. His bow was the longest and the heaviest among them all. A mighty man indeed must he be to bend it; yet Al-tan drew the shaft back until the stone point touched his left forefinger, and he did it with consummate ease. Then he raised the ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who I was by the way they ignored me. It exasperated me to a pitch of fury, that coldly insolent air of theirs—a jerky nod at me without so much as a glance, and no notice of me when they were leaving my box beyond a faint, supercilious smile as they passed with eyes straight ahead. I knew what it meant, what they were thinking—that the "Bucket-Shop King," as the newspapers had dubbed me, was trying to use old Ellersly's necessities as a "jimmy" and "break into ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... manner aroused in me instant resentment. I was the toiler in mud-stiffened overalls, he arrogant and supercilious in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... are little, low, and mean in their own eyes, and they esteem each other better than themselves; whereas they who at all look to, or depend upon, their own righteousness for their clothing and justification before God, always look down with an air of supercilious contempt upon others who they think are not so righteous as themselves. Lord, hide self-righteous pride from my heart, and sink me into the depth of humility, that I may ever glory in Thee, in whom ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... resorting to irony in his turn, said, with that supercilious politeness with which his adversary had so often ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... experiments familiar and vulgar; for it is esteemed a kind of dishonour unto learning to descend to inquiry or meditation upon matters mechanical, except they be such as may be thought secrets, rarities, and special subtleties; which humour of vain and supercilious arrogancy is justly derided in Plato, where he brings in Hippias, a vaunting sophist, disputing with Socrates, a true and unfeigned inquisitor of truth; where, the subject being touching beauty, Socrates, after his wandering manner of inductions, put first an example of a fair virgin, and then of ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... act with a somewhat supercilious manner, but the second act found her wiping her eyes—very cautiously; there was that unvarying colour to think of. The third act found her well back in the shadow of the box curtain, and the last act she watched with a face of such fixed determination as to attract the wondering ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... with a lighter heart. From a dying man there could not be much to fear. So I hunted up Mr. Royce, and found him, finally, endeavoring to extract some information from a supercilious official in ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... compactly built, fair man of less than forty, with thin reddish brown hair, brows slanting downward from the base of the nose, and a profile of that curious Teuton type reminiscent of a supercilious hound if one could imagine such an animal with milk-blue eyes and a yellow mustache with spiky ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... darling!" said Meta, giving Rose a fresh hug and glancing in a supercilious but friendly ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Nationalist policy of active resistance, there would at least have been superficial plausibility in it. But when it was suggested or implied that the Ulster example was actually responsible in any degree whatever for violent outbreaks in the other provinces, a supercilious smile was the only possible retort from the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... communications with foreign States. It was among the high duties devolved upon him to introduce our new government into the circle of civilized States and powerful nations. Not arrogant or assuming, with no unbecoming or supercilious bearing, he yet exacted for it from all others entire and punctilious respect. He demanded, and he obtained at once, a standing of perfect equality for his country in the society of nations; nor was there a prince or potentate of his day, whose personal character carried ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... to have girdled the globe, the spirit of petty jealousy and assumed superiority with which Americans are treated in many European countries, has imbued this people with the idea that the quickest way to win the respect of their supercilious neighbors is to slaughter them. Uncle Sam is in an ugly humor and will suffer no legitimate casus belli to be side-tracked by arbitration. He is "dead tired" of having the European ants get on him—of being harried by petty powers whom he knows full well he could ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... home, successful abroad, young Calcott had enough of the prig to be a perpetual irritation to Jem Frost, all the more because he could never make Louis resent, nor accept, as other than natural, the goodnatured supercilious patronage of the steady distinguished ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looked upon 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
... proffered wares the chief waves off with aristocratic hauteur, until he suddenly recollects that his humble countryman has a vote at the elections; then he stops, enters into a brief conversation, examines the kitful of fruit through his glasses with supercilious disdain, but eventually purchases a chunk of melon, and goes on his way ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... his "Biographical History of Philosophy," speaks of the essay from which these words are quoted, as written in "a somewhat supercilious tone." We are unable to detect any such feature in it. That trait was wholly foreign from Leibnitz's nature. "Car je suis des plus dociles," he says of himself, in this same essay. He was the most tolerant of philosophers. "Je ne mprise presque rien."—"Nemo ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... his eyes roved over her face. Her superb, supercilious beauty overcame him. 'Ah!' he said, 'what a wife you would make!' He approached nearer to her. 'You and I, Miss Racksole, your beauty and wealth and my brains—we could conquer the world. Few men are worthy of you, but ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... tropical afternoon doze if it had not been for Hamilton's voice raised in the dining room. He was finishing his tiffin there. The big double doors stood wide open permanently, and he could not have had any idea how near to the doorway our chairs were placed. He was heard in a loud, supercilious tone answering some statement ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... hind an active coadjutor in me?" said Ramorny, in the same supercilious tone as before. "But know, the artisan fellow is too low in degree to be to me either the object of hatred or of fear. Yet he shall not escape. We hate not the reptile that has stung us, though we might shake it off the wound, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... bore to Carlisle. She recognized it as one of the triumphs of her life. The material dinner could of course be no better than the New Arlington could make it; but then the New Arlington was a hotel which supercilious tourists always mentioned with pleased surprise in their letters home; that is, if they had any homes and ever thought of writing to them. And Cousin Willie Kerr, having got "off" at three-thirty ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Schwartz fawned after her to the door, and with a second yawn she repassed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old gendarme. The absurd little drama of coquetry and worship went on until the old fellow arose with a friendly bon jour, to me, and a whistle to Lil, who followed him with a supercilious nose in the air. The despised Schwartz stood a while, and then set out after her at a ridiculous three-legged run, but before he had gone ten yards he stopped short, looked after the retreating ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... refute the calumnies against our climate; for, though he agreed that we had fogs in London occasionally somewhat denser than in Paris, he had not fallen into the error,—which it is thought heresy to dispute,—that, at Brighton, Richmond, or Windsor, the blue sky is never seen. A very supercilious man who sat near him, annoyed at his praises of England, and his raptures at the Tunnel,—that great object of foreign admiration,—endeavoured to silence him by pronouncing that London had no monuments, and was ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... rounded work, he had more of a disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach which is like belief; and now he is telling a story again for the sake of the story, but without the deeper meaning. Lynette is a supercilious damsel who asks redress of the knights of the Round Table: Gareth, a male Cinderella, starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after conquering her prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a disguised prince. It is a plain little comedy, not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... meantime had made its way into a back court, accompanied by the tyrant, the pedant and Scapin, who superintended the unloading of the various articles that would be needed—a strange medley, which the supercilious servants of the chateau, in their rich liveries, handled with a very lofty air of contempt and condescension, feeling it quite beneath their dignity to wait upon a band of strolling players. But they dared not rebel, for the marquis had ordered it, and he was a severe master, as well ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the ground as before. Tired of this affectation of indolent importance, and not much flattered with his guest's persevering in it to the last, Halbert resolved at once to break the ice, being determined to know what circumstance had brought to the tower of Glendinning a guest at once so supercilious ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... everything else desirable, and this consciousness actually produced, in a large majority, the pleasing illusion that she was really all these. But she was not. On the contrary, stripped of the gloss, she was censorious, supercilious, and selfish. Deprived of her dressmaker, she was gaunt and unsightly. Separated from her position, she would have been unbearable. Arabella had many offers, of course, but she was too fond of her power and too suspicious of an attempt ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... conscious of the fact, the action was magnificent; but of it they were not conscious. They but answered an instinct: the eternal brotherhood of the frontier. Far away in his well-policed, steam-heated abode urban man listens to the tale of unselfishness, and, supercilious, smiles. We believe what we have ourselves felt, we humans. First of all to come was lean-faced Crosby, one cheek swelled round with a giant quid. Close at his heels followed Trapper Conway: grizzled, parchment-faced veteran, who alone had followed the Missouri to its source and, stranger to ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... reverent attitude during prayer. The theme, too, was one that gave little room for skepticism. It was the story of Zaccheus, and story-telling was Moore's strong point. The thing was well done. Vivid portraitures of the outcast, shrewd, converted publican and the supercilious, self-complacent, critical Pharisee were drawn with a few deft touches. A single sentence transferred them to the Foothills and arrayed them in cowboy garb. Bill was none too sure of himself, but Hi, with delightful winks, was indicating Bruce as the Pharisee, to ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... man is unfit for absolute power over his fellow men. They think as unfavorably of the influence of this power on the slaveholder, as your own Jefferson did. They think that it tends to make him impatient of contradiction, self-willed, supercilious, cruel, murderous, devilish; and they think that they can establish this opinion, not by the soundest philosophy only, but by the pages of many of your own writers, and by those daily scenes of horrid brutality which make the Southern States, in the sight both ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... [I]Troilus is a very supercilious Man: And 'tis no ways inconsistent with this Character to suppose, that he may entertain a natural Antipathy against an ugly Face, or a bad Voice; but our Author represents him as labourirg under this Distemper to such a Degree of Excess, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... points of his little moustache went up again in the habitual barometrical smile. Rather a priggish, supercilious smile, she thought, taking ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... did not sympathise as much as she expected, having been much galled by Mrs. Robert Brownlow's supercilious manner, and thinking the attempt to conciliate her ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... happiness. What we do, must be quickly done, must have immediate results. Our success in solving the political and social problems has spoiled us. When we hear of a man who has been prosperous for years, whom no misfortune has sobered and softened, we expect him to be narrow and supercilious; and in the same way, a prosperous people are exposed to the danger of becoming self-complacent and superficial. We exaggerate the importance of our own achievements and think that which we have accomplished is the best; whereas the wise hold what they have done ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... deserves. I shall, on such an occasion, without scruple trample upon all those forms with which wealth and dignity intrench themselves, nor shall anything but age restrain my resentment; age which always brings one privilege, that of being insolent and supercilious without punishment. But with regard, sir, to those whom I have offended, I am of opinion, that if I had acted a borrowed part I should have avoided their censure; the heat that offended them was the ardor of conviction, and that zeal for the service ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... she had said on the way to the club, and was, without doubt, a very perfect person with his wide-set eyes and well-groomed head, his smooth moustache and the cleft on his chin. He didn't like him. He had decided that at a first glance. He was too supercilious and self-assured and had a way of looking clean through men's heads. He conveyed the impression of having bought the earth,—and Joan. A pity he was too old for a year or two of Yale. That would make him a bit more ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... am concerned, my dear Marcus, I am perfectly indifferent," replied Judith, assuming the supercilious expression with which women invariably try to mask ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with two half-charred sticks, which he laid cross-wise upon the ground. The Dervishes came clustering over to see the new converts admitted into the fold. They stood round in the dim light, tall and fantastic, with the high necks and supercilious heads of the camels swaying ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it was an overwhelming, a public defeat that made his leadership ridiculous. His vanity was cut savagely; it was impossible for him to control himself to stay and witness the inevitable rout. He lounged down the wide aisle, his face masked in a supercilious smile, his glance contemptuously upon the jubilant barbs. They were thick about the doors, and as he passed among them he said, addressing no one in particular: "A revolt of the Helots." A barb raised a threatening fist; Pierson sneered, and the ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... of our departure, in the twilight of the morning, I ascended the vehicle with three men and two women, my fellow travellers. It was easy to observe the affected elevation of mien with which every one entered, and the supercilious servility with which they paid their compliments to each other. When the first ceremony was despatched, we sat silent for a long time, all employed in collecting importance into our faces, and endeavouring to strike reverence and submission into ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... third-grade staff-officer learns is to speak respectfully of his superiors," said the A.P.M., as he hurled a cushion at Ponsonby, who caught it with a bow. Ponsonby is irrepressible and, in spite of his supercilious civilian airs, much is forgiven him. He turned to the D.A.A.G. and said, "Hooper, you've forgotten to say grace. For what we have not received"—he added, with a meaning glance at a Stilton cheese which the A.A.G.'s ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... thinking that he was addressed, but found that the summons was meant for a boy, rather good-looking but very slender, whose self-important attitude and supercilious look betrayed no slight amount of vanity, and who, to the apparent astonishment of the rest, was surveying the room and its appurtenances with a look of great affectation ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... was fast receding, leaving uncovered a bleak and barren shore, whose chief salients were a disdainful nose and a mouth which looked as if it might be able to say bitter things. The eyes, however, were still handsome, if supercilious, and her manners velvety. No doubt there were claws beneath the velvet, but they were not for April . . . only for the girl who was using April's name! They had not talked for five minutes before she realized that in this woman Diana had an enemy. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
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