"Conventionality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fair, with the bloom of perfect health upon it, and the little mouth was firm, the lips fresh as from the kiss of a rose. There was grace in all her movements, that unstudied grace which tells of life in the open air and freedom from restraint; and in thought and word and deed conventionality had small interest for her. It was hardly wonderful that Lord Rosmore should pronounce her adorable, or that Judge Marriott should forget that his youth was a thing of the past. Indeed, she had come as a revelation to the ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... city. Those paintings mentioned by Pliny were commonly believed to be earlier than the foundation of Rome. At the present day the tombs of Etruria afford examples of Etruscan painting in every stage of its development, from the rudeness and conventionality of early art in the tomb of Veii to the correctness and ease of design, and the more perfect development of the art exhibited in the painted scenes in the tombs of Tarquinii. In one of these tombs the pilasters are profusely adorned with arabesques, and a frieze which ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... to the woman who is about to become a mother. Most of these questions are reasonable and natural, and should be frankly answered; but a false conventionality has—until recently, at least—forbidden any open discussion of facts connected with childbirth. The inevitable result has been that, without experience of their own to guide them, prospective mothers have sought advice from older women, whose experience ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... the shaven skin, softened with rice-powder, contrasted with the clear rose and white of the upper part of his cheeks. Always dressed with meticulous neatness and simplicity, following English rather than French taste; in manner punctiliously observant of the strictest conventionality, scrupulously, even excessively polite; in talk measuring his phrases, using only the most select terms, and pronouncing certain words as if the sound itself possessed a certain subtle, mystical value,—throwing his voice into capitals and italics;—in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Gilbert felt tacitly rebuked. He was struck by the fact that this country girl, in the coarse dress and sunbonnet, whom he had whimsically likened to a rustic lass, to be helped across a brook for a kiss, had instantly, by a mere glance, clothed the situation in an impregnable mantle of conventionality. He took her basket and held out his hand, feeling as though he were about to assist a princess from her carriage. With a touch she sprang past him and stepped quietly up the bank. "Thank you," she said, sedately, as she took the basket from him. "I think it ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... something also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never been at a public school—thus missing, in the plastic years of a sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class—made it easier for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions with his own eyes, and not through the medium of special glasses imposed by ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... is very different from the real native American who has been exposed to the corrupting influences-of the white man's civilization. The poet insists on seeing in the American Indian a noble manhood, simple tastes, freedom from all conventionality, heroic fortitude, and all those romantic qualities which a free forest life seems so well calculated to engender. He looks upon the deep, mysterious woods, traversed by nameless streams; the majestic mountains, haunted by shadows; the broad lakes, swept only by the wind and the wild man's ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... was tampered by a thing which, if not grief, depressed and saddened him at times. Two days more and they would be at Fort o' God, and there Jeanne would be no longer his own, as she was now. Even the wilderness has its conventionality, and at Fort o' God their comradeship would end. A day of rest, two at the most, and he would leave for the camp on Blind Indian Lake. As the time drew nearer when they would be but friends and no longer comrades, Philip could ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... and "silly," but, I tell you, a legacy of gold or a hatful of diamonds could not begin to outvalue such love in a man's home. God bless the two, say I, and roll round the joyful day when love and its free and beautiful demonstration shall shine athwart the heresies of conventionality as April suns dispel the winter's fog with the splendor of their ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... for him and did not know whether she liked or hated him most. She saw his faults clearly, his blatant conceit, his irritating belief in the supremacy of money, his arrogance, his bad manners. She knew that men deemed him a bounder. But his very boorishness, his savage outbreaks against conventionality, attracted her. Under the thin veneer of civilisation, he was simply an animal; she knew it and it appealed to her baser nature, the sensual strain in her. That he was beast, and wild beast at that, did not affright her; she felt that she could always dominate him when she ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... this Natalie Coolidge? And what could she possible desire of him? These questions remained unanswered, yet continually tantalized. He could not even grasp her personality. In spite of her apparent friendliness, her irresistible smile, her lack of conventionality, there remained a certain reserve about the young woman he felt quite unable to penetrate. Whatever game she was playing she kept the cards securely in her own hands. He was not yet admitted to her confidence. He stood there immersed ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... George Sand's 'Jacques' when he is just about to fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law, truth and not legal fiction, were ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the rock with a sort of gigantic impression. No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... be well," Francesca assured her soothingly. "We shall be pardoned much because we are Americans, and will not be expected to know any better. Besides, the gifted Miss Hamilton is an artist, and that covers a multitude of sins against conventionality. When the castle people 'tirl at the pin,' I will appear as the maid, if you like, following your example at Mrs Bobby's ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... while I have lived amongst them. So that although when the country settled down, and we built houses for ourselves and returned more to English modes of living, I felt that I was drifting away from them into the conventionality and ignorance of our official lives, yet I had in my memory much of what I had seen, much of what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt that I had been—even if it were only for a time—behind the veil, where it is ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a Man,—and, on the other hand, nothing could be ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... human beings who wished to know each other should be held back from such knowledge by mere convention, by the unwritten law of the solemn and formal introduction! A great happiness might lie in their intercourse, but conventionality solemnly and selfishly forbade it, unless they could find a common acquaintance to mumble a few unmeaning words over them. Mumbo-Jumbo! What a fantastic world of stupidly obedient puppets this world of London was! She said to herself that she hated it. Then she thought of her first widowhood ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... well acquainted with Dr. Everett, and was too young and ready for enjoyment to be disturbed about conventionality. She merrily declared her willingness to be taken to whatever entertainment the doctor had to propose. Mrs. Roberts was out with her husband on business connected with church matters, and she had only intended to walk a square or ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... of this country has taught me that its conventional gardeners are always jolly, and always three in number. Whether that conventionality has reference to the Three Graces, or to those very significant letters, L., S., D., I do not know. Those mystic letters are, however, most important, and no society can have officers of more importance than its Treasurers, nor can it possibly give ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... ablest romancer. Fadaises, which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings. There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here. He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account. In this he is supremely serviceable ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... over others' weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she even forced herself to think of Carroll—only ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... we may learn the mere conventionality and the utter arbitrariness of even our most important ethical terms. How prodigiously cheap is the application of any such epithets, considering the terrible abuse they have undergone! And how poor is that philosophy that can concentrate 'politeness' and 'civility' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... colouring under the new cupola, and the effect of the west end is, as usual, ruined by the organ loft. There are very fine stained-glass windows, some quite modern, but so good both in colour and design, that we cannot look at them without rebelling in our minds, against the conventionality of much of the modern work in english churches.[20] It seems not unreasonable to look forward to the time when it shall be accounted a sin to present caricatures of scriptural subjects in memorial church-windows. Let us rather have ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise with ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... would forget the look in that man's eyes. The look might have been in other men's eyes, but conventionality had always veiled it; she ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... de Sismondi for having taught that landed property has no other basis than law and conventionality; and he says himself, speaking of the respect which people feel for property, that "their good sense reveals to them the nature of the ORIGINAL CONTRACT made between society ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... his ways of—gaiety. Not caring to be pitied, nor to be so soon a deserted wife, nor yet to admit my loss of attraction for him, I dashed into the gay life of Paris with reckless fervour. I know I was indiscreet. I know I fractured conventionality and was dreadfully compromised—but I never violated the Seventh Commandment. Robert Clephane and I were not ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... perception of which it doubtless was that led Selina to break out, with a greater show of indignation: 'I never heard of such extraordinary ideas for a girl to have, and such extraordinary things for a girl to talk about! My dear, you have acquired a freedom—you have emancipated yourself from conventionality—and I suppose I must congratulate you.' Laura only stood there, with her eyes fixed, without answering the sally, and Selina went on, with another change of tone: 'And pray if he was there, what is there so monstrous? Hasn't it happened that he is in London ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... true they both came from Glasgow. She thought of the parsimonious rectitude—which had of course included linen sheets and fine porcelain and shining silver—of old Lady Gaverick's establishment, of its stuffy conventionality—though that had been soothing sometimes after a dose of Upper Bohemia; and Bridget wept, feeling rather like a wilful child who had strayed out of the nursery among ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Noble Seven, described as "letting a fellow do as he blanked pleased," would be gone. None resented more bitterly than he the missionary's intrusion, which he declared to be an attempt "to reimpose upon their freedom the trammels of an antiquated and bigoted conventionality." But the rest of the Company, while not taking so decided a stand, were agreed that the establishment of a church institution was an objectionable and impertinent as ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119} mother. The Duchess of Kent would appear ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... might use an odalisque. 'The only rule worth thinking of,' he said, 'is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting ourselves to current taste and the fashions of the age.' His epic represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against conventionality. The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral. With like brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... tree! What did it ever grow for?" That was my thought but I assented with a show of pleasure, as conventionality demands. It was a balmy night in early November, not uncommon in this glorious climate. The moon was one quarter large, and the dim light was pleasant. Many young people were abroad that evening. When we reached the swell where ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... a scientist, and while the brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment. The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... great balls, the rocky shores of conventionality made it impossible to move without a thousand ceremonies, proprieties, dubiosities, formalities, and all the rest, which, taken together, make up a vast sum of difficulties. The great ball at Axelholm was not without pretension, and on that account not without its stiff ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... three paragraphs you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the handling ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... shall be a slave: the slave of uncertainty: the slave of fear: the worst of all slaveries. How would you like it if every laborer you met in the road were to make love to you? No. Give me the blessed protection of a good stiff conventionality among thoroughly ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... Custom and conventionality recommend many and varied occupations for women, social functions intermixed with kindly deeds of charity, embroidering altar cloths, making strong and durable garments for the poor, visiting the sick, comforting ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... Everything lacked conventionality, and was accepted as a matter of course; and although at times Sam sorely taxed my gravity by using the bed for a temporary dumb waiter, the bushmen showed no embarrassment, simply because they felt none, and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... between the two ripened fast. In defiance of all conventionality, the lady took to sitting out late at night with her elderly admirer, and, with an absolute disregard of decorum, accompanied him on long excursions. Finally, she went away with him altogether. On the occasion of ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... superficial view, Marian. Neither poetic or outlandish costume, nor the impossible language put into the mouths of their creations by the old bards, makes the unconventional woman. There is, in truth, a conventionality about these very things, only it is antiquated. It is not a woman's dress or phraseology that makes her an ideal or an inspiration, but what she is herself. No two leaves are alike on the same tree, but they are all enough alike to make ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the length of each step. Orde followed at full speed. When the bottom was reached, he steadied her to a halt. She shook herself, straightened her hat, and wound the veil around it. Her whole aspect seemed to have changed with the descent into the conventionality of the village street. The old, gentle though capable and self-contained reserve had returned. She ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... indispensable. Conventionality is often denounced as untrue and hypocritical. It is said that we ought to be natural. Respectability is often sneered at because it is a sum of conventionalities. The conventionalizations which persist are the resultant of experiments and experience as to the devices by which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... said, came to mingle in the controversy; and those who held by the king's Opera were as certainly Tories, as those who went to the nobility's were Whigs. Of course all this was very foolish, and very wrong; yet in our days of stately conventionality, when perfect impassibility is deemed the highest style of breeding, there is something refreshing in reading of such animated scenes in high life. The crowning act of hostility to Handel, was when the Earl of Middlesex himself ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... what Vandyke is. I should call him a true court painter—a master of splendid conventionalities, whose portraits of kings are the most powerful arguments for the divine right I know of. Nevertheless, beyond conventionality and outward magnificence, his ideas have no range. He suggests nothing to the moral and ideal part of us. Here again was the picture of King Charles on horseback, which had interested me at Warwick. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the work on their side. They were succeeded by inferior craftsmen, Francois Marchant of Orleans, and Nicolas Guybert of Chartres; and after them art went on sinking lower and lower, down to one Sieur Boudin, who had dared to sign his miserable puppets, down to the stupid conventionality of Jean de Dieu, Legros, Tuby, and Mazieres, to the cold and pagan work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But there was an improvement in the eight last groups opposite the Virgin of the Pillar—some simple figures carved by the pupils of Soulas; ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... moment. For the first time in his life he was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee's soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it. All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection. In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong. To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... fellow-student who sat there with mother and sister, black-uniformed, looking very much a gentleman. 'I, of course, am not a gentleman,' he said to himself, gloomily. Was there any chance that he might some day take his ease in that orthodox fashion? Inasmuch as it was conventionality, he scorned it; but the privileges which it represented had strong control of his imagination. That lady and her daughter would follow the play with intelligence. To exchange comments with them would be a keen delight. As for him—he ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... down. And he was ashamed of it—ashamed of the thought that for an instant was in his mind. The soul of the wild, little mountain creature was in her eyes. Her lips made no concealment of its thoughts or its emotions, pure as the blue skies above them and as ungoverned by conventionality as the winds that shifted up and down the valleys. She was a new sort of being to him, a child-woman, a little wonder-nymph that had grown up with the flowers. And yet not so little after all. He had noticed that the top of her shining head came ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... stretched to a long quarter of an hour before she descended. To the outward eye at least Miss Whitford looked a woman of the world, sheathed in a plate armor of conventionality. As soon as his eyes fell on her Clay knew that this pale, slim girl in the close-fitting gown was a stranger to him. Her eyes, star-bright and burning like live coals, warned him that the friend whose youth ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... a speech in the House of Commons, however forcible and eloquent, rarely influences a vote. Some orators, however, have gift of stirring the soul to emotions that carry a man to actions beyond range of conventionality. Such an one is the Right Hon. THOMAS LOUGH, commonly and affectionately known through several Parliaments as "Tommy." One of small faction of Liberals who have not withdrawn opposition to Military Service Bill. Declaiming against it just now on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... such social freedom to be enjoyed anywhere as on board an ocean steamer. The breaking-up of old associations, the opening of a fresh existence, the necessity of new relationships,—this fuses the crust of conventionality, quickens the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and astonished to find in ourselves so much wit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... with the conditions of blessedness so as to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a man whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of that conventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits him for heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim. And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must find it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological dreams with their religion, than to believe that the infinite God is ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... absent in the old Nancy; but the old Nancy had ceased to exist, and here instead was a highly developed, highly specialized creature in whom I delighted; and after taking thought I would not have robbed her of fine acquired attribute. As she had truly observed, we were both conventional; conventionality was part of the price we had willingly paid for membership in that rarer world we had both achieved. It was a world, to be sure, in which we were rapidly learning to take the law into our own hands ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... believe I am quite all right," she said, in answer to a question. "I shall not even have a suspicion of a limp." She held out her hand to me, and did not try to draw it away, though I grasped it rather longer and more tightly than conventionality might have approved. "You will come—soon—to see Lady Tressidy and—me?" she ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... quickly. The traditional formality and conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it in ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... lends her a peculiar charm. She has many admiring friends who are true to her, and I must say that when she is a friend she is a true one, and never fails you. Her originality frequently leads her beyond conventionality; for instance, the other day she took it into her head to dine out of doors. If she wanted to picnic al fresco, why did she not choose some pretty place in the park or in the woods? But no, she had the usual elaborate dinner served directly outside the chateau, and on the gravel walk. The servants, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... less sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caress with every tenderness of speech and touch, and that, after all, the memorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere conventionality,—this is a dreadful fact on which the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it always seems a desolation never recognized, an anguish never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names upon the stones and the black head- boards,—the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... throughout, animating the whole, uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic. Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional,—not even the conventionality. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... preacher as well as an elegant writer. His influence exerted in both the two functions, that of the writer and that of the preacher, was powerfully felt in favor of the freedom of nature in style as against the conventionality of culture and art. He insensibly helped on that reform from a too rigid classicism which in our day we have seen pushed to its extreme in the exaggerations of romanticism. Few wiser words have ever been spoken on the subject ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims of conventionality afterwards. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... specialty, Au Telescope. "But at Paris all these maisons chaudes," says an expert in these matters, Rodolphe Darzens, "have a special physiognomy,—they are not, as in the provinces, discreet localities, with an atmosphere of familiar conventionality, in which the father brings his eldest son to pass the evening with the notary of the quarter and the pharmacien of the public square, in an interminable game of billiards or of piquet voleur. Houses very comme il ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... wife deliver themselves into the hands of the brown curate and his wife for the time being. Perhaps it is this that makes most white missionaries so thin—the strain of having to submit to a Kanaka teacher's ideas of conventionality must be pretty hard to bear. And so poor Melanie, who would have liked to have sat near the fair-faced, sweet-voiced white ladies, or, perhaps, fondled their hands, as did the young unmarried girls who always surrounded them, bore her lot with content. For once, when she had brought her simple ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... of it besides the loss of the handsome salary for years from the little old withered woman. But conventionality is inexorable; and the St. Denis's great recommendation was its conventionality. Madame Joubert must have felt something of it,—she must have felt something of it,—for why should she volunteer? Certainly madame could not have imposed that upon ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... surrounded, it happened that, not having wherewith to console him, he listened to those who are said to intoxicate him with such exaltation, verses, and rhymes, as they had never demonstrated to others; because this work shines more by its originality than by its conventionality. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... He was detested by the whole of the middle or shop-keeping class which in England, according to Matthew Arnold, has "the sense of conduct—and has but little else." This class hated and feared him; feared him for his intellectual freedom and his contempt of conventionality, and hated him because of his light-hearted self-indulgence, and also because it saw in him none of its own sordid virtues. Punch is peculiarly the representative of this class and of all English prejudices, and Punch jeered at him now in prose, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... disconnected words reached her, but she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . . "puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . . prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with the life-purpose . . . with the end of passion life declines ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... condone her trespass in the eyes of the world. She might meet some of her invisible admirers, or even her companions; and, with all her erratic impulses, she was, nevertheless, a woman, and did not entirely despise the verdict of conventionality. She smiled sweetly, and assented; and in another moment the two were lost in the shadows ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... not seem so ridiculous, under the direct charm of the fresh young voice that came down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the riot act. Then he remembered that he was himself in doubt as to whether he wished to marry the young woman. All his doubts came flooding back, and his terrors—for, in some of its aspects, the idea of being married to this delicate flower of conventionality and gentle breeding was literally a terror to him. If he went he would be still further committing himself; all Washington would soon know of the journey in the carriage of Madam Bowker, the most imposing ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... a whole one and might have made good, although the old man has not much use for art. Unfortunately, however, I felt I had to kick against the conventionality of the life I led and the protest I put up was a little too vigorous. It made trouble, and in consequence, my folks decided I'd better be an engineer. I couldn't follow their arguments, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... your own chaperone you must recognize the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little latitude in the ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... home, and the WORLD dictates prudence; but I know your views on conventionality are those I too have learned to share, so will you come and see me ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... first. Dr. Hubers did not rouse himself to more than the merest conventionality, and all the rest of it was left to his wife, who, however, rose to the situation with a superb graciousness. Finally they touched a topic which roused Karl. His mind reached out to it with his old ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... legislation, human sacrifice would probably be common. What the gods do and what their worshippers do in their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary laws of right and wrong. The god is supra-moral: the worshipper when he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of our cynicism; their contented acquiescence in God's will rebukes our incessant restlessness; above all, their constant elevation shames that multitude of little vices, and little meannesses, which lie like a scurf over the conventionality of modern life. But this earlier chapter has also a special value for the young. It offers a picture which it would indeed be better for them and for us if they could be induced to study. If ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... fragmentary ideas, which even he himself was doubtful whether he could handle, an atmosphere confronts us as mediaevally German as the "Der arme Heinrich" of Hartmann von Aue, which was the inspirational source for Longfellow's "The Golden Legend." Uhland shows heaviness in conception, and a conventionality, thoroughly at variance with the tragedy's original passion. Romantic as he is, he has robbed the story of its warm southern nature, and has thrown his Dante aside to deal with false situation. He seems willing to let fact and spirit ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... practice, shook off the trammels of the so-called poetic diction which had tyrannized over English poetry for more than a century. This diction of course exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled against this conventionality of spirit, so against the outward expression of it. The whole of the stock phrases and used-up metaphors he discarded, and returned to living language of natural feeling, as it is used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had got stereotyped ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... can lodge on the top of a dome, not on the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and all the so-called aspiration of Gothic architecture ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... {opp. 83} conformity, conformance; observance; habituation. naturalization; conventionality &c (custom) 613; agreement &c 23. example, instance, specimen, sample, quotation; exemplification, illustration, case in point; object lesson; elucidation. standard, model, pattern &c (prototype) 22. rule, nature, principle; law; order of things; normal state, natural ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... sang the praises of the poem lustily. Even Jeffrey—perhaps because it was purely Scottish (he had thought Marmion not Scottish enough), perhaps because its greater conventionality appealed to him, perhaps because he wished to make atonement—was extremely complimentary. And certainly no one need be at a loss for things to commend positively, whatever may be his comparative estimate. The fine Spenserian openings (which Byron copied ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... becoming such a habit with me at my time of life—you will permit me to inquire if that is an actual expression of your attitude toward the people here? You say you are glad? Do you mean that, or is it a mere conventionality with you?" ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... drawled Mrs Skewton, pinching her shrivelled throat, 'is heart.' It was frightfully true in one sense, if not in that in which she used the phrase. 'What I want, is frankness, confidence, less conventionality, and freer play of soul. We ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in these brothers of hers. From coping with the actual needs and stern realities of existence, from standing and facing fortune on their own feet, so to speak, they had mentally become more muscular. The old soft life of comparative dependence and conventionality was not such as educates sturdy characters or helpful men. This present life was just the training required. Linda discovered that Robert and Arthur were no longer boys to be petted or teased, as the case might be; but men in the highest attributes of manhood—forethought, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... bureaucracy, the bureaucracy to the provincial nobility, and the provincial nobility to the inferior classes. As I said before, it is a sliding-scale of despotism. The worst feature of it is seen in the treatment of women. Among the better classes conventionality has, doubtless, somewhat meliorated their condition. Absolute physical cruelty would be, perhaps, a violation of etiquette and good breeding; but neglect, selfishness, innate coarseness of thought, and a general want of chivalrous ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... is of mine; and I love her the more for the womanly outburst of honest truth that triumphed over all conventionality. Norman, what she, the 'loveliest maiden in Plymouth,' the beloved of Miles Standish, said to John Alden, I say to you—'Why don't you speak ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... "No; for conventionality's sake. Not legally, you understand. Not even an adventure as exciting as that has happened to me. But constructively in jail. De facto, as it were. It's all the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... into talk with Eagle before we stopped shaking hands; but he had not been able to answer the call of conventionality so soon; and it was not till after we were seated at table that he could control himself to speak. On his other side was Prince Paul's elderly dinner companion. On my other side was the new military ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... as was absolutely necessary, and with as little meaning as conventionality required, Nekhludoff rose and went up to Meslennikoff. "Can you give me a few ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... the way of burning or boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up; was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing- -from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like, but they are not to ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... work, his constant offering of something new and his unremitting insistence upon something new from her each day make it impossible for her to develop the slightest tendency toward that sleeping sickness wherewith the germ of conventionality inflicts any mind it ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... assistance in the paths of virtue—as if, forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will do more harm than good. A conventionality is not necessarily bad or contemptible merely as such. Not a promiscuous and indiscriminate slashing, but a careful pruning is the proper method in the garden of society. The indiscreet hand will cut what it should leave, and leave perhaps what might have been better sacrificed. The artificial ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... woman whose chief attribute he had supposed to be sprightliness was added now by the romantic ubiquity of station that attached to her. A discovery which might have grated on the senses of a man wedded to conventionality was a positive pleasure to one whose faith in society had departed with ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... him with as much warmth as she ever permitted herself to show. She was a good and kind lady at heart, only she insisted upon covering the natural bloom and beauty of her nature with the artificial enamel of mannerism and conventionality. During the unwrapping process the young people stood in the background, but Lottie watched the emergence from overcoat and muffler of the predestined victim of her wiles ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... work will, in the end, have most power which was begun with most patience. No man is fit to paint Swiss scenery until he can place himself front to front with one of those mighty crags, in broad daylight, with no "effect" to aid him, and work it out, boss by boss, only with such conventionality as its infinitude renders unavoidable. We have seen that a literal facsimile is impossible, just as a literal facsimile of the carving of an entire cathedral front is impossible. But it is as vain to endeavor ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... feeling to be a hero. We slander the emotions by calling people emotional because they are always talking about their feelings; but deep feeling is always silent. It is not fashionable to feel deeply, and we are dwarfed by this conventionality. We have almost ceased to wonder, and hence we have almost ceased to learn; for the wise old Greeks knew that wonder ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... deaf to the calls of pleasure, or the mandates of fashion, swept by the incoming patriotism of the time to the loftiest height of womanhood, willing to do, to bear, or to suffer for the beloved country. The riven fetters of caste and conventionality have dropped at their feet, and they sit together, patrician and plebeian, Catholic and Protestant, and make garments for the poorly-clad soldiery. An order came to Boston for five thousand shirts for the Massachusetts troops at the South. Every church in the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... of conventionality. How was it possible for these people to look so quietly, eye to eye, upon the most vitally perfect of living beings? How could they turn from me to orange frappe ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... Many desires are unsatisfied because conduct does not correspond to desires. Many a prayer remains unanswered because its pray-ers never do anything to fulfil their prayers. I do not say they are hypocrites; certainly they are not consciously so, but I do say that there is a large measure of conventionality that means nothing, in the prayers of average Christian people for more holiness and likeness to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... people who go to the Haverstocks don't wear evening dress on principle. That's their way of showing their contempt for conventionality. I suppose you'll come with me?" John nodded his head. "Good! We'll start off immediately after we've had our dinner. You'll get a good dose of Truth to-night, my son. There was a couple went there once ... the rummest couple I ever saw in my life. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... with the accompaniment of hissing and convulsive movements all over his body, or when he tries to convince me at all costs that Tchatsky, who talks so much with fools and is so fond of folly, is a very clever man, and that "Woe from Wit" is not a dull play, the stage gives me the same feeling of conventionality which bored me so much forty years ago when I was regaled with the classical howling and beating on the breast. And every time I come out of the theatre more ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... youth had returned to his mind, while the faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all conventionality being done away by the force of the impression which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought: most of them ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... friends of the robbed girl, for that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her loss. The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and civilization, makes no outcry. A barbarian in her place would have fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes out. Sometimes I am sorry that our barbaric ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... boulevardier, till the entire side of the table was in a buzz of talk. These genial people of a genial land finding themselves all in search of the same adventure, on top of a hill, away from the petty world of conventionality, remembered that speech was given to man to communicate with his fellows. And though neighbors for a brief hour, how charming such an hour can be made when into it are crowded the effervescence of personal experience, the witty exchange of comment and observation, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... engaged in urging his horses forward, leans naturally in the opposite direction, thus contrasting with the main figure and balancing it. The lion immediately behind the chariot is outlined with great spirit and freedom; his head is masterly; the fillings up of the body, however, have too much conventionality. As he rises to attack the monarch, he conducts the eye up to the main figure, while at the same time by this attitude his principal lines form a pleasing contrast to the predominant perpendicular and horizontal lines of the general composition. The dead lion ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... start—but do not interrupt me. Let me go on. The young woman assumed, as I said, an impenetrable disguise—ingratiated herself with him, and found out all his secrets. The precious secret which she had thus braved conventionality to discover, was her own. He loved her—yes! he loved her!" said the young girl, with a tremor of the voice and a beating heart; "she could not be mistaken! In moments of unreserve, of confidence, he told her all, as one friend tells another, and she knew that she was loved. Then she threw off ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... she?" Lord Torrington's tone suggested that this was a distinct advantage to Frank. "According to Miss Lentaigne then, the girl has asserted her right to live her own life untrammelled by the fetters of conventionality. That's the way she ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... inhibited from presenting us with their full value and significance. And it is this which happens only too often in daily life. The constant need of attention to external things, the absorption of the mind in conventionality and custom as these present themselves in the form of a ready-made inheritance—all these occupy so much of the attention as to prevent man from knowing and experiencing what his own life is or what it is capable of becoming. Man has penetrated into the secrets of Nature as well as into the past ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones |
