"Depreciatory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sex, masculine to the qualities, especially to the stronger, hardier, and more imperious qualities that distinguish the male sex; as applied to women, masculine has often the depreciatory sense of unwomanly, rude, or harsh; as, a masculine face or voice, or the like; tho one may say in a commendatory way, she acted with masculine courage or decision. Manlike may mean only having the outward appearance or semblance of a man, or may be closely equivalent ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... all men who mean to be great must do, that is not merely to be helped, but to be taught by her; and will once or twice take her gifts, without looking them in the mouth, he will most assuredly find—and I say this in no unkind or depreciatory feeling, for I should say the same of all artists who are in the habit of only sketching nature, and not studying her—that her worst is better than his best. I am quite sure that if Mr. Pyne, or any other painter who has hitherto been very careful in his ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... with which the men of that day accepted the foreign estimate upon works written here, which had been read by themselves, but which it was clear had not been read by the critics whose opinions they echoed. Even the meekness with which they submitted to the most depreciatory estimate of themselves was outdone by the anxiety with which they hurried to assure the world that they, the most cultivated of the American race, did not presume to have so high an opinion of the writings of some one of their countrymen as had been expressed by enthusiasts, whose patriotism had ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... reply to this and similar depreciatory opinions, it may be pointed out that one does not look in these extra-Danielic stories for such a knowledge of the human heart as is displayed in the Psalms, nor for such knowledge of the Godhead as is revealed in St. John's Gospel. If we look for fully developed doctrine of this kind, we ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude the most sensitive person would be quite indifferent about his appearance. We feel blame or disapprobation more acutely than approbation; and consequently depreciatory remarks or ridicule, whether of our appearance or conduct, cause us to blush much more readily than does praise. But undoubtedly praise and admiration are highly efficient: a pretty girl blushes when a man gazes intently ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... else; indeed it stung her to the heart, wounding her worse than in its first stunning effects she was able to know; yet she thought better rather than worse of Florimel because of it. What she did not like in her with reference to the affair was the depreciatory manner in which she had always spoken of Malcolm. If genuine, it was quite inconsistent with due regard for the man for whom she was yet prepared to sacrifice so much; if, on the other hand, her slight opinion of his judgment was a pretence, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... mean opinion of the cock who forbore to crow lustily when he turned up a jewel of surpassing richness, in the course of his ordinary scratching, and under his own very beak; why, then, should we render ourselves liable to the same depreciatory moral? Something, at least, must be pardoned to the certaminis gaudia of this new-found contest with the secrets of Nature,—and though the fact we have stated be a startling one, the statements and authorities which go to support ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... not want to seem irreverent, still less depreciatory, of noble men, but it strikes me that in the present case the Nazarenes were the match and Paul ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... One text reads Kakapeya, the other Kakapeya. It is difficult to choose. The more usual word is kakapeya, which is explained by Panini, ii. 1, 33. It is uncertain, however, whether kakapeya is meant as a laudatory or as a depreciatory term. Boehtlingk takes it in the latter sense, and translates nadi kakapeya, by a shallow river that could be drunk up by a crow. Taranatha takes it in the former sense, and translates nadi kakapeya, as a river so full of water that a crow can drink it without ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... wished to tell, and on his return set to work with all his old vigour to finish his tale, and put the concluding touches to Count Robert of Paris. But his temper was no longer what it had been. He quarrelled with Ballantyne, partly for his depreciatory criticism of Count Robert of Paris, partly for his growing tendency to a mystic and strait-laced sort of dissent and his increasing Liberalism. Even Mr. Laidlaw and Scott's children had much to bear. But he struggled on even to the end, and did not consent to try the experiment ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... from any town, and fifteen from any conveyance." Seclusion and solitude had evidently no charms for him at that period. In another letter about this time he wrote expressing his relief at being "free from the temptations of a line regiment," and concluded with the self-depreciatory remark that he was "such a miserable wretch that he was sure to be led away." In yet another letter from Pembroke, written not many weeks after his arrival, he reveals something of the deep religious feeling which was no doubt greatly strengthened by his experiences ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... show me all the views," he said eagerly; and it was plain, even to the self-depreciatory Rose, that she did not bore ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... interposed with a parenthesis of his own depreciatory of the Spaniards, whom he loathed and despised. He had fought against them in the war of 1839-1860, and the Shereef had also headed his countrymen, and had shown great courage and coolness in action. His ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... question, prided himself more highly than upon any other of his gifts. He preferred, we can plainly see, to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the great sentimentalist; and though the word "sentiment" had something even in his day of the depreciatory meaning which distinguishes it nowadays from "pathos," there can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Sterne to be, on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of the Italians in the sphere of the natural sciences, we must refer the reader to the special treatises on the subject, of which the only one with which we are familiar is the superficial and depreciatory work of Libri. The dispute as to the priority of particular discoveries concerns us all the less, since we hold that, at any time, and among any civilized people, a man may appear who, starting with very scanty preparation, is driven by an irresistible ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... getting out of Bessie's depth now; a little more of poetry and romance in his views would have brought them nearer to the level of her comprehension. Then he talked to her of his school, of the old doctor, that great man, of his schoolfellows, of his rivals whom he had distanced—not a depreciatory word of any of them. "I don't believe in luck for myself," he said. "But there is a sort of better and worse fortune amongst men, independent of merit. It was the narrowest shave between me and Fordyce. I would not have given sixpence for my chance of the scholarship ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... he said abruptly, when they had left the cottage. "She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen—present company always excepted," he concluded, with a depreciatory laugh. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Phoenician records; so that there remains a great deal of discount to take off in the way of disparagement, depreciation, &c. &c. It is as if the future Australian, standing on the ruins of a city mightier than Carthage, could obtain no account of Napoleon, but through partial and depreciatory fragments from the pages of Sir Walter Scott's life of that extraordinary meteor. Napoleon, it is true, crossed the Alps, but Hannibal traversed the Alps and Pyrenees too, and I fancy the last are the more impassable of the two. It ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory view,—whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern anti-geologist,—agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that some of even the abler ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Jack, in that grudging, depreciatory tone of voice which, for some inexplicable reason, so many Englishmen use when speaking of their own property; "she is not bad, for her size. But a knot or two more would be welcome, just now; for we are ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... proceeded," is, to the thoughtful part of mankind, the only intelligible clue to the several books of Holy Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation! Hence "the marginal references to the English Bible," (to which Mr. Jowett devotes a depreciatory half page,) so far from being the dangerous or useless apparatus which he represents, we hold to be an instrument of paramount importance for eliciting the true meaning of Holy Writ.—In a word, he is reasoning about the Bible on the assumption that the Bible ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... former humble status of a private citizen; that he has nothing in common with the dignified majesty of an Emperor; but were the highest official of the United States to be in future officially known as Emperor, all these depreciatory remarks would fall to the ground. There is no reason whatever why he should not be so styled, as, by virtue of his high office, he possesses almost as much power as the most aristocratic ruler of any nation. Secondly, it would clearly ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the fascinating qualities which we have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded, sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons,—a supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... depreciatory opinion formed by the Waalwyk coachman as to the "rising light of the world" and the "miracle of Holland." They travelled all night and, arriving on the morning of the 21st within a few leagues of Antwerp, met a patrol of soldiers, who asked Grotius for his passport. He enquired ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the bailiff's man is an outsider, an adventitious minister of justice, appearing to see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of inferior executioner employed by the county court. But the word "lawyer" (homme de loi) is a depreciatory term applied to the legal profession. Consuming professional jealousy finds similar disparaging epithets for fellow-travelers in every walk of life, and every calling has its special insult. The scorn flung into the words homme de loi, homme de lettres, is wanting in the plural form, which may ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... surnames, or rather nicknames, from some quality of body or mind, but generally from some disadvantageous peculiarity of feature; for there is no denying that the English, Norse, or whatever we may please to call them, are an envious depreciatory set of people, who not only give their poor comrades contemptuous surnames, but their great people also. They didn't call you the matchless Hurler, because, by doing so, they would have paid you a compliment, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... cogent assertions were unanswerable. In impotent rage the discomfited Jews resorted to invective and calumny. "Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" they shrieked. They had before called Him a Galilean; that appellative was but mildly depreciatory, and moreover was a truthful designation according to their knowledge; but the epithet "Samaritan" was inspired by hate,[863] and by its application they meant to disown Him ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... what sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into. But it was only that his wife—I didn't know he had a wife, he seemed altogether so happily unmarried—was coming home. She had been away for three weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an evergreen garland round our door on coming back. He laughed when I told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... virtuosi, for whose club-room Louis Laguerre, the French painter who settled in London in 1683, designed and executed a Bacchanalian procession. This was the artist who was coupled with Verrio in Pope's depreciatory line, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Sometimes the depreciatory or negative judgment refers to the presumed or proved uselessness of many researches, made to recover the correct meaning of artistic works. But, it must be observed, in the first place, that historical research does not only fulfil the task of helping to reproduce and judge artistic ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... fluidity of the Greek, and especially of the Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly into a conscious method, a practical philosophy, an art of life itself, in which all those specific arts would be but subsidiary—an all-supplementing ars artium, a master-art, or, in depreciatory Platonic mood one might say, an artifice, or, cynically, a trick. The great sophist was indeed the Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts, its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of its own parts, given over completely to ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... imperfection in the people and the things one likes. You like a person; and he is good. That seems the whole case. You do not go into exceptions and reservations. I remember how indignant I felt, as a boy, at reading some depreciatory criticism of the "Waverley Novels." The criticism was to the effect that the plots generally dragged at first, and were huddled up at the end. But to me the novels were enchaining, enthralling; and to hint a defect in them stunned one. In the boy's feeling, if a thing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... word—was named a character; while one remaining in a state of development—a skilful navigator on life's river, who did not sail with close-tied sheets, but knew when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again—was called lacking in character. And he was called so in a depreciatory sense, of course, because he was so hard to catch, to classify, and to keep track of. This middle-class notion about the immobility of the soul was transplanted to the stage, where the middle-class element has always held sway. There a character became synonymous with a gentleman fixed and ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... throughout these volumes; for assuredly it is the very extravagance of folly to tax Jerome with "extreme ignorance of early Christian literature." Those who are acquainted with his writings will decline to subscribe any such depreciatory certificate. He was undoubtedly bigoted and narrow-minded, but he had a most capacious memory; he had travelled in various countries; he had gathered a prodigious stock of information; he was the best Christian scholar of his generation; he has preserved for us the knowledge of not a few important ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... of a self-depreciatory turn of mind, I had occasional flashes of inspiration, to the effect that, in spite of the soft flattery of friends, I really was amounting to very little after all. It was in a mood induced by one of these supernatural gleams that I stood on one occasion, leaning a pair of very plump ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Papers, vol. ii. p. 40), to describe a party of presbyterians who appealed only to "what their reason dictates them in church and state." Hahn (De Rationalismi Indole) states that Amos Comenius similarly used the term in 1661 in a depreciatory sense. The treatise of Locke on the Reasonableness of Christianity caused Christians and Deists to appropriate the term, and to restrict it to religion. Thus, by Waterland's time, it had got the meaning of false reasoning on religion. (Works, viii. 67.) And, passing into Germany, it appears ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... own views about him just as you had them about sheep or oxen. Moreover, I found instead of the stereotyped orthodox view of his place and capacity which prevailed in 1857, a great variety of opinions about him, mostly depreciatory, it is true, but still varying in degree as well as in kind. It is difficult to give anyone who has never had any experience of the old slave society an idea of the difference this makes in a stranger's position at the South. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... it that I have been wanting of him?" To the repetition he added with manifest sincerity, though also with a self-depreciatory movement ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Providence to place him in, or to suppose, for one moment, that reputable men, though in widely different circumstances, are not equally reputable. We have studiously avoided portraying fashionable life according to the vulgar notions, whether depreciatory or panegyrical. We have shown that that class is not to be taken and treated of as an integral quantity, but to be analyzed as a component body, wherein is much sterling ore and no little dross. We have shown by sufficient examples, that whatever in our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... one of several of Boswell's depreciatory mentions of Goldsmith—which may well irritate biographers and admirers—and also those who take that more kindly and more profound view of Boswell's own character, which was opened up by Mr. Carlyle's famous article on his book. No wonder that Mr. Irving calls Boswell an "incarnation of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Undesirable individuals would sometimes be discovered in the midst of otherwise pleasant parties. Of such may be mentioned those who knew of much finer churches they could really admire. Whenever we heard the preface—"There's one thing strikes me in this church"—we were prepared to hear a depreciatory remark of some kind. Some would take pleasure in breaking the sequence of the story by anticipating matters not then reached, and causing divers interruptions. Others would annoy by preferring persistent speaking to listening. It was trying work going round with, and explaining ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... to be unlike other people. It is still more dangerous to be better than other people. The world has a little heap of depreciatory terms which it flings, age after age, at all men who have a higher standard and nobler aims than their fellows. A favourite term is 'mad.' So, long ago they said, 'The prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad,' and, in His turn, Jesus was said to be 'beside Himself,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... to further it by such a notice, written with that observable and characteristic duplicity, that to poor gross stupid Powell it shall look like an admiring 'Oh, fie—so clever but so wicked'!—a kind of D'Orsay's praise—while to the rest of his readers, a few depreciatory epithets—slight sneers convey his real sentiments, he trusts! And this he does, just because Powell buys an article of him once a quarter and would expect notice. I think I hear Chorley—'You know, I cannot praise such a book—it ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... within the house," can only mean, according to Japanese etiquette, "your wife," or "your family," while "gu-sai," "foolish wife," can only mean "my wife." "Gufu," "foolish father," "tonji," "swinish child," and numberless other depreciatory terms such as "somatsu na mono," "coarse thing," and "tsumaranu mono," "worthless thing," according to the genius of the language can only refer to the first person, while all appreciative and polite terms can only refer to ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious or hostile. Rather, he was self-depreciatory. He looked at me doubtfully. "But do you really think—?" he said. "And your play! How ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... stroked the body and shook the skirt. Not a single depreciatory criticism was ventured. Excepting the wearer, nobody present had seen such a masterpiece. But although for half a lifetime we may have beheld nothing better than an imperfect actual, we recognise instantly the superiority and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Snodgrass, fancying that the wedding was of his lady, turned pale. What was old Wardle's remark? Most significant of Trundle's status. "Don't be frightened," he said, "it's only Trundle there and Bella." "Only Trundle there," i.e., only that poor insignificant thing there! No more depreciatory words could be chosen, or put into the mouth of an honest country gentleman. I am certain that old Wardle gave his child reluctantly to this soft sort of fellow—"Only Trundle there!" Then for the shooting party. We hear of Tupman and Winkle even, with their guns, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald |
