"Insincerity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enthusiasm of her ardent heart, and full of expectation that Helen's lot would be one of the happiest this world could afford. All seemed indeed to smile upon her prospects, and the only clouds which dimmed the sunshine were Cecilia's insincerity, and her feeling that the general thought her acting unhandsomely and unwisely towards his ward; but she consoled herself with the thought that he could not judge of what he did not know, that she did not deserve his displeasure, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... writers Confucius has been accused of insincerity in a few minor matters; still, the wisdom contained in his religious doctrines, the philosophical value of his teachings relative to the regulation of human conduct, and, above all, his purity of purpose, justly ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to her; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women: but that—a little before he had commenced his compliments—she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating a young woman, who had not brought home his cravats ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... success of our prayers upon our righteousness, but upon Thy mercy. Without this disposition in our hearts, all others, however pious they may be, can not please God. St. Augustine observes that the failure of Peter should not be attributed to insincerity in his zeal for Jesus Christ. He loved his Master in good faith; in good faith he would rather have died than have forsaken Him; but his fault lay in trusting to his own strength, to do what ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... of this apparent restoration of good feeling, Frank was discerning enough to detect the insincerity of both ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... I have done for about fifty years," wrote Voltaire. "How could I fail to love you? Your soul seeks always the true; it is a quality as rare as truth itself." So far does she carry her hatred of insincerity that one is often tempted to believe she affects a freedom from affectation. "I am so fatigued with the vanity of others that I avoid the occasion of having any myself," she writes. Is there not here a trace of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... witness the treatment of the ex-Emperor Go-Kameyama by Yoshimitsu. But subsequent and repeated neglect of the claims of the Southern branch in regard to the vital matter of the succession betrayed the insincerity of the Ashikaga, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... to the rector? He hated insincerity, but on this occasion he stooped to it. He had not only the fear of Stepton upon him; he had also the desire not to add to the deep misery of Marcus Harding. This was ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... small insincerity. Janet's relation with Elfrida was a growing pleasure to him. He found himself doing little things to enhance it, and fancying himself in some way ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... the end of an article on "Recent Poetry" as "neither good nor bad." The reviewer objected in the English fashion to the sensual tone of the poems; but summed up fairly enough: "This book is not without traces of cleverness, but it is marred everywhere by imitation, insincerity, and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... numbers in question indicate an even larger proportion of "failures," than is the case with mission work generally; and that they point not only to losses through "back-sliding," but to many instances of insincerity on the part of those professing conversion. It has been remarked that it does not belong to the Japanese temperament to "take things au grand serieux;" and this characteristic extends to matters of religion. The young fellow, for instance, who, for some reason ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... countrymen, indeed, he continued to retain his characteristic sincerity and good faith; but, once duped and tricked by the southern schemers, as if with a fierce scorn, he rejected troth with the truthless; he exulted in mastering them in their own wily statesmanship; and if reproached for insincerity, retorted with naive wonder, "Ye Italians, and complain of insincerity! How otherwise can one deal with you—how be safe ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... condemnation of the anti-machine Senators of course brought its protest. The people of Palo Alto met in mass meeting on March 21st, and adopted resolutions condemning the Call's course[50]. Senator Black from his sick bed wrote a letter showing the Call's insincerity and breach of faith with the pro-primary Senators[51]. The paper was bitterly denounced on the floor ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... custom, almost universal, to invite and to welcome the presence of women at political assemblages, to listen to discussions upon the topics involved in the canvass. Their presence has done much toward the elevation, refinement, and freedom from insincerity and hypocrisy, of such discussions. Why would not the same results be wrought out by their presence at the ballot-box? Wherever the right has been exercised by law, both in England and this country, such has been its effect in the conduct ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the races of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only too frequently, ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... speech, as well as its cold-blooded insincerity, produced in William the impulse to smite. Fortunately, his only hope lay in persuasion, and after a momentary struggle with his own features he was able to conceal what he desired to do ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... with appointments who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties—to which we had vowed our heart's blood—and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair of ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... to hand in a capacious old dowager, and mine to be handed in by Mr. Grimsby, a friend of his, but a man I very greatly disliked: there was a sinister cast in his countenance, and a mixture of lurking ferocity and fulsome insincerity in his demeanour, that I could not away with. What a tiresome custom that is, by-the-by—one among the many sources of factitious annoyance of this ultra-civilised life. If the gentlemen must lead the ladies into the dining-room, why cannot they ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... occurred when he was not speaker may serve to illustrate the manner in which he routed his opponents. Representative Springer, of Illinois, who had a reputation for loquacity and insincerity, once asked for unanimous consent to correct a statement which he had previously made in debate. "No correction needed," shouted Reed. "We didn't think it was so when ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... was resolved to avail herself. She left all the insincerity to her husband, and would by no means allow grandmamma to abdicate the warm corner. She suspected that he wanted an introduction to Mrs. Nugent, and was resolved to defeat this object, unless he should condescend to make the request, so she was well satisfied to see ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... politeness!" He remembered that the politeness seemed too elaborate, too florid, altiloquent to the extent of insincerity. "To see her again is to love her the more," he insisted. "I have never been to Washington. Probably I'd be able to understand better the manners one is obliged to put on there, if I had been to Washington. I ought to have gone there on my vacation, instead of ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... Such insincerity gave weight to Randolph's words when he wrote: "My lord, I have but one thing to reminde your lordship, that nothing their agents can say or doe in England can be any ground for his majestie to depend upon." ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... admirable qualities were well appreciated by the translators—have been utterly sacrificed in the result. In none of the English versions that I have examined is more than a trace of the mocking spirit of insincerity pervading the whole prayer,—the cool effrontery of the suppliant in enumerating his demerits, his serenely illogical demands of salvation in spite, or rather because, of them, his meek submission to the punishment of others, and the many similarly pleasing characteristics of this ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... for Dinah's was not the voice of caprice or insincerity. But it was very hard for him; his eyes got dim ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... fail to have a very injurious influence on the good understanding between the two Governments on all these points. That it would place the Executive Administration under embarrassment, and subject it, the Congress, and the nation to the charge of insincerity respecting the great result of the final suppression of the slave trade, and that its first and indispensable consequence will be to constrain the Executive to suspend all further negotiation with ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... candidates for Addison's favor there was one distinguished by talents from the rest, and distinguished, we fear, not less by malignity and insincerity. Pope was only twenty-five. But his powers had expanded to their full maturity; and his best poem, the Rape of the Lock, had recently been published. Of his genius, Addison had always expressed high admiration. But Addison had early discerned, what might indeed have been discerned by an eye less ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be any courage in making this admission I know not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation—but still we have to ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... operas, often by three or four different composers, strung together regardless of rhyme or reason. Even in Handel's lifetime the older school of opera was tottering to its fall. Only the man was needed who should sweep the mass of insincerity from the stage and replace it by the purer ideal which had been the guiding spirit ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... that have bewildered and sometimes offended his critics. He has been charged with insincerity because he was so clever, and because he wrote with a kind of Oriental exuberance that was to him entirely natural and a part of his Jewish heritage. Gilfillan is the only critic, so far as I know, who has recognized that Disraeli's excellences, and his ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... with some open copybooks before him, carefully making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as "Riches are deceitful," and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof, during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the opening of the door, and the tapping continuing from the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... for a time, pondering over the interview, and trying to trace out some motive for insincerity on the old woman's part. But she could see none. She resolved to investigate a little, and all that evening was the most attentive and agreeable of wives. Abundant and versatile was her conversation. Deftly she led the talk up to the proper ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... you have any taint of the blood which you discover inclines you toward guile, insincerity, and untruthfulness fortify yourself by the reflection that insincerity is a losing game. Put it on the low ground of self-interest, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... vehemently of my antagonists. I have tried to fix upon them too unreservedly what seemed to me the logical consequences of their dogmas. I have condemned their attempts at a milder interpretation of their creed as proofs of insincerity, when I ought to have done more justice to the legitimate and lofty motives which prompted them. And I at least am bound by my own views to admit that even the antagonist from whose utterances I differ most widely may be an unconscious ally, supplementing ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... stillness of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodino and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When Gerasim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow which he knew was projected. And with ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Miss Wardour withdrew, and Mrs. Aliston fulfilled her mission. Then I was more than ever convinced of the fellow's insincerity. I heard how he received the news of his sister's flight; and when Mrs. Aliston went, in a panic, to call her niece, I heard him, when ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... are not only no part of the advocate's duties, but they are more likely to repel than to attract the hearers. The function of the advocate in the court of justice, as thus defined and limited, is tainted by no insincerity or hypocrisy. It is as respectable, as lofty, and as indispensably necessary as ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... absolutely; or that it is probable that bread will be found more nourishing than stone, even though it may not be a perfect elixir of life. Even if he denied this, the sceptic's acts would convict his words of insincerity, and practically, at any rate, no one has been or can be a sceptic, whatever the ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... independence. Of these the current of union had run a little faster. Notwithstanding the authority which they had set over themselves, the colonies still professed to be loyal members of the British empire. To be sure, there is a strong smack of insincerity in the protestations poured forth by the assemblies and the second Continental Congress. But John Adams says: "That there existed a general desire of independence of the Crown in any part of America before the Revolution, is as far from the truth ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... principles had hitherto been vague and unsettled. My circumstances had led me to the frequent practice of insincerity; but my transgressions as they were slight and transient, did not much excite my previous reflections, or subsequent remorse. My deviations, however, though rendered easy by habit, were by no means sanctioned by my principles. Now an imposture, more profound and deliberate, was projected; ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... respectable mainspring of action. But Ferdinand has been credited with neither. Whithersoever he moves one looks in vain for the guiding light of large ideas. Deeper than conscious volition lies the stored-up instinct of barren pettifogging egotism to which a fine moral atmosphere is deadly. Insincerity is second nature to him. He once boasted in my presence that he was a born actor, and it is fair to say that he played his roles—repellent for the most part—as behoves a mummer. The astonishing ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... gratified by this tribute to her familiar surroundings, she fancied that its expression was overdone, and resented its seemingly patronizing insincerity. Placing a chair directly in the glow of the fire, she invited Katharine to take it, while she herself sat down ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... there will come that supreme moment when we shall be suddenly changed "in a moment, the twinkling of an eye." Oh child of God see your need! It is Christ, the Lord of Glory set before your heart; all worldly mindedness, all insincerity, all discouragement, all unbelief, all unfaithfulness must flee when we follow on to know the Lord and daily behold "as in a glass ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... Their characters bear the indelible stamp of veracity. You and I know men whose slightest word is unimpeachable; nothing could shake our confidence in them. There are other men who cannot speak the truth: their habitual insincerity has made a twist in their characters, and this twist ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... insincerity in these words; for if the road which they had taken did not lead to the bridge, neither did it lead to the chateau, and the mistake, if there was one, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Daisy, Field I will think of it. Dahlia Dignity. Daffodil Unrequited love. Dandelion Coquetry. Everlasting Always remembered. Everlasting Pea Wilt thou go with me. Ebony Blackness. Fuchsia Humble love. Foxglove Insincerity. Fern Sincerity. Fennel Strength. Forget-me-not For ever remembered. Fraxinella Fire. Geranium, Ivy Fond of dancing. Geranium, Oak A melancholy mind. Geranium, Rose I prefer you. Geranium, Scarlet Stillness. Gladiolus Ready armed. Golden Rod Encouragement. Gillyflower Promptness. ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... likeness; but must do this, if at all, indirectly, being indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his friends; friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise"; this lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to sweeten the intercourse of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... which his nature is no mere aggregate of parts or faculties, but a living whole. So deeply rooted in the Western mind is disbelief in the reality of the soul that it is difficult to use the word, when speaking to a Western audience, without exposing oneself to the charge of insincerity,—not to speak of the graver charge of "bad form." A savour either of cant or gush hangs about the word, and is not easily detached from it. That being so, it must be clearly understood that I mean by the soul the nature of Man considered ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... but her heart was heavy over Phil's insincerity. Auntie Gibbs, who just naturally liked boys better than girls, was doubled over with laughter at their antics. She buzzed around them, took their hats and coats ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... mere playthings, and, as such, contemptible both in our own eyes and in theirs. No sincere respect can exist where the truth has to be avoided. But the majority of American women are made of too stern a stuff to be dealt with in that way. They feel the lurking insincerity even where politeness forbids them to show it, and it makes them disgusted both with themselves, and with the flatterer. And now you must pardon me for having spoken so plainly to you on so short an acquaintance; but you are ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... convictions is a pure figment of the popular imagination. No doubt an editor will sometimes ask a leader-writer not to put a particular view so strongly as he, the leader-writer, is known to feel it, but such reticence cannot surely be regarded as insincerity on the ethics of anonymity in journalism. The public are apt to suppose that anonymity is the cloak of all sorts of misdoings, and I have often heard people declare that in their opinion every leader-writer should be forced to sign his name. As I once heard it picturesquely expressed, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... dignity of person far excelled his father. He had more skill and more courage; but he had the same theory of arbitrary government, and acted as if insincerity and the breaking of promises were excusable in defense of it. His strife with Parliament began at once. They would not grant supplies of money without a redress of grievances and the removal of Buckingham, the king's favorite. War had begun with Spain before the close of the last reign. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... powers of endurance, and, having exhausted his forces in one desperate spurt, he is naturally obliged to spend more than a corresponding amount of time in recuperating, even if no serious complication intervenes; and this gives rise to the accusation of laziness and insincerity from those who chance to see him in one of these intervals ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... the cathedral on Sunday, and being, as usual, wearied by the monotony and apparent insincerity of it all, he again gives vent ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... he placed a "g" before the letters which it was hard for him to pronounce. We were talking of the many sad and sudden deaths from pneumonia, bronchitis, etc., during the recent spring season, and then of the insincerity of poets who sighed for death and longed for a summons to depart. He said in his deliciously slow and stumbling manner: "I don't want the ger-pneu-m-mon-ia. I'm in no ger-hurry to ger-go." Mrs. Webb's drawing-rooms were filled with valuable pictures and bronzes, and ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and lies of their false prophets, continued to sin, and so fell to their doom, abashed at last but unassoilable.(783) If at any time they were startled by disaster, this found them too enfeebled even for repentance by their habitual insincerity or self-indulgence; which made them incapable of truth even under pain, and of a real conversion to God.(784) All this is discovered to us by the eyes and the mouth of Jeremiah. What in it is arbitrary? The record is awful, nothing like it in literature. Yet every step is real. We follow ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... insincerity," says she, tilting her chin, "keep all that sort of thing for your Miss Maliphant; it ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... then proving from the Apocalypse that the world would come to an end in 1865. His ignorance of Greek and of geography, his audacious plagiarisms from E. B. Elliott (a more learned though not a much wiser interpreter), and his insincerity, are denounced so unsparingly as to suggest some danger from the law of libel. Dr. Cumming, however, was wise in his generation, and wrote a letter of such courteous and dignified remonstrance that the 'Saturday Review' was forced to reply in corresponding terms, though ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and misery ever since I knew you. I saw you first, so impetuous, yet self-contained! Incapable of insincerity, devoid of affection and courageously naturally beautiful. Then, to my amazement, I saw that, unlike most women, you understood your instincts; that you dared to define them, and were impious enough to follow them. You debased my ideal, you confused me, also, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... to come into the room while she was practising. I remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of Mozart's quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral, inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity. It is strange that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I could not ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... They now merely plead for extenuating circumstances on the ground that the damage was done unwittingly. "It would be unjust," the Nationalist Federzoni said in a speech delivered before the Chamber on March 16,[99] "to accuse the Italian Government of disloyalty or insincerity, but none the less the treaty it concluded with Germany has proved superlatively baleful to the country." Like the other allied peoples, the Italian nation has been served by a Cabinet which defeated many of the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... insincerity of his father's laugh, and rebelled against the unfairness of it. The question, he knew well, was sarcastically asked, the flavour of irony in the "permission to inquire" was not there by accident. To speak like ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... and civil duties of life with a stricter regard, whether a son, a friend, or a member of society, and he had the happiness to fill every one of these parts, without even the suspicion either of undutifulness, insincerity, or disrespect. Thus he continued to the last, not owing his virtues to the happiness of his constitution, but the frame of his mind, insomuch, that during a long sickness, which is apt to ruffle the smoothest temper; he never betrayed any discontent ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... poke it? If you can't poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a wood-fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas-log. What a sense of insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten thousand a year ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... prophet deduces from the name the solemn thought that those who truly feel its significance will shape their words accordingly, and act and speak so that they shall not fear to call His pure eyes to witness that there are neither, hypocrisy, nor insincerity, nor vacillation, nor the 'hidden things of dishonesty' nor any of the skulking meannesses of craft and self-seeking in them. 'I swear by the God of the Amen, and call Thy faithfulness to witness that I am ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... masculine insincerity of your gallantry," she said, "unworn, I see, by working with women. John Crondall ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia be discussed without this impersonation—impersonally? It has confused the book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown a quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and squabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land again except through ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Pflug and Michael Helding and the court-preacher of Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, John Agricola, a man with whom Luther had, already since 1540, refused to have any further intercourse owing to his insincerity and duplicity. "I go forth as the Reformer of all Germany," Agricola boasted when he left Berlin to attend the Diet at Augsburg, which was to open September 1, 1547. After the Diet he bragged that in Augsburg he had flung ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Ireland. Then he attempted to clear himself at his agent's expense. Glamorgan received, in the Royal handwriting, reprimands intended to be read by others, and eulogies which were to be seen only by himself. To such an extent, indeed, had insincerity now tainted the King's whole nature, that his most devoted friends could not refrain from complaining to each other, with bitter grief and shame, of his crooked politics. His defeats, they said, gave them less pain than his intrigues. Since ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... then bespoke him: "After the proofs you have given of your falsehood and insincerity, we can no longer have any reliance upon you, nor faith in your fulfilling the conditions of our agreement; I will, therefore, once more make you a proposal that shall still leave you indebted to our clemency. You shall banish yourself ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... of two opposite currents of thought,—that women were evil and dangerous and to be shunned, and that women were lovely and adorable, and worthy of reverence and worship. Both of these sets of ideas degenerated into folly and vice, and became modes of selfishness and luxury. Elaborate hypocrisy and insincerity became common. Technical definitions of terms were used to obscure their ethical significance. Minne came to have a bad meaning and was used for erotic passion. Courtoisie became a term for base solicitation.[1221] Gower, in the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... life has lost romance; there is no poem left in nature; no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its wholesome influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no causes for which to die—save themselves. They are so honeycombed with insincerity and the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as one, all pathways the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon their world they see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and whether the path ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... passed, making all comment in daily newspapers illegal? In a way, of course, it would be hard on the commentators. Having lost the power of independent thought, having sunk into a state of chronic dulness, apathy and insincerity, they could hardly, be expected to succeed in any of the ordinary ways of life. They could not compete with their fellow-creatures; no door but would be bolted if they knocked on it. What would become of them? Probably they would have to perish in what they would call ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... right!" said Eileen, "but you talk so earnestly one would almost imagine that you had suffered at some time through the insincerity and untruthfulness of ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... over the unfortunate country? There is, it is true, the river Mole in Surrey. But I am not sure that some foolish imagery against the peace of the burrowing river might not be due from a poet of facility. I am not censuring any insincerity of thought; I am complaining of the insincerity of a paltry, shaky, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... respect, learn first the talent of listening to others. Never pass even a few moments with one skilled in this accomplishment, without earnest attention. You will thus not only gather knowledge, but observe how this great art may be practised. You will perceive that no affectation and no insincerity are needed to enable you to improve in this precious power. Simplicity, naturalness, a truthful air and manner are, indeed, more frequently the result of labor than their opposites. It is hard, in this world of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... his antagonists, and to separate the forces of Illyricum from the cause of rebellion. It was an easy task to deceive the frankness and simplicity of Vetranio, who, fluctuating some time between the opposite views of honor and interest, displayed to the world the insincerity of his temper, and was insensibly engaged in the snares of an artful negotiation. Constantius acknowledged him as a legitimate and equal colleague in the empire, on condition that he would renounce his disgraceful alliance with Magnentius, and appoint a place ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to young hawks eager to break their jesses seems to an Englishman particularly happy in reference to Eton, from which so many youths pass into the ranks of the army and navy. The line about bowing, smirking and glozing, refers to the comparative insincerity of the higher society into which so many of the scholars must eventually pass. "Smirking" suggests insincere smiles, "glozing" implies tolerating or lightly passing over faults or wrongs or serious matters ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'breaking butterflies upon the wheel' To let such fribbles feel the critic steel With scalpel-like severity? Granted! But will no pangs the victims urge To abate that plague of bores, which is the scourge Of social insincerity? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... appealed to him with hope. Surely one so young and laughing, so ready to stop an army to argue with a child, could not be beyond reach of persuasion. With the simple frankness so innocent of guile as to make charming that which upon other lips would have been the broadest insincerity, he put that ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Peter answered. Alix grinned. She had before this accused Peter of violent partisanship with his own sex. He criticized women severely; the Strickland girls had often been angry and resentful at his comments upon the insincerity, extravagance, and ignorance of their own sex, but with Peter, all men were worthy of respect, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... and of other minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are really worth while. There is an every-day "sophistry," of course, against which we have all of us to be on our guard—that insincerity of reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all with each other, we must all be tempted at times. Such insincerity ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... presently. "I believe he shook me up more than I realized. He charged me with insincerity; me, who have always made sincerity my special virtue.... Well, there may be something ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... This is true in all human affairs involving motive and conduct. Especially is it true in friendship. Sincerity knows its own. By a glance it penetrates the very heart of its true friend, and leaves translucent and transparent its own. Sincerity gives steadfastness and constancy to friendship. Insincerity mars and breaks friendship. Who has not seen a soul spring into life through the love of a radiant friendship; and then following a series of hollow pretenses, insincerities, that friendship fails, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Uttering a benediction upon the monarch, the Rishi, possessed of great intelligence, O chief of men, comforted the king and said, 'Sit down on that seat!' After this, O monarch, the son of Bhrigu, without guile or insincerity of any kind, gratified the king with many soft words, and then said, 'O king, thou hast completely subjugated the five organs of action and the five organs of knowledge with the mind as their sixth. Thou hast for this come out unscathed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... told himself that the suddenness of this new emotion must be evidence of its insincerity. He was perfectly well aware that his impulses were abrupt and of short duration. But he knew that this was not sudden. Without realising it, he had been from the first drawn to Hilma, and all through these last ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... facts should be so merciless to the most excellent arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled me ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... insincerity, although, contrasted with some of the writer's later productions, Love in Several Masques is comparatively pure. But he might honestly think that the work which had received the imprimatur of a stage-queen and a lady of quality should fairly be regarded as morally ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... effect of placing at Her Majesty's control the patronage of four hundred places; while the Regent was to possess no power whatever over any office, reversion, or pension. This appeared to the Prince and his allies a monstrous proposition, calculated to introduce "weakness, disorder, and insincerity into every branch of political business;" to "separate the Court from the State;" to "disconnect the authority to command service from the power of animating it by reward;" and to impose on the Regent "all the invidious ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... that the old intimate relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years. His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a languid foreign accent, and with an emphatic and bountiful use of adjectives, that gave to our severer generation an impression of insincerity. Yet it was said with truth that Giulia Petrucci had never forgotten a friend nor ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... is still plenty of snow to be photographed against in the full splendour of a Hyperborean disguise; but is it worth while to unpack one's valise for that? And anyhow would not the atmosphere of the picture be marred, the pose of the explorer be rendered unnatural by his consciousness of insincerity and his fear ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... too, and one of vast extent, and touching men generally, that by insincerity and lying faith and truth are lost, which are the firmest bonds of human society, and, when they are lost, supreme confusion follows in life, so that men seem in nothing ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... searched out by any curious student: the reality of the likeness, scoffed at by a few whose admiration for Shakespeare is inclined to prejudice their judgment, has been effectively demonstrated by Professor Ward.[67] It would be an interesting exercise to pursue Professor Ward's hint at the insincerity of the Jew's recital to Ithamore of his early crimes. We might work back to an initial conception of Barabas as an upright merchant, and so discover a real tragedy in the moral downfall which results from ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... religion. Even Plato played with Pagan orthodoxy and gave the Delphic Apollo a titular place in his Utopia, proving himself as timid in touching Greek superstitions as English thinkers to-day are in touching the Monarchy. It is this basis of insincerity which reveals itself throughout the superstructure. Greek political thought contains already the germs of the disease which, centuries later, led men, plebeians first, later patricians also, to turn away from the outworn symbols that stood for the union of Church and State and to seek comfort ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... is more happy; the value expressed for him, by different sorts of men, raises him to esteem; there is yet something of the common cant of superficial satirists, who suppose that the insincerity of a courtier destroys all his sensations, and that he is equally a dissembler to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... be no good ground for charging Ximenes with hypocrisy in this singular display of humility. The nolo episcopal, indeed, has passed into a proverb; but his refusal was too long and sturdily maintained to be reconciled with affectation or insincerity. He was, moreover, at this time, in the sixtieth year of his age, when ambition, though not extinguished, is usually chilled in the human heart. His habits had been long accommodated to the ascetic duties of the cloister, and his thoughts turned ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... lofty solitudes of Salvator Rosa and the brigand—I have experienced the frivolity of France, the dissipation of Florence, the profligacy of the Venetian, the degeneracy of the Roman, and vindictiveness of the Neapolitan, the insincerity of the impoverished noble, and the truth of honest poverty—I have wondered in the gaudy sanctuary of the Papist, teeming with devotees, or pondered amid the nobler simplicity of the Heathen's Temple in ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... carefully composed observations for precisely what they seemed. He was too inexperienced in the drama to detect the essential insincerity of every word, though there was not one of the lowliest of his clerks but had heard every one of these phrases bandied across the footlights ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... from the blatant insincerity of the words, and still more from the tone. Why had it not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... coalition of Fox and North in 1783. He was the most liberal statesman of his time, "one of the earliest, ablest, and most earnest of English freetraders," but he was at the same time one of the most unpopular, a supposed insincerity being the ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... we were home again as before, but, since the joy of a temporary reprieve may outweigh even the annoyance of an anticlimax, they were pleased to see us and gave us another farewell only slightly less emotional than the last. But on the third of this series of week-ends a note of insincerity crept into the "Goodbye, old man," and the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... appeared in March 1713), indicated pretty plainly a refusal to accept the Whig shibboleths. In the Forest he was enthusiastic for the peace, and sneered at the Revolution. Pope afterwards declared that Addison had disavowed all party intentions at the time, and he accused him of insincerity for afterwards taking credit (in a poetical dedication of Cato) for the services rendered by his play to the cause of liberty. Pope's assertion is worthless in any case where he could exalt his own character for consistency at another man's expense, but ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... working in the huckster's shop in the back alley, than go home to the King. I am quite sure that if the inmost sentiments of the bulk of professing Christians about a future life were dragged into light, these would be a revelation of a faith all honeycombed with insincerity. God tests us, and it is a sharp test if we submit ourselves to it; He tests us by His promises. 'Child, wilt thou believe?' is the first testing question put to us by these. 'Wilt thou keep them hid ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... princes and the emigres saved her from the passions of the old regime. Conde spoke of her as a democrat; and she would have been glad to exchange the institutions of 1791 for something like the British constitution as it existed in those Tory days. She perished through her insincerity more than through the traditional desire for power. When the king was beheaded, the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wuerzburg, reputed the most sagacious and enlightened among the prelates of the empire, was heard to say, "It ought to have been the queen." We who see farther may allow the retribution ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... how dishonesty is always plunging men into infinitely more complicated external difficulties than it would in real life, but how any continued insincerity gradually darkens and corrupts the very life-springs of the mind: not how all events conspire to crush an unreal being who is to be the "example" of the story, but how every event, adverse or fortunate, tends to strengthen and expand a high mind, and to break the springs of ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... of deepest sincerity. All sham and hypocrisy were foreign to their nature; they held insincerity in any one to be the meanest and most deadly sin. To this intense loyalty to the truth, Jesus bore emphatic testimony by an early martyrdom; while Gautama gave the same unwavering witness by a long and holy life. They both stood in the midst of communities ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... distrust. Confidence in the sincerity of the men who so readily made sacrifices of principles was forfeited or greatly impaired. The Whig party dwindled under it, and as an organization shortly went out of existence. A large portion of its members, disgusted with what they considered the insincerity if not faithlessness of their leaders, yet unwilling to attach themselves to the Democratic party, which had coalesced in the movement, gathered together in a secret organization, styling themselves "Know Nothings." Democrats in some quarters, scarcely less dissatisfied with the compromises, joined ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Delarayne replied after satisfying herself that there was not a trace of insincerity either in the voice or features of her ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... the lark the next morning, and bade them good-night, the serenaders retired as if they had had a funeral sermon preached to them. Thenceforth Mr. Webster was a disappointed, heart-stricken man, and he retired to Marshfield profoundly disgusted with the insincerity of politicians. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... there are now two trains a day which land tourists for the Passion Play, and among them may appear some American theatrical manager who, finding that John Zwink of Ober-Ammergau impersonates the spirit of grab and cheat and insincerity better than any one who treads the American stage, and only received for his wonderful histrionic ability what equals forty-five pounds sterling for ten years, may offer him five times as much compensation for one night. If avarice could clutch Judas with ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... the people to themselves, for if armies are to interfere, how can we ascertain that it is a legitimate government established with the pure consent of the people? As to Buonaparte, whose character has been represented as marked with fraud and insincerity, has he not made treaties with the Emperor and observed them? Is it not his interest to make peace with us? Do you not think he feels it? And can you suppose, that if peace were made, he has not power to ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... had scattered down the stream to refresh their horses, making a long banner of color in the dark canon. Don Enrique led John along the line, and presented him solemnly to each in turn. The caballeros protested eternal friendship with vehement insincerity, and the girls flashed their eyes and teeth at the blue-eyed young American without descending from their unconscious pride of sex and race. They had the best blood of Spain in them, and an American was an American, be he never ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Henry of York, had arrived from Rome, and the king proposed to place him at the head of the Irish regiments in the king's service and several others to enable him to effect a landing in England; but with his usual insincerity the French king continued to raise difficulties and cause delays until it was too late, and he thus lost for ever the chance of placing the family who had always been warm friends of France, and who would in the event of ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... And yet, even as I said it, I was conscious of a peculiar feeling of insincerity. I liked young Bayliss. He was all that Hephzy had said, and more. He would, doubtless, make a good husband for any girl. And his engagement to Frances Morley might make easier the explanation which was bound to come. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... occasion to congratulate the despised underling with pompous insincerity, whereat Louis admonished him scowlingly to beat it back to his trial balance or he'd bounce ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... been impossible for Sylvie to define a lover with truth and decency to the girl's mind. Instead of seeing in that question the proof of adorable innocence, she considered it a piece of insincerity. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... to the detective at all. There was an air of insincerity about the man which at once put them on ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... Nature—standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal sea—one realizes the pathos of the picture. But this is as another generation may see it. We are now too close—so close that the meaner details, the blots and flaws, are all most plainly visible, the corruption, the insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity—all the unlovely touches that will bye and bye be forgotten—sponged away by the gentle hand of time, when only ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... natural son of the most chivalrous king of England, Richard Coeur de Lion, forms a very entertaining and original prelude in the play itself. When, amidst so many disguises of real sentiments, and so much insincerity of expression, the poet shows us human nature without a veil, and allows us to take deep views of the inmost recesses of the mind, the impression produced is only the more deep and powerful. The short scene in which John urges Hubert to put out of the way Arthur, his young ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of Henry's character is his incapacity for government, which rendered him as much a prisoner in the hands of his own ministers and favorites, and as little at his own disposal, as when detained a captive in the hands of his enemies. From this source, rather than from insincerity or treachery, arose his negligence in observing his promises; and he was too easily induced, for the sake of present convenience, to sacrifice the lasting advantages arising from the trust and confidence of his people. Hence too were derived his profusion to favorites, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... behold you, since such is the pleasure of the gods, extending your empire over foreign nations, both by sea and land. I cannot deny that you have reason to suspect the Carthaginian faith, in consequence of their insincerity lately in soliciting a peace and while awaiting the decision. The sincerity with which a peace will be observed, depends much, Scipio, on the person by whom it is sought. Your senate, as I hear, refused to grant a peace in some measure because the deputies were deficient in respectability. ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature herself has taken to the same insincerity. The landscape round Marathon is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water, reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... asked if he is prepared to sign the Confession of Faith. He is not asked to sign it then and there. To express his willingness to sign it does not seem to be so much of a tax on his candor as actually to sign it. Such a proceeding seems to me to put somewhat of a premium on insincerity. It is well known that there are reservations. Would it not be more honest to accept a short statement of evangelical truth, which could be accepted ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... was the family fashion. Was it because she had grown accustomed to the tactful and gentle methods of John Crewys that it seemed to have become suddenly such an intolerable fashion? Sir Timothy had quite honestly believed tactfulness to be a form of insincerity. He did not recognize it as the highest outward expression of self-control. But Lady Mary, since she had known John Crewys, knew also that it is consideration for the feelings of others which causes the wise man to order ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture |
