"Pedantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hungary to which Jokai belonged. The brutal ignorance of the common people, the criminal neglect of the gentry which made such ignorance possible, the imbecility of mere mob-rule, and the mischievousness of demagogic pedantry—these are the objects ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... the style and conception of these letters; clearly the man was a pedant without imagination or taste. Such indeed was the age he lived in, and it is no marvel that he was like to his age. But there must have been more in him than mere pedantry; there was indeed a heart in the man, which Marcus found, and he found also a tongue which could speak the truth. Fronto's letters are by no means free from exaggeration and laudation, but they do not show that loathsome flattery which filled the Roman court. He really admires what he ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Sedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so forsworn and ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... see,' said Goethe, 'how the earlier pedantry of the Scotch has changed into earnestness and profundity. When I recollect how the 'Edinburgh Reviewers' treated my works not many years since, and when I now consider Carlyle's merits with respect to German literature, I am astonished at the important step for the better. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. About her played her children Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Pedantry and Ill-manners. The goddess herself had claws like a cat. Her head, ears, and voice resembled those of an ass." Bulwer (Lord Lytton) flew out against his critics, and was well laughed at by Thackeray ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... and enfeebled health from which, vigorous as he was, his frame never wholly freed itself. But he was destined to be known, not as a scholar, but as a preacher. In his addresses from the pulpit the sturdy good-sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the schools as well as the subtlety of the theologian. He had little turn for speculation, and in the religious changes of the day we find him constantly lagging behind his brother-reformers. But he had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... introducing points as they are required, and not starting, as was formerly done, by assuming the whole of space. This method is due partly to Peano, partly to another Italian named Fano. To those unaccustomed to it, it has an air of somewhat wilful pedantry. In this way, we begin with the following axioms: (1) There is a class of entities called points. (2) There is at least one point. (3) If a be a point, there is at least one other point besides a. Then we bring in the straight line ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Ansell was a conceited man; but he was never proud of being right. He had foreseen Rickie's catastrophe from the first, but derived from this no consolation. In many ways he was pedantic; but his pedantry lay close to the vineyards of life—far closer than that fetich Experience of the innumerable tea-cups. He had a great many facts to learn, and before he died he learnt a suitable quantity. But he never forgot that the holiness of the heart's ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—"Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, Corurac McCullenan and Cuan O'Lochain, the gr-r-reat Irish histhorians." The boy was evidently accustomed to the priest's Celtic pleasantries. A little, appreciative grin was all the attention the insinuation of pedantry received. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... trivial scene. He is borne upward to the harmony of the sphere. He bows before the great law of the universe—the young gallant is transformed into the mighty teacher; and this without one hard conceit —without one touch of pedantry. It is but a flash of light; and where glowed the playful picture shines ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... poverty? He then frequented places of publick resort, and endeavoured to attract notice by the copiousness of his talk. The sprightly were silenced, and went away to censure, in some other place, his arrogance and his pedantry; and the dull listened quietly for a while, and then wondered why any man should take pains to obtain so much knowledge which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... theoretic side of morals. Even the most theoretic of sciences, Metaphysics, though, as Novalis said, it bakes no bread, is not without its direct bearing upon life. Dogmatic theology when divorced from practical interest is in danger of becoming mere pedantry; and ethical inquiry, if it has no dogmatic basis, loses scientific value and sinks into a mere enumeration of duties. Nor is the common statement, that Dogmatics shows what we should believe and Ethics what we ought to do, an adequate one. Moral precepts are also objects of faith, and what we ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... he claimed for his fellow countrymen the honor of having discovered the Coy Fountains. The Nemesis who never sleeps punished Bruce by the justest of retributions. His pompous and inflated style, his uncommon arrogance, and over-weening vanity, his affectation of pedantry, his many errors and misrepresentations, aroused against him a spirit which embittered the last years of his life. It is now the fashion to laud Bruce, and to pity his misfortunes. I cannot but ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry, scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the "sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and do work which counted. ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... as it was, did not lack defenders. Some of their arguments were most extravagant and far-fetched. "Paramo, in the quaint pedantry with which he ingeniously proves that God was the first Inquisitor, and the condemnation of Adam and Eve the first model of the Inquisitorial process, triumphantly points out that he judges them in secret, thus setting the example which the Inquisition ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... sanction we must trace a large portion of the mythological pedantry and incongruous paganisms, which for so long a period deformed the poetry, even of the truest poets. To such an extravagance did Boccaccio himself carry this folly, that in a romance of chivalry, he has uniformly styled ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... themselves, as the titles indicated. "Deer Creek" and "Mud"—"Coon" and "Cat"—"Big" and "Little Forky"—told that the pioneers, who first explored the hydrographic system of the Western Reserve, were not heavily laden with classic lore; and a pity it is that pedantry should be permitted to alter the simple, but expressive and appropriate, appellatives by them bestowed. Unfortunately, the system is followed up to this hour by the Fremonts and other pseudo-explorers of the farthest west. The soft and harmonious sound of Indian and Spanish ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... qualifications which domestic amusements and occupations betrayed. Much of his reserve was now banished; his manners were as easy and as free from pride or hauteur as his conversation, though chaste and intellectual, was from pedantry. To all the individuals of that happy circle he was the same; as kind and as gay to Emmeline and Ellen as to his own sisters; there might, perhaps, have been a degree of reserve in his demeanour towards Caroline, but that, except to those principally ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... children though he was a poet, but he loved them the better because he was a poet. He seems to have been without taint of worldliness. London with its pomps and vanities, learned coteries with their dry pedantry, rather scared than attracted him. He found his prime glory in his genius, and his chief felicity in home affections. I ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... pillars of its religion, which it regarded as the only asylum. The Jewish spirit again withdrew from the outer world. It gave itself up wholly to the study of the Talmud. In northern France and in Germany, Talmudic learning degenerated into the extreme of scholastic pedantry, the lot of every branch of science that is lopped off from the main trunk of knowledge, and vegetates in a heavy, dank atmosphere, lacking light and air. Rashi (1064-1105), whose genial activity began before the first crusade, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... the head. She fancies all sorts of things-shame, disgrace, and ruin!—only because she don't understand the quality of our morality-that's all! There's no harm, after all, in these little enjoyments-if the girl would only understand them so. Our society is free from pedantry; and there-no damage can result where no one's the wiser. It's like stealing a blush from the cheek of beauty-nobody misses it, and the cheek continues as beautiful as ever." Thus philosophizes the chivalric gentleman, until he ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... have noted above the spelling "cacao," and to those who think it curious, I would say that I do not use this spelling from pedantry. It is an imitation of the word which the Mexicans used for this commodity as early as 1500, and when spoken by Europeans is apt to sound like the howl of a dog. The Mexicans called the tree from which cacao is obtained ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The Woods of Westermain, published in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... p. 635. Such an anecdote was perfectly suited to the taste of Montaigne. He makes use of it in his agreeable Essay on Pedantry, l. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... canon of observation matured by technical ability. We have no reason to suppose that Donatello claimed to be a deep thinker. He did not spend his time, like Michael Angelo, in devising theories to explain the realms of art. He was without analytical pedantry, and, like his character, his work was naive and direct. Nor was he absorbed by appreciation of "beauty," abstract or concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... of pedantry in every form, demanding of her followers originality at all times on penalty of banishment from her circle. The great writer, Mynard, once related with tears in his eyes that his daughter, who afterward became the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... richest fruit of Milton's early genius, is the epitome of the man at the age at which he wrote it. It bespeaks the scholar and idealist, whose sacred enthusiasm is in some danger of contracting a taint of pedantry for want of acquaintance with men and affairs. The Elder Brother is a prig, and his dialogues with his junior reveal the same solemn insensibility to the humorous which characterizes the kindred genius of Wordsworth, and would have provoked the kindly smile of Shakespeare. It is singular ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... have intended seriously to discredit it, and yet certainly could not possibly believe the absurd theory of it concocted out of German philosophy; ergo, that we must regard the whole book as a piece of prolonged irony,—a little too characteristic of German pedantry, it is true, but sincerely designed to expose that extravagance of historic criticism and Biblical exegesis which had so distinguished the author's countrymen, by which Homer had been annihilated, a great part of ancient history rendered doubtful, and the Bible turned into a ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... or less deliberately intended as definitions of the good, and as instruments for its attainment. They must, therefore, be immediately tested by their fruits in life. An ethical theory that is only verbally concerned with the good, but does not in practice promote human welfare, is futile pedantry or worse. Reflection upon conduct arises in man's attempt to control the nature which is his inheritance in the interests of his happiness. Men have learned through experience that to follow each impulse without forethought brings them pain, misery, and sometimes ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... leash. They are evidently family portraits, taken from those who looked on at the artist, and on the other side he has introduced members of his own family who were helping him. These decorations have a gaiety, an absence of pedantry, a sound and sane sympathy with the spirit of the Renaissance which tell of a happy moment when art was at its height and in touch with its environment. From about 1563 we may begin to date his great supper pictures. The Marriage of Cana (Louvre), one of his most famous works, was ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... knew Selenin as a student, he was a good son, a true friend, and for his years an educated man of the world, with much tact; elegant, handsome, and at the same time truthful and honest. He learned well, without much exertion and with no pedantry, receiving gold medals for his essays. He considered the service of mankind, not only in words but in acts, to be the aim of his young life. He saw no other way of being useful to humanity than by serving the State. Therefore, as soon as he had completed his studies, he systematically ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will be at the mercy ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at her pass everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own—to the extent, as he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have close reference to ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Berlin, St. Petersburg—the names of French or German experts—quotations from Italian books or newspapers—the three dealt lightly and familiarly with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her—nay, rather, led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they had been abroad together—had seen many sights in each ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... chains; expels anti-militarists with the blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser reason to thank heaven that he was born in the comparative freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... answer to all that arrogant assumption and narrow pedantry which confine the free flow of the water of life to the conduits of sacraments and orders, and will only allow the wind that bloweth where it listeth to make music in the pipes of their organs, is simply the homely one which shivered a corresponding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... his fiery imagination. It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... writes:—"The manner in which Bishop Van Mildert proceeded on this occasion will never be forgotten by those who know how to appreciate scholarship without pedantry, and dignity without ostentation. Sir Walter had been observed throughout the day with extraordinary interest—I should say enthusiasm. The Bishop gave his health with peculiar felicity, remarking that he could reflect upon the labours of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Present State of Polite Learning (ch. xi.), wrote in 1759:—'From a desire in the critic of grafting the spirit of ancient languages upon the English have proceeded of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think, we may reckon blank verse. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used upon the most trivial occasions.' On the same page he speaks of 'the tuneless flow of our blank verse.' See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... me so ill, that I could not get the better of it; joined to that also was, I believe, the irritation of finding at my heels this insolent spy, a very fit subject, certainly, to outwit, if I had had the desire, but who did his duty with an intolerable mixture of pedantry and rigor*: I was seized with a nervous attack in the middle of the road, and they were obliged to lift me out of my carriage, and lay me down on the side of the ditch. This wretched commissary fancied that this was an occasion to take compassion on me, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... moderate men been the only reformers. He will long be honored for his elegant, Latinity. In the republic of letters, his efforts to infuse a pure taste, a sound criticism, a love for the beautiful and the classic, in place of the owlish pedantry which had so long flapped and hooted through mediveval cloisters, will always be held in grateful reverence. In the history of the religious Reformation, his name seems hardly to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... received were equally learned, and the fragments Mrs. Farquhar was permitted to hear were so interrupted by these cabalistic expressions that she finally begged to be excused. She said she did not doubt that to be in love was a liberal education, but pedantry was uninteresting. Latin might be convenient at this stage; but later on, for little tiffs and reconciliations, French would ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of justifying Messrs. PITMAN'S confidence in entrusting me with the compilation of a Spanish Grammar to form part of the series of "Commercial Grammars," I set to work to produce a book which, while avoiding pedantry and the agglomeration of superfluous and intricate rules which puzzle the student, should equally avoid falling into the extreme of coarseness which debases the subject under study, or the scrappiness resulting in gaps that perplex and discourage him. I have tried to be brief and ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... appearance—ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as much as Germany did one hundred ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... exerted it; but I hope he will get clear of them as soon as he can. Indeed, I cannot doubt it. I know his principles, and that he detests their cant and hypocrisy. I have heard him laugh a thousand times at the pedantry of that old presbyterian scoundrel, Poundtext, who, after enjoying the indulgence of the government for so many years, has now, upon the very first ruffle, shown himself in his own proper colours, and set off, with three parts of his ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... merits, it is not difficult to understand why the name of Theobald came to convey to the eighteenth century the idea of painful pedantry, and why one so eminently just as Johnson should have dubbed him "a man of heavy diligence, with very slender powers." While his knowledge is indisputable, he has little or no delicacy of taste; his style is dull and lumbering; and the mere fact that he dedicated his Shakespeare Restored to ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... for nearly fifty years, no pedantry, no loose manners, no questionable characters, no social or political intrigues, no discourtesies of any kind, were recorded; hers was a reign of dignity and grace, of purity of language, manners, and morals. She died in 1665, at the advanced age of seventy-seven, esteemed ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Frank. Some men it would have only hardened in their pedantry, and have emboldened them to say: "Ah! then these men see that a High Churchman can work like any one else, when there is a practical sacrifice to be made. Now I have a standing ground which no one can dispute from ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... literature, unless either great political and social events should rouse the national mind from its languor, or the classical models of pure taste and true art should be studied again in a different spirit from that of professorial pedantry. Now, after the Thirty Years' War, there was no war in Germany in which the nation took any warm interest. The policy pursued in France during the long reign of Louis XIV. (1643-1708) had its chief aim in weakening the house of Hapsburg. When the Protestants ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... thoughtlessly sustained and confirmed by the unconscionable literary perverseness of Irishmen themselves, who have preferred the easy task of concocting humorous extravaganzas, which caricature with merciless exaggeration the pedantry, bombast, and blunders incident to the lowest order of Hibernian ballads, to the more pleasurable and patriotic duty of collecting together the many, many specimens of genuine poetic feeling, which have grown up, like its wild flowers, from the warm ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... take up with the mode of the Nineties that drove the Young Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back to the Hobby-horse of the Eighties, or, in a further access of pedantry to the Germ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as late as the Blast of yesterday and The Gypsy of to-day. But I do not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... details; unfortunately he developed it chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of life which had called them into being; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... he would enjoy teaching, and took up his duties with keen interest. Fortunately for him he had little conceit or pedantry, which would have been a fatal handicap for him as teacher among his own people, simple-hearted though they were. He organized his work with straightforward earnestness and quiet ability and things usually moved smoothly in his class room. ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to "terror-stricken" wagons. The very touches of poetic impressionism that ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... avoiding it, are discussed with a delicacy of insight which would do credit to a Chesterfield of the present century, sending forth his son into society for the first time. Castiglione goes so far as to condemn the pedantry of far-fetched words and the coxcombry of elaborate costumes, as dangerous forms of affectation. His courtier must speak and write with force and freedom. He need not be a purist in his use of language, but may use such foreign phrases and modern idioms as are current in good society, aiming ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of such magnificent qualities one should be wary of criticism. That Milton's poetry has little human interest, no humor, and plenty of faults, may be granted. His Paradise Lost especially is overcrowded with mere learning or pedantry in one place and with pompous commonplaces in another. But such faults appear trivial, unworthy of mention in the presence of a poem that is as a storehouse from which the authors and statesmen of three hundred years have drawn their choicest images and expressions. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to preserve unaltered such names as Tigris, Bassora, Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, etc., which are familiar to us otherwise than by the Arabian Nights and to alter which, for the sake of mere literality, were as gratuitous a piece of pedantry as to insist upon writing Copenhagen Kjobenhavn, or Canton Kouang-tong, and to transliterate the rest as nearly as may consist with a due regard to artistic considerations. The use of untranslated Arabic words, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... attachment to it. Painters are, no doubt, often actuated by jealousy to that only which they find useful to themselves in painting. Wilson has been seen poring over the texture of a Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see the picture itself. But this is the perversion and pedantry of the profession, not its true or genuine spirit. If Wilson had never looked at anything but megilps and handling, he never would have put the soul of life and manners into his pictures, as he has done. Another objection is, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet's text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary conjecture."] ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... outset let it be distinctly understood that I write without any prejudice in favour of grammar. The fear of the critics is the beginning of pedantry. I detest your scholiast whose footnotes would take Thackeray to task for his "and whiches," and your professor who disdains the voice of the people, which is the voice of the god of grammar. I know all the scholiast has to say (surely he is the silly [Greek: scholastikos] of Greek anecdote), and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... had an illuminating personality, which illuminated no one. [A pause] I had an illuminating personality! You couldn't say anything more biting. I am forty-seven years old. Until last year I endeavoured, as you do now, to blind my eyes by your pedantry to the truths of life. But now—Oh, if you only knew! If you knew how I lie awake at night, heartsick and angry, to think how stupidly I have wasted my time when I might have been winning from life everything which my ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... strength. The forms of different materials must be varied to suit their texture, according as it is fibrous or crystalline, tough or brittle. Iron, of course, requires a peculiar treatment. At the risk of being charged with pedantry, we say that there have never been but two iron buildings, of any pretension, in this country—the Niagara Suspension Bridge and the Crystal Palace at New York. The first still speaks for itself; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... pitfall; but there are many more that will beset us in the attempt to understand Berlioz. To get at the man himself one must break down a wall of prejudice and pedantry, of convention and intellectual snobbery. In short, one must shake off nearly all current ideas about his work if one wishes to extricate it from the dust that has drifted about it for ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... that are really past excusing. In one place she says that a man 'had a contemptible opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the common formula of 'I am agreeable, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and most admired institutors of youth, whose fine taste has been allowed clear from the least tincture of pedantry, Quintilian recommends especially the talent of dancing, as conducive to the formation of orators; not, as he very justly observes, that an orator should retain any thing of the air of a dancing-master, in his motion or ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... France which inaugurated the new age after the Revolution had only been an English conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force—by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... mistaken in your premises! The Media Nocte is a society devoted to noble pleasures, to pure joys, to the highest, most intellectual enjoyments. All the arts, all the sciences, are fostered by it. All that is great and good, exalted and beautiful, is hailed there with delight, and only pedantry and stupidity are held aloof. Truth and nature are the two sacred laws observed in this society, and the noble, pure, free, and chaste Grecian spirit is the great exemplar of all its members. Therefore ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tragedian was that in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... those restraints, he is really vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... require, to be successful, the delicate precision of a Th['e]ophile Gautier. In his hands it might have become in French a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, as it is in the original Portuguese. As to the text, without emulating the pedantry of the critic who added a fourth season to Shelley's three, and thereby provoked a splendid outburst of wrath from Swinburne, we may assume that in passages where Vicente appears to have gone out of his way to avoid a required rhyme, this ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... the past. Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, or the aged Chateaubriand, also drop in by-and-by, to recognize, in the music, echoes of the daring romanticism which they opposed to the classic and formal pedantry of the time. ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... a claim to be remembered by posterity, Lord Timothy Dexter has a right to historic immortality. If the true American spirit shows itself most clearly in boundless self-assertion, Timothy Dexter is the great original American egotist. If to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Sir Thomas Heathcot, whom he had met at Mr. Wyndham's, at Dinton, of whom my father rented Widdington Farm. Mr. Cooper, who was one of the best hearted and worthy men that perhaps ever lived, and who possessed as little of the pedantry and stiffness of a schoolmaster, as any man who had spent his life in such an occupation, replied, that he was very sorry to part with me, as he had no doubt I should some day make as clever, and he hoped as good, a man as my father. The only fault ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... foreign words, whether from the ancient or from the modern languages, savors of pedantry and affectation. The ripest scholars, in speaking and writing English, make least use of foreign words or phrases. Persons who indulge in their use incur the risk of being charged with a desire to exhibit their ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... into, could it shew him the deformity of his mind, as well as the finery of his person; who has a taylor for his tutor, and a milliner for his school-mistress; who laughs at men of sense (excusably enough, perhaps in revenge because they laugh at him); who calls learning pedantry, and looks upon the knowledge of the fashions as the only useful science to ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... lines of Ammianus (xxxi. 14) countenance a whole oration of Themistius, (viii. p. 101-120,) full of adulation, pedantry, and common-place morality. The eloquent M. Thomas (tom. i. p. 366-396) has amused himself with celebrating the virtues and genius of Themistius, who was not unworthy of the age ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... deserve serious discussion, were it not that the Berlin psychologist's report created an immense sensation some years ago and has succeeded in intimidating the greater part of the official German scientific world to this day. It is true that the report in question is a monument of useless pedantry, but we are none the less bound to admit that, such as it was, it annihilated poor Von Oaten, who, being no controversialist and not knowing how to proclaim the truth which was struggling for utterance, died in ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... boots, who might have belonged to either one of them or to neither. No stranger could tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details—no, not so much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top floor: dusty window-panes, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... in the world than a young and rising civilian; no one who has more to say that is worth hearing, and who can say it in a manner better adapted to interest those who know good talk from bad. He delighted in that freedom from pedantry, affectation, and pretension which is one of the most agreeable characteristics of a service, to belong to which is in itself so effectual an education, that a bore is a phenomenon notorious everywhere within a hundred miles of the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... is both metrical and rhythmical, equally free from the confused strains of unmoulded genius and from the servile pedantry of conventional rules. The verse of eight syllables is the source of all other metres, and the sloka or double distich is the stanza most frequently used. Though this poetry presents too often extravagance of ideas, incumbrance ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... than to sobs and tears, satisfied with her lot despite her widowhood, she felt happy in being a princess, in being a mother, in being in France. Flattered by the homage addressed to her on all sides, but without haughty pride in it, she protected art and letters with out pedantry, rejuvenated the court, embellished the city, spread animation wherever she was seen, and appeared to the people like a seductive enchantress. Those who were at her receptions found themselves not in the presence of a coldly and solemnly majestic ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... deal of ludicrous pedantry generally accompanied this knowledge is not at all surprising, when we consider the rank these worthy teachers held in life, and the stretch of inflation at which their pride was kept by the profound reverence excited by their learning among the people. ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... you'll still persist in your confounded pedantry about your science. Now, what the devil has science to do with botany ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... is the idol of all who surround her, and she had the sensibility and goodness of an angel: in one word, she unites qualities which moralists consider incompatible; it is, however, only a self-evident fact to all who know her. She is evidently well informed, without pedantry; she has a delightful naivete; and though long since married, she has still the gaiety of a child, loving laughter like a little girl, which does not prevent her from possessing a religious enthusiasm for great ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... great confidence in his own savoir faire. His talents were naturally acute, and by no means confined to the line of his profession. He had at different times resided a good deal in England, and his address was free both from country rusticity and professional pedantry; so that he had considerable powers both of address and persuasion, joined to an unshaken effrontery, which he affected to disguise under plainness of manner. Confident, therefore, in himself, he appeared at Woodbourne about ten in the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... had come a remodelling of the sixth form time-table. Indeed, not modern politics but Greek philosophy had been the first subject to stir that almost religious passion for a real understanding of things, without which knowledge is in the old man mere pedantry and in the young man mere grist for the examination mill. In the present educational chaos, school sixth forms are quite bewilderingly fissiparous. Every one is a "specialist" of some sort or other; specialism means "private work," and if private work enables the gifted few to escape ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... poets, for many years past, were all overrun with pedantry. For, as I take it, the word is not properly used; because pedantry is the too frequent or unreasonable obtruding our own knowledge in common discourse, and placing too great a value upon it; by which definition, men of the court or the army may be as guilty of pedantry as a philosopher or a divine; ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one's self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle—not hackneyed—to show you that if he is writing about "characters and ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... adopted. I do not share the sentimental regret with which some philologists regard this tendency of the language. It seems to me that each case ought to be judged on its own merits, and by a strictly utilitarian standard. When a 'spelling-pronunciation' is a mere useless pedantry, it is well that we should resist it as long as we can; if it gets itself accepted, we must acquiesce; and unless the change is not only useless but harmful, we should do so without regret, because ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... of the women I'm looking for is here.... Did you notice," he added, "how few human faces there are among men! All you can read in the features of these wretches is mistrust, abjection, malice, just as among the rich you find only solemnity, gravity, pedantry. It's curious, isn't it? All cats have the face of cats; all oxen look like oxen; while the majority of human beings haven't a ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... rather rapidly; and when my name was called and my fizzling fireworks expected, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, thinking about her and her life-work. The whole experience was a revelation. I had never met such a woman. No affectation, nor pedantry, nor mannishness to mar the effect. It was in part the humiliating contrast between her soul-stirring words and my silly little society effort that drove me from the place, but all petty egotism vanished before the wish to be of ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... have not made their appearance, surmounting all formal considerations? And least of all can they fail to appear in War, where the personal character of the combatants plays such an important part, both in the cabinet and in the field. We limit ourselves to pointing this out, as it would be pedantry to attempt to reduce such influences into classes. Including these, we may say that the number of possible ways of reaching the object ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... rectitude of articulation and force of emphasis of which I had entertained no conception previously to my knowledge of him. Notwithstanding the uncouthness of his garb, his manners were not unpolished. All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation. He uttered no sentiment calculated to produce a disadvantageous impression; on the contrary, his observations denoted a mind alive to every generous and heroic feeling. They were introduced without parade, and accompanied with that ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... plan of execution is so cumbersome that its only defense is its imitation of the inevitably disjointed talk when the guests of a dinner party are busy with their wine and nuts. One is tempted to suspect Athenaeus of a sly sarcasm at his own expense, when he puts the following flings at pedantry in the mouths ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Propertius was too pedantic an imitation of the Greeks. His whole ambition was to become the Roman Callimachus, whom he made his model. He abounds with obscure Greek myths, as well as Greek forms of expression, and the same pedantry ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... threw glances towards him from a lonely corner, Peak went over to her, and was pleased with the smile he met. Fanny had watched eyes, much brighter than Sidwell's; her youthful vivacity blended with an odd little fashion of schoolgirl pedantry in a very piquant way. Godwin's attempts at conversation with her were rather awkward; he found it difficult to strike the suitable note, something not too formal ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... predecessors and early contemporaries in the opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called rhetoriqueurs, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... provincialism ever prepared for the edification of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his tales—in defence of which, he says, "however, or ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... long bear the idea of contradiction. She busied herself in settling the Comtesse Jules near her, by making such a provision for her as should place her beyond anxiety. Her character suited the Queen; she had merely natural talents, no pedantry, no affectation of knowledge. She was of middle size; her complexion very fair, her eyebrows and hair dark brown, her teeth superb, her smile enchanting, and her whole person graceful. She was seen almost always in a demi-toilet, remarkable only for neatness ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... successful manager. He was soon elevated to an official position, which he filled with honor and satisfaction. Many slaves were helped to their freedom by his efforts and advice. He was bold, yet discreet; wise without pedantry; humble without religious affectation; firm without harshness; ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... ascertained the position of the two armies, and pronounced that the King ought to have lost the day, for that his tactics were altogether faulty. I am willing to suppose that this military criticism arose merely from military pedantry, though it is now said that Napoleon was envious of the veneration, which, as the French believe, they feel for the memory of Henri quatre. Napoleon is accused of having given the title of le Roi de la Canaille to the Bourbon Monarch. And when Napoleon was in ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... excellency, which, for want of judgment, is often the cause of ridiculous and blamable effects; I mean, great learning; which, if not accompanied with sound judgment, frequently carries us into error, pride, and pedantry. As, I hope, you will possess that excellency in its utmost extent, and yet without its too common failings, the hints, which my experience can suggest, may probably not be ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... abound in novels, but it is to the credit of Sir Walter Scott that wherever he has introduced a sincere character of this description, he has gone to the very origin for his facts, and then given us the result without pedantry. The four which I have examined are each a curious subject for study, and indicate, collectively and compared, a train of thought which I believe that few have suspected in Scott, notwithstanding his well-known great love for the curious and occult in literature. That ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... well that they afford to speak without emphasis, and in whose speech you find neither neologisms, nor inversions, nor grammatical extravagances, nor calculated brutalities, nor affected ignorance, nor any faintest trace of pedantry? What these men have to say is more or less interesting, but they address us in the same language, and however arbitrarily we may place them, though we hang a pig-stye by Morland next to a duchess ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... inclined, since, to think Mr. Somerville meant this as a sly hit at my schoolboy pedantry; but he was too well bred not to seek to relieve me from my mortification. "Oh!" said he, "Julia is our family book of reference for names, dates, and distances, and has an excellent memory ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... strictness that some parents do the studies of their children. He was very particular that we should play the old English games according to their original form; and consulted old books for precedent and authority for every 'merrie disport;' yet I assure you there never was pedantry so delightful. It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... remarkable things,' said Coningsby; 'and met many celebrated persons. Nothing strikes me more in this brilliant city than the tone of its society, so much higher than our own. What an absence of petty personalities! How much conversation, and how little gossip! Yet nowhere is there less pedantry. Here all women are as agreeable as is the remarkable privilege in London of some half-dozen. Men too, and great men, develop their minds. A great man in England, on the contrary, is generally the dullest dog in company. And yet, how piteous to think ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... prosperity, your family should have occasion to be in mourning. Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration and affection, and nothing that concerns you is indifferent to them, and there are more people who sympathise with you than you are aware of. It would be the greatest pedantry to offer any topics of consolation to you who are naturally so firm and so manly. As your Brother dyed in the service of his country, you have the best and the noblest consolation: That since it has pleased God to deprive ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... regard for disused metaphor savours of pedantry: disregard is inelegant. Write, not, "unparalleled complications," but "unprecedented complications;" and "he threw light on obscurities," ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... whatever may be their chemical identity, or resemblance in aspect. I do not mean to talk of fat in seeds, nor of flour in eggs, nor of milk in rocks. Pace my prelatical friends, I mean to use the word 'Alb' for vegetable albumen; and although I cannot without pedantry avoid {253} using sometimes the word 'milky' of the white juices of plants, I must beg the reader to remain unaffected in his conviction that there is a vital difference between liquids that coagulate into butter, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... peremptorily rejected. I am convinced that you are still what the world calls an upright man of business, but I do not know whether you have preserved that proudly pure integrity, which, alas! many in the mercantile world treat as mere pedantry, and to have to tell you this makes your return ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... as modern Latin.'' "They were encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours of real learning.'' s The Italian nobility, excluded as they mostly were from politics, and living in cities, found in literature a consolation and a career. Such academies were oligarchical in their constitution; they encouraged culture, but ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with features as distinct, was this Irish insurrection, when suddenly surrendered to the whole contagion of politico-religious fanaticism, by comparison with vulgar martinet strategics and the pedantry of technical warfare. What a picture must Enniscorthy have presented on the 27th of May! Fugitives, crowding in from Ferns, announced the rapid advance of the rebels, now, at least, 7000 strong, drunk with victory, and maddened with vindictive fury. Not long after midday, their advanced ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... disappointment of the imagination was far more than compensated by the frank, social, and engaging qualities, both of disposition and manner, which, on a nearer intercourse, he disclosed, as well as by that entire absence of any literary assumption or pedantry, which entitled him fully to the praise bestowed by Sprat upon Cowley—that few could ever discover he was a great ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and much machinery standing idle, it is so clear to common sense that we could produce more of some particular thing without diminishing the supply of other things, that any apparent statement to the contrary may perhaps seem the height of academic pedantry. But let me ask the reader to consider with an open mind a familiar parallel. During the recent war there was inevitably much waste and muddle in the utilization of the military resources of the Allies. Some regiments would be kept inactive for ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... interpreted the law in early times with too great narrowness and timidity, defects which, on the one hand, raised up the overruling authority of the court of chancery as the necessary means of redress to the civil suitor who found the gates of justice barred against him by technical pedantry, and on the other, brought this usurpation and tyranny of the Star-chamber upon the kingdom by an absurd scrupulosity about punishing manifest offences against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Layer's head, and desired in his will that it should be placed in his right hand when he was buried. Another version of the story is, that a spurious skull was foisted upon Rawlinson, who died happy in the possession of the doubtful treasure. Rawlinson was bantered by Addison for his pedantry, in one of the Tatlers, and was praised by ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... endeavoured to avoid an ostentatious display of learning. By the idle and the frivolous indeed, any appearance of learning is called pedantry. But as I do not write for such readers, I pay no regard to their censures. Those by whom I wish to be judged, will I hope, approve of my adding dignity to Corsica, by shewing its consideration among the ancients, and will not be displeased to find my page sometimes embellished with ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... Parliament, though for Imperial purposes it may retain an indefinite supremacy throughout the British Empire, has, as regards self-governing colonies, renounced, for all other than Imperial purposes, executive and legislative functions. To labour this point may savour of pedantry. But the distinction insisted upon, whilst often overlooked, is of extreme importance. We risk being deceived by words. The Imperial Parliament is supreme in the United Kingdom, it is also supreme in New Zealand. But the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is a misleading expression; ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don't let me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door." Again, to the same (1761): "It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or flagons." Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of the latter's odes, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... kind of scholastic jargon was much in vogue in the time of Lucian, and it is no wonder he should take every opportunity of laughing at it, as nothing can be more opposite to true genius, wit, and humour, than such pedantry. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... stump speakers, pamphleteers, think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for two reasons—because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English and German investigators. While M. Jusserand betrays all the critical independence of his compatriot M. Taine, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with their ancient ideal, it must be confessed that in practice there is not a little letter worship and a good deal of pedantry; for, in all the teachings of abstract principles by the different sects, there are endless puns or plays upon words in the renderings of Chinese characters. This arises from that antithesis of extreme poverty in sounds with amazing luxuriance in written expression, which characterizes ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... literal,—art in which a jest is a jest and serious things are treated with familiar directness, and all, whether in jest or earnest, is primarily beautiful. In Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan Bach answers the critics who censured him for his pedantry and provincial ignorance of the grand Italian operatic style, by making effective use of that style in Pan's prize-aria ("Zum Tanze, zum Sprunge, so wack-ack-ack-ackelt das Herz"), nobly representing his own style in Phoebus's aria, and promptly caricaturing it in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is so nice and guileless that she doesn't resent my pedantry. I love giving information, you know," Augustine smiled. He looked about him as he spoke, at birds and trees and clouds, happy, humorous, clasping his riding crop behind his back so that his mother heard it make a pleasant ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... toil Slowly accomplish'd in each foreign soil.[45] Yet to the mine though the rich coin he trace, No current marks his early essays grace; For in each page we find a massy store Of English bullion mix'd with Latian ore: In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin'd, He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;[46] In scientifick phrase affects to smile, Form'd on Brown's turgid Latin-English style:[47] Too oft the abstract decorates his prose,[48] While measur'd ternaries the periods close: But ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... shares the characteristic belief of the day, that the abstract problems are soluble by common sense, when polished by academic culture and aided by a fine taste. It is a case of sancta simplicitas; of the charming, because perfectly unconscious, self-sufficiency with which the Wit, rejecting pedantry as the source of all evil, thinks himself obviously entitled to lay down the law as theologian, politician, and philosopher. His audience are evidently ready to accept him as an authority, and are flattered by being treated as capable of ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... and I believe I am unprejudiced when I say, I had but half an idea of him, Demigod as he seemed before, till I read them carefully. How can Hazlitt call Warton's the finest sonnets? There is the air of pedantry and labour in his. But Shakespeare's are perfectly simple, and have the very essence of tenderness that is only to be found in the best parts of his Romeo and Juliet besides. I have truly been lapped in these Sonnets for some time: they seem all stuck ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... of the Campo Santo, to which in times of pest and sickness thou wast wont to carry so many, Gypsy and Gentile, in thy cart of the tinkling bell? Oft in the reunions of the lettered and learned in this land of universal literature, when weary of the display of pedantry and egotism, have I recurred with yearning to our Gypsy recitations at the old house in the Pila Seca. Oft, when sickened by the high-wrought professions of those who bear the cross in gilded chariots, have I thought on thee, thy calm faith, without ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... my father, familiarly, "you son would know that though a scholar is often a fool, he is never a fool so supreme, so superlative, as when he is defacing the first unsullied page of the human history by entering into it the commonplaces of his own pedantry. A scholar, sir,—at least one like me,—is of all persons the most unfit to teach young children. A mother, sir,—a simple, natural, loving mother,—is the infant's true ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... evil consequences as take place in these instances are likely to arise from the modern freak of writing sanatory instead of sanitary, it deserves notice as a charming specimen of pedantry ingrafted upon ignorance. Those who thus undertake to correct the spelling of the classical English writers, are not aware that the meaning of sanatory, if there were such a word in the language, would have reference not ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to make her two or three visits at her father's house. I passed some happy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... correspondent cast, homely, ridiculous, graphic, these men of service paint their hopes and doings. There are ranks and kinds among them; representatives of all the constituent parts of the motley multitude, which followed this prince of Condottieri. The solemn pedantry of the ancient Wachtmeister is faithfully given; no less so are the jocund ferocity and heedless daring of Holky's Jaegers, or the iron courage and stern camp-philosophy of Pappenheim's Cuirassiers. Of the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... and worn close over the forehead, with the lower part resting on the nose. His manner is equally peculiar; it cannot be called vulgar, nor yet genteel—for it is too passive for the one, and too pompous for the other; it forms, say, a sort of compromise between the two, with a slight infusion of pedantry that greatly adds to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... saying that you liked music, but didn't like dancing; music leads another person to dance, but not you; and dancing does not increase but diminishes the intensity of the pleasure you find in music. In like manner, it is a mere piece of pedantry to make a religious nation, like the English, more religious by placing images in the streets; this is not the English way, and only offends us. If it were our way, it would come naturally without any one telling us. As music incites to dancing, so religion would lead to images; but ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... of it quoted above was translated as "those Pedants who profess a kind of Religion which consists of worshipping the Ancients" (p.294). Fontenelle's phrase more nearly than that of the English translator describes Rapin. Though Rapin's erudition was great, he escaped the quagmire of pedantry. He refers most frequently to the scholiasts and editors in "The First Part" (which is so trivial that one wonders why he ever troubled to accumulate so much insignificant material), but after quoting them he does not hesitate to call their ideas "pedantial" (p. ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... subtle dialectics and speculative disputations. With so much of Renaissance studies as did not serve the good estate of souls he showed little sympathy, and was indifferent to art, to metaphysics, to antiquarian pedantry. He endeavoured to make men familiar with the wisdom of the ancients by a collection of 1451 adages selected from their works. His Colloquies, the most popular book of his age, sold in 24,000 copies. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... pedantry was the obligation felt in the rear ships to take post about their own admiral, and to remain there when the signals for the line of battle, and to bear down in the admiral's wake, were flying. Thus Palliser's own inaction, to whatever cause due, paralysed ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... reason, as they have been to measure and to count. In matters of opinion, feeling and impulse are allowed to dominate over reason, and to hug the delusions which reason would dispel. We have no educational system, no college, in which the art of reasoning is properly taught, although the shallow pedantry of Aristotelian logic has assumed to teach the art of reasoning. The faculties themselves of our colleges do not understand or practice the true art of reasoning, for if they did, they would harmonize in opinion as mathematicians harmonize in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... model. If a gentleman could possibly demand a lady's meaning in such an act as the holding-up of her train, he certainly would use none of Priestley's three questions, which, with such ridiculous and uninstructive pedantry, are repeated and expounded by Latham, in his Hand-Book, Sec.481; but would probably say, "Madam, what do you mean by holding up your train?" It was folly for the doctor to ask an other person, as if an other could guess ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of her misadventures; but she continued instead to pour forth the most extraordinary mixture of the correct school miss and the poor untutored little piece of womanhood in a false position—of engrafted pedantry and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he lacked some of the authority of erudition, he escaped also the induration of pedantry. In writing of remote and dimly known periods, critics are perhaps most apt to show their defects of temper, and Scott often commented on the acerbity of spirit which such studies seem to induce. "Antiquaries," he said, "are ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... happy climes, the seat of innocence, Where nature guides and virtue rules, Where men shall not impose for truth and sense The pedantry of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... idea of winking. Patting me on the knee, he added, "The women be always like that—bain't they?—always trying to think they know better. It was just like King Arthur and the cakes, weren't it?" I, of course, assented and, I am sorry to say, with the magnificent pedantry of boyhood, reflected that he was not the first person to make the mistake. Did not Mrs. Quickly piously ejaculate that the dead Falstaff was "in Arthur's bosom"? Besides, it was proof that the Somersetshire people still remembered King Arthur—a point treasured by me ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... not the measure for all; but for those that have wings. We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants. Therefore in this present time ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... to learning. He is reported, however, by other authorities, cited by Zefirino Re, to have been "eccellente canonista." He had been a professor in the University of Toulouse.) he, at least, appreciated knowledge and intellect in others; so that the graceful pedantry of the time continued to mix itself with the pursuit of pleasure. The corruption which reigned through the whole place was too confirmed to yield to the example of Innocent, himself a man of simple habits and exemplary ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme authority on anything is a satisfaction ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... deeply shrouded from us as the future. If at times we are reminded in reading Clarendon's Life of the old steward in Hogarth's plate, who lifts up his hands in horror over the extravagance of his master, if his pedantry often irritates, and his love of place displeases, we recognise these but as the shades of the character of a distinguished and accomplished public servant. But to Marvell Clarendon was rapacious, ambitious, and corrupt, a man who had sold Oliver's Dunkirk to the French, and shared the price; who ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... he gave the usual salutation in the harsh and guttural tones of his own language. The trapper replied as well as he could, which it seems was sufficiently well to be understood. In order to escape the imputation of pedantry we shall render the substance, and, so far as it is possible, the form of the dialogue that succeeded, into the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson, this poor curate, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden |
