"Scoffer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ominous significance, he approached the young scoffer, his hand on an exact level with the latter's ear, his right foot raised to indicate a possible means of enforcing ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... was seen to rise out of the woods and stir and push the clouds before her with a broom. For a hundred yards around Witch Rock the ground is still accursed, and any attempt to break it up is unavailing. Nearly a century ago a scoffer named Reynolds declared that he would run his plough through the enchanted boundary, and the neighbors watched the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... that haunt the bush, some tell, in places where no human foot is wont to tread. So that nothing of this sort comes upon me with an air of newness, at least! I mayn't quite trust it, as you do, but I am no scoffer. Look, now, Mr. St. Aubyn, I have a proposal to make. You are alone, and purpose undertaking a bitter and, it may be, a perilous journey in mountain ground at this season. What say you to taking me along with you? May be, I shall prove of some use; and at any rate, your adventure and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... of much use talking in this wise to a scoffer. He that maun to Cupar maun to Cupar. We're all in the same express train, plunging towards ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... could not be doubted, since the spirits named Gresil des Trones, Aman des Puissance, and Asmodeus, had promised to carry off the calotte of Monsieur de Laubardemont. They were preparing for this, when the physician Duncan, a learned and upright man, but somewhat of a scoffer, took it into his head to pull a cord he discovered fastened to a column like a bell-rope, and which hung down just close to the referendary's head; whereupon they called him a Huguenot, and I am ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... inscription, that reckless wit, Bonnel Thornton, instantly wrote a squib, under the obvious pseudonym of the "Rev. Busby Birch." In these critical and political remarks (which he entitled "City Latin") the gay scoffer professed in his preface to prove "almost every word and every letter to be erroneous and contrary to the practice of both ancients and moderns in this kind of writing," and appended a plan or pattern for a new inscription. The clever little lampoon soon ran to three editions. The ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... mind that vile scoffer. Set an example to Europe, Madam, by doing what I am going to do. Marry again. Marry some good man who will be a strength and ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... can be dispensed with, by employing solely what is called in some quarters the preaching of the gospel, I do not agree with the opinion. The benefits of Christ's redemption are pearls which must not be cast before swine. The gospel is not for the stupid, or for the doubter,—still less for the scoffer. Christ's atonement is to be offered to conscious guilt, and in order to conscious guilt there must be the application of the decalogue. John Baptist must prepare the way for the merciful Redeemer, by legal and close preaching. And the merciful Redeemer Himself, in the opening of His ministry, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Scotchman in the front rank, who objected to each statement that fell from his lips, thus interfering seriously with the effect of his peroration. If the Irishman had been more convincing, I suppose the crowd would have silenced the scoffer, for these little matters of discipline are always attended to by the audience; but the Scotchman's points were too well taken; he was so trenchant, in fact, at times, that a voice would cry, 'Coom up, ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... enough by a burst of tears, and the terrific information that he was damned. But the Carbuccia of old was a riotous, joyful, foul-tongued, pleasure-loving atheist, a typical commercial traveller, with a strain of Alsatia and the mountain-brigand. How came this red-tied scoffer so far on the road of religion as to be damned? Some foolish fancy had made the ribald Gaetano turn a Mason. When one of his boon companions had suggested the evil course, he had refused blankly, apparently because he was asked, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... it. The man who laughs, his notion of the right and the reasonable, his attitude towards the world and life, become manifest through the things which he laughs at. Only a man of a certain kind, with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they portray that we value the work of a Swift, a Voltaire, or ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... whom Providence has doomed to live on trust'; Lucian entirely refuses to live on trust; he 'wants to know.' It was the wish of Arthur Clennam, who had in consequence a very bad name among the Tite Barnacles and other persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the same fate; 'the scoffer Lucian' has become as much a commonplace as 'fidus Achates,' or 'the well-greaved Achaeans,' the reading of him has been discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place at the table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... assumed that he would reform that incorrigible tippler into a "teetotal Falstaff," and protested against the enthusiast mixing water so copiously with the milk of his human kindness. So Cruikshank set off in great wrath towards Fleet Street to seek out the scoffer, and, meeting Blanchard Jerrold, sputtered out his purpose and declared that he was on the trail of that scoundrel Punch to "knock his old wooden head about." When he died, Punch announced that "England is ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... me joy that in His name I can bear, with patient frame, All these vain ones offer; While for them He suffereth long, Shall I answer wrong with wrong, Scoffing with the scoffer? ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... perfectly willing that his world should see in him an incorrigible scoffer at moral conventions. He rather enjoyed being the object of maternal warnings to young daughters, but in financial affairs no stern moralist could have been more observant of rigid integrity, and in that, as in other things, he reversed the usual order. The business involved ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... resumed their journey, the relationship between them had undergone a change; nay, you might have said that their characters were also changed. For Tom found himself pouring out his turbulent heart to Kenelm, confiding to this philosophical scoffer at love all the passionate humanities of love,—its hope, its anguish, its jealousy, its wrath,—the all that links the gentlest of emotions to tragedy and terror. And Kenelm, listening tenderly, with softened eyes, uttered not one cynic word,—nay, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paralytic, crippled of all her limbs. And I am quite ready to allow that in this state she will escape the delusions that make mock of mankind, and will have no temptations to play the runagate. You are a scoffer, and you have made much mock at ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... opportunity; he reeled under his good fortune; and whether he did ill or well, the exposure of these pious "phantoms" did as a matter of fact silence in all that part of the island the voice of the scoffer. "Why then," the word went round, "why then, the Bible is true!" And on our return afterwards we were told the impression was yet lively, and those who had seen might be heard telling those who had not, "O yes, it is all true; these things all happened, we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that this were then an excellent order to take with the friars, seeing that they were the veriest vagabonds that be; a friar thereupon took the jest in very ill part, and could not refrain himself from calling the fellow ribald, villain, and the son of perdition; whereat the jester became a scoffer indeed, for he could play a part in that play, no man better, making the friar more foolishly wrath ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... healed of his wound, healed also of his love, I trust, at least headed off from it. M. de Fontelles was gone also, on that quest of his which made my Lord Rochester so merry; indeed I fear that in this case the scoffer had the best of it, for he whom I have called M. de Perrencourt was certainly served again by his indignant subject, and that most brilliantly. Well, had I been a Frenchman, I could have forgiven King Louis much; and I suppose ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... nothing in our language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... up a handful of sand and threw it at the scoffer. Herb ducked adroitly and the sand passed over his head and fell full on Jimmy's mouth, which at the moment ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... lyre in my hand has never swept, The song I cannot offer: My humbler service pray accept— I'll help to kill the scoffer. The water-drinkers and the cranks Who load their skins with liquor— I'll gladly bear their belly-tanks And ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... been, from the very first, its own best prophet, and step by step it has foretold the progress it would make. It comes, too, most triumphant. No faith before it ever took so victorious a stand in its infancy. It has swept like a hurricane of fire through the land, compelling faith from the baffled scoffer and the ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... For two months I have endured the pains of the lost through him. A wild, untameable savage, subject to no laws, a heathen, a butcher, a scoffer at things holy, an idler, a highwayman, a traitor, a rebel, an Irish Papist wolf-hound! Do I know my own pupil? And—oh my God!—is it he who has the coat? Oh, we are doubly lost! Knaves, fools, all conspire to ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... true value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind! His Candide is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called "the dull product of a scoffer's pen"; it is indeed the "product of a scoffer's pen"; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think it dull. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... which we inhabit we are come upon evil day's. The rage of the blasphemer, the laugh at the scoffer, the heartless lip-service of the worldling, and the light dalliance of the daughters of music, are offered every hour upon a thousand Baal-altars within this very parish. I would ask some of you who spend your evenings in the playhouses which multiply around us like weeds sown in the rank ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... stars, John Markham? They're a merry congregation. They're laughing at you—as I am. A sermon by moonlight with only the stars and a scoffer to listen!" ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... several days, until every penny was exhausted. Then he would make demands at home for more money, which if refused, he was sure to abuse his wife and family. He was not only a drunkard; he was a scoffer at religion, and considered it a mark of honor to take the ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... that shee laughs at, and censures my folly, for making her sport, and pities mee for understanding her no better? To this purpose speaks Mountagne concerning Cats: And I hope I may take as great a libertie to blame any Scoffer, that has never heard what an Angler can say in the justification of ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... to everything, this inevitable act of hypocrisy was not merely painful to Levin, it seemed to him utterly impossible. Now, in the heyday of his highest glory, his fullest flower, he would have to be a liar or a scoffer. He felt incapable of being either. But though he repeatedly plied Stepan Arkadyevitch with questions as to the possibility of obtaining a certificate without actually communicating, Stepan Arkadyevitch maintained that it was out ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the genial certainty in this answer, said: "I thank you, sir. I shall go back and refute that common scoffer, that caster of doubts. I have seen the Truth face, to face, and am greatly encouraged to further public effort. With many apologies I can now get out," he added, as the train stopped at South Croydon. "Blink!" And, followed by his dog, he stepped ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... couch of the infidel and blasphemer. The same beam glitters on the blessed Altar of the faithful, and on the cell of the impenitent murderer. Look at the sunshine and the shower in the country. The fields of the earnest, prayerful man, and those of the unbelieving, prayerless scoffer lie golden under the same sunlight, are watered by the same showers. And why is this so? Surely it is a type of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Surely it teaches us the wondrous height, and depth, and breadth of divine love. It warns us not ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... he listened, was ugly to watch. He shot out a hand and grabbed the scoffer by his coat; then dropped it ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... humiliations!" said Meadows, putting an arm round the scoffer. "I tell you, she proposes to write my next set of lectures for me. She gave me an outline ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... stream. On some of the tributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I take this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights,' as the scoffer might imagine, but from that most respectable authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays from two to three million eggs, each of which, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the celestial effulgences could be seen rippling like sunshine on the sea of faces spreading away from the shore of the pulpit steps. When he spoke of hell and its terrors, which was frequently and with thrilling descriptive, even so hardened a scoffer as Japheth Pettigrass was wont to declare that you could hear the crackling of the flames and the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... you believe in it?" asked Lil Artha, who was known to be pretty much of a scoffer ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... though Fitch's boats had made trips in the Delaware only some twenty years earlier, the fact did not seem to be generally known. People had all along spoken of Fulton as a half-crazy dreamer and had called his boat "Fulton's Folly." "Of course, the thing will not move," said one scoffer. "That any man with common sense well knows," another replied. And yet they all stood watching for Fulton's ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... they breathed—heavier upon them fell the sense of something almost supernatural, beyond the human and the finite. Skeptic and faint believer, sinner, Christian and scoffer, they were all alike now in the presence of a faith whose evidence was before them in harrowing vividness, in the torment and agony of a fellow creature who sought again through faith a restoration to the image of his kind. There was no creed, no school ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... things automobilistic is not very sincerely a scoffer at heart. It is mostly a case of "sour grapes," and he only waits the propitious combination of circumstances which shall permit him to become a possessor of a motor-car himself. This is not a very difficult procedure. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... "Unbeliever," or a "Unitarian," or an "Episcopalian," or whether "he ever went to church in his life," or "used improper language," or "drank enough to hurt him." He was human, very human, but he was no scoffer or doubter. His religion was of the heart, and his faith beyond questioning. He taught the world, said Dean Stanley over his new-made grave in Westminster Abbey, great lessons of "the eternal value of generosity, of purity, of kindness, and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... filled with deeds that are screened from the action of the laws by the closed doors of domestic life; but as to which the finger of God, often called chance, supplies the place of human justice, and in which the moral is none the less striking and instructive because it is pointed by a scoffer. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... his incessant and bitter attacks. That he might obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and scoffer at all ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... thy gay buffoonery describe? Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe. Wit—sophist—songster—Yorick of thy tribe, Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school, To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe, Arch scoffer, and mad Abbot of Misrule! For such thou art by day—but all night long Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain, As if thou didst in this, thy moonlight song, Like to the melancholy Jaques, complain, Musing ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... dulness. Dulness is certainly not the characteristic of the rhyming paraphrases of certain dialogues of Lucian which Charles Cotton wrote and published late in the seventeenth century under the title of 'Burlesque upon Burlesque, or the Scoffer Scoft.' 'We bring you here,' said Cotton, 'a fustian-piece, Writ by a merry Wag of Greece'—'a piece of raillery writ,' as he went on to say, ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... supernatural sound that told her of the hopelessness of love, Aurora dropped the hollow, mocking scoffer, clutched spasmodically at her heart, and, with an agonizing shriek, fell ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... frequently protested to me that Il est fou, le noir. He is always playing when sensible men try to sleep. The last few hours (which had made of the fou a geant) made of the scoffer a worshipper. Nor did "le bras casse" ever from that time forth desert his divinity. If as balayeur he could lay hands on a morceau de pain or de viande, he bore it as before to our beds; but Jean was always called over to partake ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... at being remembered," said Mr. Vancouver, whose delicate features betrayed neither pleasure nor interest, however. "But," he continued, "I am not particularly flattered at being called a scoffer ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... a scathing satire upon society. All its fondest idols,—love, faith, and hope,—are dragged in the mire. There is something almost grand in the way that this Titanic scoffer draws pictures of love only to mock at them, sings patriotic ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... accepted Mrs. Bellmore s story as a made-up affair, charitably offered as an offset to the unkind vision seen by Mrs. Fischer-Suympkins. But one or two present perceived that her assertions bore the genuine stamp of her own convictions. Truth and candour seemed to attend upon every word. Even a scoffer at ghosts—if he were very observant—would have been forced to admit that she had, at least in a very vivid dream, been honestly ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... a beetroot. 'I'll teach you to know your place, sir.' He turned his back on the scoffer, and ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... foolish—Courtney would have called it something stronger—but, nevertheless, I told her the story of Hugo. For the benefit of the scoffer let me say that the Lady Helen could be very fetching when she was so minded, and this was our ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... well founded, that the wits and poets who congregated at Will's were a most profane and licentious set; and, being himself a man of orthodox opinions and regular life, he was not disposed to give his confidence to one whom he supposed to be a ribald scoffer. Prior, with much address, and perhaps with the help of a little hypocrisy, completely removed this unfavourable impression. He talked on serious subjects seriously, quoted the New Testament appositely, vindicated Hammond from the charge of popery, and, by way of a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... am I To frown on kind intent, nor child to trust This sceptre of Seven Realms to magic snare That puissance hath—who knows not?—greater thrice In house than open field. I therefore chose For audience hall this precinct.' Muttered low Murdark, the scoffer with the cave-like mouth And sidelong eyes, 'Queen Bertha's voice was that! A woman's man! Since first from Gallic shores That dainty daughter of King Charibert Pressed her small foot on England's honest shore The whole land dwindles!' In seraphic hymns Ere long that serpent ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... are those which determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people—he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[2].... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be—their every "thou shalt" ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... arrival, was of a severe satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that speech is ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... purposes, without a creed, yet never could it have arisen without some creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,—all the more horrid, the grander its dress! That is not worship, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... so deep as that sly dart they wield, The Bacchant's pointed spear in laughing flowers concealed. And oh, 'twere victory to this heart, as sweet As any thou canst boast—even when the feet Of thy proud war-steed wade thro' Christian blood, To wrap this scoffer in Faith's blinding hood, And bring him tamed and prostrate to implore The vilest gods even Egypt's saints adore. What!—do these sages think, to them alone The key of this world's happiness is known? That none but they who make such proud parade ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... say no more about it, Sam," said he, "but mind my words, and apply your experience to it afterwards in life, and see if I ain't right. Crime has but two travelling companions. It commences its journey with the scoffer, and ends it with the blasphemer: not that talking irreverently ain't very improper in itself, but it destroys the sense of right and wrong, and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... for any scoffer, qui mockat mockabitur. Let mee tell you, (that you may tell him) what the wittie French-man [the Lord Mountagne in his Apol. for Ra-Se-bond.] sayes in such a Case. When my Cat and I entertaine each other ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... "The scoffer shall not go unpunished, nor shall he that revileth partake of the blessing. Go thy way, and tell him he may not ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... that of other literatures, is singularly unexceptionable; but who is there that holds a place among its writers so historical and important, who is so copious, so versatile, so brilliant, as that Voltaire who is an open scoffer at every thing sacred, venerable, or high-minded? Nor can Rousseau, though he has not the pretensions of Voltaire, be excluded from the classical writers of France. Again, the gifted Pascal, in the work on which his literary fame is mainly founded, does not approve himself ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... was only a lip-deep scoffer. Her heart was open to conviction yet, and, when the time came, I believed that the seed sown in old days would germinate and bear good ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Scoffer! so the Scriptures tell us, But awful was the silence at that time; A prelude of the wrath of God most jealous, Expressed ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... to the right hand, and join the company there who have gladly welcomed the Son of God as their Saviour; but, correspondingly, in order to be lost, it is not necessary that you should arise from your state of indifference, and join the scoffer's ranks. To be saved you must flee to the refuge; but to be lost, it is enough that ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... him to hazard sentiments or assertions that would be fatal to others. His controversial daring is backed by his bodily prowess; and by bringing his intellectual pretensions boldly into a line with his physical accomplishments, he, indeed, presents a very formidable front to the sceptic or the scoffer. Take a cubit from his stature, and his whole manner resolves itself into an impertinence. But with that addition, he overcrows the town, browbeats their prejudices, and bullies them out of their senses, and is not ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... occasion to reprove her for such excessive grief over so unworthy an object. 'He was not an upright man, Matty, and you know it,' he began quite boldly; 'he was a libertine, and a gambler, and an open scoffer at religion.' But Matty went on sobbing harder than ever, and at last, getting angry, he said sternly: 'And more than this, ma'am, he was, as you know, a faithless and disloyal husband!' Then the poor girl drew out a pocket handkerchief with a three-inch black border and mopped ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... to see the Titan who would dare to laugh at the First Consul!" exclaimed Marianne, eagerly. "You would do like Jove; you would hurl down the audacious scoffer into the abyss with ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... have my choice between the Church and the Bar. The idea, however, proved—impracticable—which, in some respects, is rather a pity. It has seemed to me that a man who can work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks with a hide like leather, and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made his mark in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... scoffer Answered: "I disdain thine offer; Neither fear I God nor Devil; Thee and thy Gospel ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... did, without any counteracting influence? why should he not settle down with the conviction that religion is a matter of no moment? nay, why should he not become what he actually did become,—a scoffer and an atheist? Whenever I meet him, I see in his face, not only a reproduction of his mother's features, but that which tells of the reproduction of his mother's character. I pity him that he should ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... states ag'in: Thar's no sooperstition ridin' the ranges of my breast. Yet I sees enough in a long an' more or less eventful life— not to say an ill-employed life—to know that Providence packs a gun; an', as more than one scoffer finds out, she don't go heeled for fun. Thar's that Gene Watkins, who gets killed by lightnin' over by the Eagle Claw that time; downed for ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... parade an affection for it, this skepticism fills the intellects. No one writer of past years unsettled the already shallow-rooted faith of the people to such an extent as Voltaire. Yet he was by no means the man many of his enemies suppose him to have been. No mere scoffer or reviler of the bible could have obtained such an influence in France as Voltaire did. He was really a great man, and gained the affections of the people by his advocacy of liberty. It is more than probable that under a system of religion as pure as now exists in America, Voltaire would ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... him, and chill him to the very bones. This could not long be endured. He fled from the actual to the source of all the ideal—to that Saviour who, the infinite mediator, mediates between all hopes and all positions; between the most debased actual and the loftiest ideal; between the little scoffer of St. Giles's and his angel that ever beholds the face of the Father in heaven. He fell on his knees, and spoke to God, saying that he had made this man; that the mark of his fingers was on the man's soul somewhere. He prayed to the making Spirit ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... him. It was strange to hear Bickley, the scoffer at miracles, suggesting that this greatest of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the daily drinking and ablutions. At four o'clock in the afternoon, should you visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,—the Aquarius sign of the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats from Scotland to tote ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... vain emblems on thy shield; All figures—that is bragging play. A modest dedication make, And give no scoffer room to say, "What! Alvaro de Luna here? Or is it Hannibal again? Or does King Francis at Madrid Once more of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... think I could almost find it in my heart to retract, but it is too late; and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was the terrifying north-wind, which drives the ship into the harbor. While the scoffer spoke, women rushed up to the platform. The Salvation Army soldiers' hands were embraced and kissed; they were scarcely able to receive them all. The boys and the old men ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... mysteries. The invisible world enshrouds us. Spirits have their regards intently fixed on us, and a very slight vail divides us. Spurn the vulgar error," said the old veteran stoutly, "that a soldier must be a scoffer. I remember the holy record, and its thrilling declaration; 'We are a spectacle unto angels and unto men.'" A pause ensued, which neither of the listeners cared to terminate. At length he spoke again. "The dews are falling. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Presently the scoffer continued: "The Duvarneys would remain in the city, and on that very night, as they sit at dinner, a shell disturbs them, a splinter strikes Madame, and two days after she is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... though the priestly calling seemed all they had in common. The first was small of stature, thin of face, looking like a mediaeval, though he was a modern, saint; the other tall, well filled out like an epicure, yet not even Bonhomme Careau, the nearest approach to a scoffer in the two parishes, ever went so far as to call the Cure of Ste. Agatha by such an undeserved name, since the good, fat priest had the glaring fault of stinginess which all the country knew but never mentioned. ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... creed to deed, from self to humanity—this is the moving thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter will not succeed. God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his own ends. Faust will be led astray—"man errs while he strives"; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... white clear through. He was red-blooded, but at the same time his heart was clean. Once more he found himself contrasting the honest-eyed, pure-hearted Ruth with this sensual scoffer. There was no denying the physical appeal of the lithe, sinuous Russian; there was no gainsaying the call of the blood. On the other hand, the American girl stood for everything his own mother ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... seem to circle about the tree, just as Bluff says; and—yes, that's blood on the ground, as sure as you live! I guess I'm on the wrong track. He did have a merry circus. He did shoot an elk, but where has the blooming thing gone?" exclaimed the scoffer. ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Pentaur, looking kindly at the old man. "But you, you everlasting scoffer—you look pale. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a touch of Johnson's vigor:—"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr. Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the Connecticut men! Morris might understand banking, but in taste ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... he, "is not that Don Federico, the young advocate, well known in the coffee-houses as a virulent Exaltado, a determined scoffer, a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... this you add what Solomon says of Scoffers, that they are an abomination to mankind, let him that thinks fit scoff on, and be a Scoffer still; but I account them enemies to me and all ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... big chair, or from the top of a folding bed, jump down, and be at the hall door ready to greet the incomer, before she was halfway up the stairs. The cat never got down for the wrong person, and she never neglected to meet any and every member of our family who might be entering. The irreverent scoffer may call it "instinct," or talk about the "sense of smell." I call ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... I were to trust a devil, who might palm upon me his own fiendish performances for the works of men, how would the scoffer laugh? ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... removed to Brighton that he might live looking out upon the sea, which appealed to and soothed him. I never met a man who seemed to weigh so carefully every action, every word—even the pettiest—and so completely to find guidance through his own conscience. He was no scoffer in religious matters. In the domain of theology, however, he had little regard for decorum. It was to him a very faulty system hindering true growth, and the idea of rewards and punishments struck him as an appeal to very low ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... mine was. Most o' my money went into it an' stayed thar. Then I got a chance to tend light and ketch lobsters, an' hev stuck to it ever since. I take some comfort livin' and try an' pass it along. The widder Leach calls me a scoffer, but she allus comes to me when she's needin', an' don't allus have to cum, either. My life's been like most everybody else's—a streak o' lean an' a streak o' fat, with lean predominatin'. 'Twas a streak ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... on the Pharsalian Plains, the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes, and boldly questions them, and reads their riddles. The red light of innumerable watch-fires glares all round about, and shines upon the terrible face of the arch-scoffer; while on either side, severe, majestic, solemnly serene, we behold the gigantic forms of the children of Chimera, half buried in the earth, their mild eyes gazing fixedly, as if they heard through the midnight, the swift-rushing wings of the Stymphalides, striving ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in building up the Junker dream. A court official—the Oberhofprediger—was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he kept them ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... lance in rest, against the scoffer rode, Pierced at one thrust his envious breast, and down his turban trode. Now ride, now ride, Guarinos—nor lance nor rowel spare— Slay, slay, and gallop for thy life.—The land ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... for an orgy of Philistine rancour such as even London had never known before. The puritan middle class, which had always regarded Wilde with dislike as an artist and intellectual scoffer, a mere parasite of the aristocracy, now gave free scope to their disgust and contempt, and everyone tried to outdo his neighbour in expressions of loathing and abhorrence. This middle class condemnation swept the lower class away in its train. To ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... and fortunate of the adventurers who swarmed at the court of St. James. By dint of these and kindred qualities he had become an intimate companion of the Prince of Wales. The man had a wide observation of life; indeed, he was an interested and whimsical observer rather than an actor, and a scoffer always. A libertine from the head to the heel of him, yet gossip marked him as the future husband of the beautiful young heiress Antoinette Westerleigh. For the rest, he carried an itching sword and the smoothest tongue that ever graced a villain. I had been ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... it, with the appetites of brutes; much less to be threatened, as you threaten it, with infinite and eternal misery by I know not what necessary laws of Zeus, and to be put off at last with some myth or other about Prometheus. Surely your mother bare you a scoffer and pitiless, Socrates, and not, as you boast, a man-midwife ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... morality publicly upheld in England are the best known in the world. Any one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of most other countries. Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer. The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world. Despite all this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the chue, chue of the House-Sparrow, so exactly imitated in every respect that were it not for what follows, no one would suppose it to be any other bird. It is called a Mocking-Bird here, and it well deserves the name, for it is a real scoffer at the sorrows of other birds, which it laughs to scorn and turns into ridicule by parodying them so exactly. I never heard it attempt to imitate any of the Larks or Thrushes, although I have listened to ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after his apparent demise. He found something sensible in ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... see the tomb of one recorded proudly as "descended from the noble families of Stuart and Bruce", who, tradition says, was supposed to have held the position of servant to said scions of nobility. One who was known as a scoffer during life here is virtuously represented ah "a sincere worshipper of Eternal, Almighty and ever just God"; reminding us of the popular adage, "lying like an epitaph". Twice have we seen one stone made to do service for two in an amusing manner: on the upper part the usual, "Sacred to the memory ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... Abbot, horror-struck at the violence, implored, with uplifted hands, pardon for blood-shed committed within the sanctuary. Magdalen Graeme alone expressed triumph in the blow her descendant had dealt to the scoffer, mixed, however, with a wild and anxious expression of terror for her grandson's safety. "Let him perish," she said, "in his blasphemy—let him die on the holy pavement which he ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... she echoed, firing up at once. "I suppose if a fellow-mortal were on his way to the scaffold, you men would still ask for explanations. Listen to me. You're the only man here Maurice was at all friendly with—I shouldn't turn to you, you scoffer, you may be sure of it, if I knew of anyone else. He liked you; and at one time, what you said had a good deal of influence with him. It might still have. Go to him, Heinz, and talk straight to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... STRANGER.—We urge you, gentle maiden, to beware of the silken enticements of the stranger, until your love is confirmed by protracted acquaintance. Shun the idler, though his coffers overflow with pelf. Avoid the irreverent—the scoffer of hallowed things; and him who "looks upon the wine while it is red;" him too, "who hath a high look and a proud heart," and who "privily slandereth his neighbor." Do not heed the specious prattle about "first love," and so place, irrevocably, the seal upon your future destiny, before you have ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... wondering. Were all those people on Earth who claimed to feel the presence of dead loved ones near them? Were those people just straining their fancy—just comforting themselves with what they wished to believe? Or was the scoffer himself the fool? And if that could be so, on Earth, why could not this strange realm be of such a quality that an awareness of those who have passed from life would be the normal thing? Who shall say that the mysteries of life and death ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... levity again, thou scoffer, or even your years may prove a feeble protection!" said a stern, startling voice from behind. All eyes turned involuntarily at the unexpected sounds, and the muscular form of the Pilot was seen resuming its attitude of repose against the wall, though ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the thought is a part of my history, and I should be false to the earliest and most cherished sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed, or hesitated to avow that opinion, although it may be characterized as irrational by the wise, and ridiculous by the scoffer. From my earliest recollections of serious matters, I date the entertainment of something like an ineffaceable conviction, that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and this ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... his reproaches, he says: Isagoras the son of Tisander was of a noble family, but I cannot tell the original of it; his kinsmen, however, sacrifice to the Carian Jupiter. (Herodotus, v. 66.) O this pleasant and cunning scoffer of a writer, who thus disgracefully sends Isagoras to the Carians, as it were to the ravens. As for Aristogiton, he puts him not forth at the back door, but thrusts him directly out of the gate into Phoenicia, saying that he had his original from ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... God!" The Last Crusader cried, "And art Thou careless of Thine own? For us Thy Son in Salem died, And Salem is the scoffer's throne! ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... always something in which the human being is vitally, not merely aesthetically interested. It deals with no shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a part of vital problems—a statement which may provoke the scoffer, but will be found to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... sighting the cold Northern Star and losing the Southern Cross. I lay back and gloated over the starry picture overhead through a crisscross picture-mount of ragged grass. I left the confutation of the scoffer to Miss Moore. There was an edge on many of her remarks that night, and I could trust her to deal with him. But what she said I have forgotten. Only I remember that he gave her best at last. Then, and not till then, I broke silence, submitting ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... concerning the unwritten laws of God that 'know no change and are not of to-day nor yesterday, but must be obeyed in preference to the temporary commandments of men,'[3] is a protest on behalf of conscience against human oppression. And even in Euripides, regarded as an impious scoffer by some scholars,[4] there are not wanting, especially in the example of Alcestis, evidence of belief in that divine justice and moral order of which the virtues of self-devotion and sacrifice in the soul of man are ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... regret. He even showed me letters that had passed between them, and in which every horrid and immoral tenet was defended by one and denied by the other. These letters showed Colden as the advocate of suicide; a scoffer at promises; the despiser of revelation, of Providence and a future state; an opponent of marriage, and as one who denied (shocking!) that any thing but mere habit and positive law stood in the way of marriage, nay, of intercourse ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... mystery. From time immemorial its practice has been the subject of disputes, and its literature finds oftentimes its friends and foes ranged side by side. At one time a noted Israelite and Voltaire, the scoffer of Judaism, may be consulted on the question as to whether Israelite or Egyptian is entitled to priority as to its original practice with a like answer; and, again, Christians are found who, after a careful investigation, will accord ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of evil this castle was sought by our folk!" Thus Bricroo,[FN84] the Poisonous Scoffer, in mockery, jeering them, spoke: "The taunt," answered Ailill Mae Mata, "is true, and with grief I confess That the fame of the heroes of Ulster hereafter is like to be less, For a three of the Ulstermen's champions in stress of the fight have been quelled; And the vengeance we wait for ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the world holds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all—the sanity of human reason—has never ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... your knees, And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love: For I must tell you friendly in your ear,— Sell when you can; you are not for all markets: Cry the man mercy; love him; take his offer; Foul is most foul, being foul to be a scoffer. So take her to thee, shepherd;—fare ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... sample of each incarnation, and fused it into his constitution. In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practicer and propagator of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
