"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pseudo-education of the masses is to be blamed for it, which you have been spreading under the name of true wisdom, and by which you have eradicated religious belief and loyalty from the hearts of my subjects and alienated their affections from my person. This sham education, strutting about like a peacock, has always been odious to me. I hated it already from the bottom of my soul before I came to the throne, and, since my accession, I have done everything I could to suppress it. I mean ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... customs of our people; indeed, we practiced only what we expected to do when grown. Our games were feats with the bow and arrow, foot and pony races, wrestling, swimming and imitation of the customs and habits of our fathers. We had sham fights with mud balls and willow wands; we played lacrosse, made war upon bees, shot winter arrows (which were used only in that season), and coasted upon the ribs of animals ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... him at the end of his resources, observed: "A sister of her mother's lives at Sham Bazar; Binod Ghosh is the husband's name. You are on you way to Calcutta; if you take her with you and place her with her aunt, then this Kaystha girl will be cared for, and you will have done your ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... Barker?" She stood with the pillow- sham in her hand which she was just about to fasten on the pillow, and Sewell involuntarily took note of the fashion ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... Catholics, mighty few went to church at all, and most of them were resentful, often bitter, toward the church and hostile toward all kinds of organized religion. They accused the church of not doing its duty toward them, and they declared that organized religion was a sham ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... duties. Your lessons must be perfect; your drawers kept in order; your clothes mended; you must be punctual at school and orderly at home; do you hear? And if all this is not done, I shall take all your pretended religion for nothing but a sham, and shall pay no respect to it at all. Now go to bed and act religion for a month before I hear you talk another ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... Also one of the priests had gone home, and straight to court, to make a thousand complaints. The military governor who had deserted the colony did the same thing, adding, "There is no gold in the Indies of Antilla, and all the Admiral said about his discoveries was mere sham ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... their wickedness, and Bostock, in spite of their teeth, got seventy-five head of volunteer labour on board, of whom not more than a dozen died of injuries. He had a hand, besides, in the amiable pleasantry which cost the life of Patteson; and when the sham bishop landed, prayed, and gave his benediction to the natives, Bostock, arrayed in a female chemise out of the traderoom, had stood at his right hand and boomed amens. This, when he was sure he was among good fellows, was his favourite yarn. "Two hundred head ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... her guest as a nice-looking man dressed in deep mourning. "Young, my dear, with beautiful dark brown hair, and a grand beard, and a sweet sorrowful look. Ah, his eyes would tell anybody that his black clothes are not a mere sham. Whether married or single, of course I can't say. But I noticed the name on his travelling-bag. A distinguished name in my opinion—Hugh Mountjoy. I wonder what he'll order to drink when he has his dinner? What a ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... saith: 'ha, ha'; that smelleth the battle afar off, the encouraging of the captains, the shouting of the army." Military trappings are no longer looked upon as stage furniture, good only for Fourth-of-July parades and sham manoeuvers. War with us has become a stern reality, and promises to continue such, for people do not yield up willingly their independence, even to a world-power with a providential "destiny" to fulfil. And ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Fred Badger, and listening to what he had to say from time to time. Apparently Fred was as indignant as any of them, and so far as Jack could tell there was not a particle of sham about his fervent denunciation of the evil deed contemplated by those strangers anxious to beat the Chester people, who wagered with them, out ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... imagine that we're on the real business at last," said Jack, clasping his hands behind his head and stretching out his legs. "After so many sham fights, it seems rum to think of one in real earnest. The strange thing to me," he continued, "is to think how often my cousin and I used to talk about war, and wonder what it was like; and we thought he was the one more likely to ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... were in earnest, do you suppose they would go on for ever choosing sin and its ghastly companion as they do? Do you know, there are moments when I think that even their reverence for the purity of women is a sham. For why do they keep us pure? Is it not to make each morsel more delicious for themselves, that sense and sentiment may be satisfied together, and their own pleasure made more complete? Individuals may be in earnest, but the great bulk of mankind ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... amused themselves by reading novels or making a row. They would play various games about the bedrooms, vaulting or jumping over the beds, running races in sheets, getting through the windows upon the roofs, to frighten the study-boys with sham ghosts, or playing the thousand other pranks which suggested themselves to the fertile imagination of fifteen. But the favorite amusement was a bolstering match. One room would challenge another, and, stripping the covers off their ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... in our language, for happiness above all is the inner essential that must dominate a perfect wedding. An unhappy looking bride, an unwilling looking groom, turns the greatest wedding splendor into sham; without love it is a sacrament inadvisedly entered into, and the sight of a tragic-faced bride strikes chill ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... nations is utterly brutal and ruthless in its disregard of international morality, and that righteousness divorced from force is utterly futile. Reliance upon high sounding words, unbacked by deeds, is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of sham. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... suppose you think we're going to bother ourselves with you, and yer impudence, and get victuals for nothing. It's all sham. Here, Jim, tie ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... style of the Primary Assembly, and was occupied in selecting those of its members who were to be returned to the legislature under the new constitution. There being no provision for any interim government, the exercise of real power was suspended; the elections were a mere sham; the magistracy was a house swept and garnished, ready for the first ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... altar at your house a bridge from earth to heaven, or is it a sham, and a helper to those who say, Prayer is an ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... he thought, "for it was all real and plucky and true. Not a bit of sham in it. He meant it all, and he meant to go to his father when it was time for me to call him in nearly four hours' time. But nature's too strong for him. He won't wake up, and I shan't rouse him. It will be the doctor ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... seems, M. Villemessant's vaudevillist is but a type of a great class of men who deceive themselves by devices which in others they would pronounce monstrosities of silliness, and who hug their delusions with a gravity none the less profound from their own half consciousness of the sham. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... CHAMPLAIN (sham-plane), at the beginning of the seventeenth century, crossed the Atlantic in two pigmy barks—one of twelve, the other of fifteen tons—and ascended the St. Lawrence on an exploring tour. At Hochelaga all was changed. The Indian town had ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... Anno Dom. 1708, being the night this sham-prophet had so impudently fix'd for my last, which made little impression on myself; but I cannot answer for my whole family; for my wife, with a concern more than usual, prevailed on me to take somewhat to sweat for a cold; and, between the hours of eight and nine, to go to bed: The maid, as ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the Samurai. But there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of Zakkuri and the offensive little figure of It, his shadow—an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... since given him the clues. The story had some connection with the "Saengerkrieg auf Wartburg," and in this contest, he saw at once the possibility of fully revealing the qualities of his hero, who raises the first German protest against the pretended culture and sham morality of the Latin world. The old poem of this "Saengerkrieg," is further connected with the legend of Lohengrin. Thus it was that in foreign Paris he was destined to gain at once and permanently a realization of the native qualities of our common ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... with dauntless breast, The base invaders of his rights withstood," was surprised in his own house by major Weymies, who tore him away from his shrieking wife and children, marched him up to Cheraw court-house, and after exposing him to the insults of a sham trial, had him condemned and hung! The only charge ever exhibited against him was, that he had shot across Black river at ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... deal with things and thoughts rather than with words, and express, if not strengthen, the peculiar ties between the person writing and the person written to,—a letter which is not genuine,—is no letter, but a sham and a lie. A real letter, on the other hand, whatever its topic, cannot fail to be worth reading. Great thoughts, profound speculations, matters of experience, bits of observation, delicate fancies, romantic sentiments, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... also to push open the door. Presently the men of the defending party make a sortie from the room fully armed, and repel the attackers with much show of violence, but without bloodshed. After this sham fight has been repeated, perhaps several times, the bridegroom and his supporters are at last admitted to the room, and they rush in, only to find, perhaps, that the coy maiden has slipped away through the small ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... work to do should not have sported with Amaryllis, or played with the tangles of Neaera's hair,—should not have worn well-anointed love-locks and snowy linen,—should, on the other hand, have bared his brawny arm, and sent the hissing flail down swiftly upon the waled and blistered back of Sham! How much better would it have been, if he had written a history, in twelve elephantine volumes, of the rise, culmination, and decay of the Empire of Barataria, which we would have gone to prison, the rack, and the drop, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... sham affluence. My father was Genteel Poverty, and my mother was Poor Gentility. The sham affluence went when my father died. The real poverty then came out in all its ugliness. I was taken from a genteel ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in Byron's day, there were thousands to whom the world 'was a blank' at twenty or thereabouts, and of whose dark imaginings,' as Macaulay says, the waste was prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists', mystics and sceptics to whom everything is a 'sham,' an 'unreality'; Who tell us that the world stands in need of a great 'prophet,' a seer,' a 'true prophet', a large soul,' a god-like soul,'*—who shall dive into 'the depths of the human consciousness,' and ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... feigned letter as a vehicle for mildly infamous gossip in "Letters from the Palace of Fame. Written by a First Minister in the Regions of Air, to an Inhabitant of this World. Translated from an Arabian Manuscript."[21] Its pretended source and the sham Oriental disguise make the work an unworthy member of that group of feigned Oriental letters begun by G.P. Marana with "L'Espion turc" in 1684, continued by Dufresny and his imitator, T. Brown, raised to a philosophic ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... life had gone out of them—that is, we continued to live in populous cities, and we toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved on in making utterly useless things, merely because we had the habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things, which pretended to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless things. I will give you an illustration from the trades, which you will all understand. The proletariate, in the competitive and monopolistic time, used to make a kind of shoes for the proletariate, or the ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... for her knowledge of the love the Caliph bore to Kut al-Kulub: so she said to him, "O Commander of the Faithful, I made her a tomb amiddlemost the Palace and buried her there." Then she donned black,[FN295] a mere sham and pure pretence; and feigned mourning a great while. Now Kut al-Kulub knew that the Caliph was come back from his hunting excursion; so she turned to Khalif and said to him, "Arise; hie thee to the bath and come back." So he rose ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... "The king sends in his resignation," said the young Viscount de Segur. At Paris curiosity was the prevalent feeling; but the jokes were bitter. "The comptroller-general has raised a new troop of comedians; the first performance will take place on Monday the 20th instant," said a sham play-bill: "they will give us the principal piece False Confidences, followed by Forced Consent and an allegorical ballot, composed by M. de Calonne, entitled ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... was not shamming. A bucket of water thrown over any one about to faint would always bring them to; but if a man had made up his mind to sham, he could do it in spite of water. Of course you will ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her own solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoistic view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted, had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she was never to see again, and this ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... friend, but Castine no longer had any particular claims to friendship. The last time he had heard Vanne's whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property of the old seigneur. The two had come out of the melee with bruised heads, and Vanne with a bullet in his calf. But soon afterwards came Christine's elopement with Vanne, of which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... business. They have been wise enough to tell the red-skins that if men came in and found gold there would be such a lot come that the hunting would be all spoilt. There is no doubt that in some of the attacks made on the caravans there have been sham Indians mixed up with the real ones. Red-skins are bad enough, but they are good men by the side of scoundrels who are false to their colour, and who use Indians to kill whites. That is one reason I ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... directness, is a protest against the supposition or assumption that the personality and personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his dramatic work. It protests, at the same time, against the sham melancholy and pseudo-despair which Byron ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... whom once you call'd Your Saviour in Distress, You in his first Request deny'd, And then his Royal Patience try'd With a canting sham Address. ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... was attained. The act of giving away money for charitable purposes is, by this admirable invention, transformed into an amusement, and puts on the externals of profitable commerce. You play at shopping a while; and in order to keep up the illusion, sham goods do actually change hands. Thus, under the similitude of a game, I have seen children confronted with the horrors of arithmetic, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rarities has no room for three-volume novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain for literature. One or two of these simulacra, these sham-semblances of books, I possess, because honoured friends have given them to me; even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single volume. The dear little duodecimos of the last century, of course, are welcome in a library. That was a happy day, when by the discovery ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... emblematic of an unchangingly virtuous heart), and bamboos (emblematic of an upright and straight mind). The child is placed upright on a chequer-board, facing the auspicious point of the compass, and invested with the dress of ceremony. It also receives a sham sword and dirk. The usual ceremony of ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... finished and the walls not yet dried out. Effi kept it in mind, however, and looked further, being as long about it as possible. After two weeks Innstetten began to insist on her return and to make pointed allusions. She saw there was nothing left but to sham illness. Then she rented the apartment on Keith street, wrote a card saying she would be home the next day, and had the trunks packed. The next morning she stayed in bed and feigned illness, but preferred not ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... up, could hardly be restrained from falling tooth and nail on the prostrate foe. "Han's uff! You's chawed up one uf de varmints; jes' let Burlman Rennuls wind up dis one. Han's uff, I say; or I'll——." And with this the Fighting Nigger made a sham thrust with the knife at his comrade's nose, which forced him to fall back a few paces, where he sat doggedly down on his tail, with the injured air of a faithful follower who had ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... only contributed two "bed-spreads," and a "sheet-sham," and a set of antimacassars. If the reader wishes to know what "bed-spreads" and "sheet-shams" are, let him ask his intended, and let him see to it that he marries a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... like you who stands steadfastly near me, Knows me and likes me for just what I am, Some one like you who knows just how to cheer me, Some one who's real without pretense or sham. Some one whose fellowship isn't a fetter Binding my freedom—who's loyal all through, Some one whose life in this world makes it better, Blest to me, best to me—Some one ...
— Some One Like You • James W. Foley
... could possibly devise, have with dexterity been played off against them, in fruitless quibbling, and malicious suits, entirely foreign to the merits of the cause. Not to mention numberless other acts of oppression, the most extraordinary and unprecedented proceeding, by means whereof this sham writ of error hath been kept on foot ever since November, 1743, is to me," said the doctor, "a most flagrant instance not only of the prevalency of power and money, when employed, as in the present case, against an unfortunate helpless man, disabled, as he is, of the means of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... placed together on the floor of the jar. Will the Spider be able to know the one that belongs to her? The fool is incapable of doing so. She makes a wild rush and seizes haphazard at one time her property, at another my sham product. Whatever is first touched becomes a good capture and is forthwith ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... laws of human nature were operative equally at the North and at the South, it soon came about that both at the North and at the South there broke forth almost simultaneously strong manifestations of impatience. The genuine President at Washington and the sham President at Montgomery were assailed by the like pressing demand: Why did they not do something to settle this matter? Southern irascibility found the situation exceedingly trying. The imposing and dramatic ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the ladies were getting up. So Miss Van Siever also got up, and left Mr Conway Dalrymple to consider whether he could say or could think of himself that he was not a sham in anything. As regarded Miss Clara Van Siever, he began to think that he could not object to paint her portrait, even though there might be no sugar-plum. He would certainly do it as Jael; and he would, if he dared, insert dimly ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... has now become their own country. They winter in Lincolnshire, gathering fresh strength during 873 from the never-failing sources of supply across the narrow seas. Again, however, in this year of ominous rest they renew their sham peace with poor Buhred and his Mercians, who thus manage to tide it over another winter. In 874, however, their time has come. In the spring, the pagan army under the three kings, Guthrum, Oskytal, and Amund, burst ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... past; our painting is only first-rate when it handles landscapes and animals, and seems likely so to remain; but, meanwhile, nobody cares. Some of the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question, in general, a 'sham and a snare,' and whisper to each other confidentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a 'bore,' and that Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all; while the middle classes look on the Art movement half amused, as with a pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... got up I received a note from the false Astrodi, asking me if I expected her and her great chum to supper. I had scarcely replied in the affirmative, when the sham Duke of Courland I had left at Grenoble appeared on the scene. He confessed in a humble voice that he was the son of clock-maker at Narva, that his buckles were valueless, and that he had come to beg an alms of me. I gave him ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... newspaper. When you think your wife looks unusually well, it would not hurt you in the least to tell her so, and the way you leave her in the morning is going to settle her happiness for the day, though she may be too proud to let you know that it makes any difference. Women are quick to detect a sham, and they don't want you to say anything that you don't feel, but you are pretty sure to feel tenderly toward her sometimes, careless though you may be, and then is the time to tell her so. You don't want to wait until she is dead, ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... to answer your question, Paul, but I understand enough of both French and German to know that his broken English is a mere sham—a mixture, and a bad one too, of what no German or Frenchman would use—so it's not likely to be the sort of bad English that a Swede would speak. Moreover, I have caught him once or twice using English words correctly at one time and wrongly at another. No, you may depend ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... of it. All, save the shameless, are toiling to escape that trial. My gentleman, treading the white highway across the solitary heaths, that swell far and wide to the moon, is, by the postillion, who has seen him, pronounced no sham. Nor do I think the opinion of any man worthless, who has had the postillion's authority for speaking. But it is, I am told, a finer test to embellish much gentleman-apparel, than to walk with dignity totally unadorned. This simply tries the soundness of our faculties: that tempts them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... so much about her in all the years of their intimacy as he saw and knew now: though he saw more than existed in reality. For this young lady was not able to carry out any emotion to the full; but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham love, a sham taste, a sham grief, each of which flared and shone very vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... right in most of the things she said. He was perfectly unreasonable, and right in all of the things he said. Their argument was absurdly hot, and hurt them pathetically. It was difficult, at first, for Carl to admit that he was at odds with his playmate. Surely this was a sham dissension, of which they would soon tire, which they would smilingly give up. Then, he was trying not to be too contentious, but was irritated into retorting. After fifteen minutes they were staring at each other as at intruding strangers, he remembering ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... again!" cried Thornton, hotly. "It is the truth. Your boasted Southern courage is a sham. You ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... doubt of that, especially when one's grandfather was a Revolutionary notability, and other antecedents of a piece—but men are all alike at heart, only the worldly ones wear flimsy masks, you know, and pretend to adore intellect and ugliness, when beauty is the only thing they care for—all a sham, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... century; both alike are making room for a spruce imitation of the nineteenth. We shall no longer see the dwelling-place either of Robert the Devil or of Henry Fitz-Empress; in its stead we shall trace the last masterpiece of the reign of Napoleon the Third. Sham Romanesque is grotesque everywhere, but it is more grotesque than all when we see newly-cut capitals stuck into the windows of a roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... on the one hand—you can see for yourself in any unfashionable part of Great Britain—are people badly, uncomfortably, painfully shod in old boots, rotten boots, sham boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world, with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great numbers of people who, either through wealth or trade disorder, are doing no work. And our question is: 'Why cannot the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... My name is Vane too—Carol Vane. It's not a sham one either, such as a lot of girls like me take. It's my own—at least, I have always been called Carol, and ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific doctrine ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... the object of my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs. The shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the house rose above it for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered through the window and, seeing ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... evening service that has been described acted as a rude disenchantment, and the beautiful church, to which Mrs. Arnot had returned every Sabbath morning with increasing pleasure, became as repulsive as it had been sacred and attractive. To her sincere and earnest spirit anything in the nature of a sham was peculiarly offensive; and what, she often asked herself, could be more un-Christlike than this service which had been held in ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... him, and watch his awkward attempts to catch it, and then while he was just on the point of getting at some idea of it to bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognized as part of the business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of place when adopted by a layman and a man of the world, who ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the boy? This, however, being one of the few things that he could not do, he was obliged to let the boy go while he watched Maroney. The affair seemed to have come to the sticking point. Maroney's face showed deep anxiety, and his limping was all a sham. The boy had taken a note to some place, but where, ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... A refused payment, and provoked B to commence an action. The law he knew very well was on the side of B: but that was of little consequence. Plaintiff B brought his action in Trinity Term. Defendant A pleaded a sham plea: asserted plaintiff had been paid for his meadow, by a firkin of butter: [All a lie, you know.] long vacation was thus got over, and next term defendant files a bill in Chancery, to stay proceedings ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... about this decline and fall? Conjecture was keen, but investigation was difficult. Father Goriot was not communicative; in the sham countess' phrase he was "a curmudgeon." Empty-headed people who babble about their own affairs because they have nothing else to occupy them, naturally conclude that if people say nothing of their doings it is because their doings will not bear being talked about; so the highly ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... cared not to abridge. He sat down, he took pen and paper, because he loved Lucy and had much to say to her; because he was faithful and thoughtful, because he was tender and true. There was no sham and no cheat, and no hollow unreal in him. Apology never dropped her slippery oil on his lips—never proffered, by his pen, her coward feints and paltry nullities: he would give neither a stone, nor an excuse—neither a scorpion; nor a ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... sooner or later, and sensible men were of opinion that the sooner the better. Of Harley, "Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," as his titles ran, we shall not hear any more; we have already foreshadowed the remainder of his life and his death. This short account of his sham impeachment is introduced here merely as a part of the historic continuity of the narrative. History has few characters less interesting than that of Oxford. He held a position of greatness without being great; he fell, and even his fall could not ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... had a sham bedstead in that room? The idea of it riled up something besides sympathy in my bosom. I had rather see bare walls than a bedstead like the one he died on. Why don't they take ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... astonished at the unusual capacity for government displayed by an Oriental people, was tempted to accept the famous assertion which Nubar Pasha put into the mouth of the Khedive Ismail: 'We are no longer in Africa, but in Europe.' Yet all was a hateful sham ['The government of the Egyptians in these far-off countries is nothing else but one of brigandage of the very worst description.'—COLONEL GORDON IN CENTRAL AFRICA, April 11, 1879.] The arbitrary ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... precipitous spur above the town, surrounded by an amazingly irregular sort of churchyard, full, literally, to bursting (the Kirkbys lie there, generation after generation of them, beneath pompous tombs), and the other church a hideous rectangular building, with flat walls and shallow, sham Gothic windows. It was thought extremely beautiful when it was built forty years ago. The town itself is an irregular and rather picturesque place, with a twisting steep High Street, looking as if a number of houses had been shot at random into this nook among the hills ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from the true—in ridding Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham admirers. This is not to say, of course, that there might not have been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's peculiar methods must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... junior is compelled, for the sake of appearances, to furnish his shelves with law books, and cover his table with counterfeit briefs. Under the Stuarts, he placed a bowl of spurious money amongst the sham papers that lay upon ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... high building which surmounted the gate, and which was several stories one above the other, the port-holes were closed with red doors, on the outside of which were painted the representations of cannon, not unlike at a distance the sham ports in a ship of war. The gates of a Chinese city are generally double, and placed in the flanks of a square or semicircular bastion. The first opens into a large space, surrounded with buildings, which are appropriated entirely for military uses, being ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... nothing I wished for so much, and I never told Martyn of her little manoeuvres, knowing he would not stand them; and now what he will do, I can't think, unless you and Edward will take her off our hands. I believe you might do her good. She is an unfathomable mixture of sham and earnest, and she really likes you, and thinks much of you, as having a certain prestige, and being a woman of the world" (fancy that). "Besides, she is really religious in a sort of a way; much good you'll say it does her, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... turned my brain at first; and my eyes were so dazzled by the pitiful glistening of the pageant, the sham splendor of the sham court, and the half-mocking, half-serious homage paid me, that I could see nothing beyond the shining surface, and the blackness, and corruption, and horror within, were altogether lost upon me. This feeling increased when, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... is an acute, sagacious, and austere bench a perilous foe to the trickery of the ignorant or half-prepared advocate, but the veteran practitioners around him are quick to detect every sign of mental weakness, disingenuous artifice, or disposition to substitute sham for reality. Forensic life is, to a large extent, life in the broad glare of day, under the scrutiny of keen-eyed observers and merciless critics. In every cause there are two attorneys engaged, of whom one is a sentinel upon ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... framed print of a large house, as much of a sham castle as the nature of things would permit; and beneath were the words 'Cheveleigh, the ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Martignano), a small lake in southern Etruria, 15 m. due N.N.W. of Rome, in an extinct crater. Augustus drew from it the Aqua Alsietina; the water was hardly fit to drink, and was mainly intended to supply his naumachia (lake made for a sham naval battle) at Rome, near S. Francesco a Ripa, on the right bank of the Tiber, where some traces of the aqueduct were perhaps found in 1720. The course of the aqueduct, which was mainly subterranean, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... familiar stratagem in warfare. It would seem that Halleck fully believed that Grant would assume actual command, on reaching Sherman (as he had commanded when with Meade during the past campaign), and concluded that any real armistice again made would be in Grant's name. Any other would be a sham or would have been made before Grant was present. Under such circumstances he could not be blamed for telling his subordinates that only Grant's authority or his own must bind them. He was mistaken, in fact, for Grant's arrival was not even known to Johnston, and Sherman concluded ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... You, the rouged stage female With a crook, Chalked Arcadian sham, You that made my soul's sleep's dream ail— Your soul fit to damn? ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I own, to be piping, But they who can't pity—why I pities they. Says the captain, says he; I shall never forget it, Of courage, you know, boys, the true from the sham," ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... is crowded. Th' cars can har'ly get through. Th' polis foorce is out, an' hammerin' th' heads iv th' delighted throng. Riprisintatives iv th' free an' inlightened press, th' pollutyem iv our liberties, as Hogan says, bright, intilligent young journalists, iver ready to probe fraud an' sham, disgeezed as waithers, is dashin' madly about, makin' notes on their cuffs. Business is suspinded. They'se no money in Wall Sthreet. It's all at th' sacred scene. Hour be hour, as th' prisints ar-re delivered, th' bank rates go up. Th' Threeasury Departmint has to go on a silver basis, there ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... I was afraid to open my eyes, or even to breathe; and I thought that, if I could sham being dead, they would carry me on deck, and I would then soon show them the contrary. I guessed that I must have rolled over with my face away from the door, so that they couldn't see it. Presently I felt a hand placed on my shoulder to draw me round. I let them move me as ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... strength must answer to his name, or be accounted for as "on duty", "on furlough", "in imprisonment", "deserted", "deceased", "in hospital." Regiments are also marched out of barracks into the country with bands playing and colours flying, and there are reviews and sham fights occasionally. Soldiers, too, are placed as sentries before officers' quarters and other places, and they have many other duties to perform even in the piping times of peace. I shall soon have to show the life they lead in war-time. Theirs is not an idle life, but still they have ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... to one of his men, and bade him order Captain Richard and his people to march the lower way on the side of the marches, and meet them in the forest; which was all a sham, for they had no Captain Richard, or any such ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... terrified companions were bending over her, endeavoring to restore her to consciousness. In the background were some flying figures, who were hastening up to separate the combatants. The sketch was one of real life, denuded of any sham element of romance, and this was the one that M. de Breulh had chosen. The two men discussed the size of the picture, and not ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... So Sham o' Blue Bills, wi' thi pints and thi gills, It's baan to be better for thee, To Keighla an' back tha ma go in a crack, Wen tha's baan on a bit ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... attempting to pass off a counterfeit coin. It is either a confession that one is so ashamed of one's face that one dare not let it be seen in public, or it is an attempt to deceive the world into accepting you as something other than you are. It has the same effect on the observer that those sham oak beams and uprights that are so popular on the front of suburban houses have. They are not real beams or uprights. They do not support anything, or fill any useful function. They are only a thin veneer of oak stuck on to pretend that they are ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... some future time when his Patagonian battalions were to drive hostile infantry before them like sheep; but this future time was always receding; and it is probable that, if his life had been prolonged thirty years, his superb army would never have seen any harder service than a sham fight in the fields near Berlin. But the great military means which he had collected were destined to be employed by a spirit far more daring and inventive than ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to act, whilst the rest thus appointed:—Dividing his troops into three columns, Sir Edward directed that General Keane, at the head of the 95th, the light companies of the 21st, 4th, and 44th, together with the two black corps, should make a demonstration, or sham attack, upon the right; that General Gibbs, with the 4th, 21st, 44th, and 93rd, should force the enemy's left, whilst General Lambert, with the 7th and 43rd, remained in reserve, ready to act as circumstances ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig |
