"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... embroidery, and crosswise with fancy ribbons and gay calicoes; she had made a mosaic of the back which must have delighted her rear neighbors in church; and she had used the gown with such care that, although it had never been washed, it was not badly soiled. One piece for the body, two for the head, a sham pocket,—that was all. The footgear consisted of crash bands, bast slippers, rope cross-garters. The artists to whom I showed the costume, later on, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... pluck which often makes it necessary to circumscribe the freedom of his movements. One day last spring, when he joined an assembly of his fellow-boarders on a sunny porch, the shortness of his tether did not prevent him from picking a quarrel with a big raccoon. After a few sham manoauvres the old North American suddenly lost his temper and charged his tormentor with an energy of action that led to an unexpected result,—for in springing back the Rhesus snapped his wire chain, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Latin and the secular part of the college discipline I will say nothing, except that it was generally inefficient. The theological and Biblical teaching was a sham. We had come to the college in the first place to learn the Bible. Our whole existence was in future to be based upon that book; our lives were to be passed in preaching it. I will venture to say that ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... you even crossed out the dedication and tidied me out of the introduction. Listen to me, Pembroke. You've done people all your life—I think without knowing it, but that won't comfort us. A wretched devil at your school once wrote to me, and he'd been done. Sham food, sham religion, sham straight talks—and when he broke down, you said it was the world in miniature." He snatched at him roughly. "But I'll show you the world." He twisted him round like a baby, and through the open door they saw only the quiet valley, but in it a ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... many young men of noble birth, chatting together, or betting, with their waxed tablets and their styli(11) in their hands, some waiting the commencement of the race between Fuscus and Victor, others watching with interest the progress of a sham fight on horseback between two young men of the equestrian order, denoted by the narrow crimson stripes on their tunics, who were careering to and fro, armed with long staves and circular bucklers, in all the swift and beautiful movements ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... occasional gusts of rolling smoke, it was an easy matter to creep upon the fireman unawares and to bring him to the ground stunned and helpless. That accomplished, Max immediately proceeded to remove the man's tunic and helmet. Dale then understood—it was to be the ruse of the sham sentry outside ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... tell you, that my uncle begged the Duke of Newcastle to stifle this report of the sham Pretender lest the King should hear it and recall the Duke, as too great to fight a counterfeit. It is certain that the army adore the Duke, and are gone in the greatest spirits; and on the parade, as they began their march, the Guards vowed that they would neither give nor ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... came he felt at once he would love to possess a castle of his own among these romantic mountains. "Seldon!" he exclaimed contemptuously. "They call Seldon a castle! But you and I know very well, Sey, it was built in 1860, with sham antique stones, for Macpherson of Seldon, at market rates, by Cubitt and Co., worshipful contractors of London. Macpherson charged me for that sham antiquity a preposterous price, at which one ought to procure a real ancestral mansion. Now, these castles are real. They ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... brethren, I point you to all the thousands who are ready to say, 'This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him.' Are there any who give counter-evidence; that say, 'We have tried it. It is all a sham and imagination. We have asked this Christ of yours to forgive us, and He has not. We have asked Him to cleanse us, and He has not. We have tried Him, and He is an impostor, and we will have no more to do with Him.' There are people, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the official answer, namely, that gentlemen holding cadet-commissions are entitled to wear service dress; but the real object of the question was revealed when Brother REDDY from the backbenches piped out, "Does that apply to sham officers wearing uniform in this House?" There was a roar of laughter, and Major NEWMAN ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... infinite management, and display of such good-humor as at least deserves credit, the nominal Sovereign Majesty of Poland. Anarchic Grandees have been kings over him; ambitious, contentious, unmanageable;—very fanatical too, and never persuaded that August's Apostasy was more than a sham one, not even when he made his Prince apostatize too. Their Sovereignty has been a mere peck of troubles, disgraces and vexations: for those thirty-five years, an ever-boiling pot of mutiny, contradiction, insolence, hardly tolerable even ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that fresh ardor and energy which is sneered at in the familiar proverb, "A new broom sweeps clean," Felix swept away at the misery, and the ignorance, and the vice of his degraded district. He was not going to spare himself; it should be no sham fight with him. The place was his first battlefield; and it had a strong attraction ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... few, I imagine, will bear inspection, who are absolutely stripped 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 Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the lake, and was received with open arms. She was an object of envy to the unsophisticated young ladies of the neighborhood, and of open and unbounded admiration to the young men. She had learned to dress and to put on flash airs, and her experience in vice, gilded over by this divorce sham, rendered her much more attractive metal to matrimonially-disposed Strephons than any quiet, retiring Daphne of the rural district. She soon became the wife of a well-to-do country store-keeper, and made his home a pandemonium, which ended by him employing a regular lawyer to procure a divorce, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... which made him so popular among his fellows and such a cypher in his home. At an early date in his married life his position had been clearly defined beyond possibility of mistake. It was his business to make money, and, when called upon, to jump through hoops and sham dead at the bidding of his wife and daughter Mae. These duties he had been performing conscientiously for ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... you, and do not listen to the malicious explanations of your wife's brother; he is a knave whom you ought not to hear to the prejudice of the most tender and most faithful mistress that ever was. Above all, do not allow yourself to be moved by that woman: her sham tears are nothing in comparison with the real tears that I shed, and with what love and constancy make me suffer at succeeding her; it is for that alone that in spite of myself I betray all those who could cross my love. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... has not escaped the malice of Porphyry, supposes some error and passion in one or both of the apostles. By Chrysostom, Jerome, and Erasmus, it is represented as a sham quarrel a pious fraud, for the benefit of the Gentiles and the correction of the Jews, (Middleton's Works, vol. ii. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... of delight and encouragement from the dense circle of spectators, the lady danced round the sham clergyman, dodging his ponderous blows, slipping under his arms, and smacking back at him most successfully. Once she tripped and fell over her own skirt, but was up and at him again in ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... boarding-house, Nicholas wept and brooded. And now that the possibility of the splendid reward was gone, Nickie dwelt upon the fearful risk he had run more than he had done in all the long months since he knelt by the murdered man in Bigg's Buildings. He realised that in offering these sham stones for inspection he had probably done a mad thing. The act might bring the noose about his neck, if he were arrested, who would believe the absurd story ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... descended from the caliph's throne, and Mesrour went before him, to shew him the way into an inner apartment, where there was a table spread; several eunuchs ran to tell the musicians that the sham caliph was coming, when they immediately began a concert of vocal and instrumental music, with which Abou Hassan was so charmed and transported, that he could not tell what to think of all he saw and heard. "If this is a dream," ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... they behaved with patience and modesty towards the government, and upon occasion of the Rye-house plot in 1682, thought proper to declare their innocence of that sham plot, in an address to the king, wherein, appealing to the Searcher of all hearts, they say, their principles do not allow them to take up defensive arms, much less to avenge themselves for the injuries they received from others: that they continually ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... you all talk! That story was invented by that sham doctor, and is nothing but a trick of his. He wants to masquerade as an Aesculapius, and so has started this consumption theory. Fortunately her husband isn't jealous. [IVANOFF makes an inpatient gesture] As for Sarah, I wouldn't trust a word or an action of hers. I have made a point ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... out, after surgical preliminaries, to be devoured by vultures, and how the vultures, when gorged, would flap to the roof of his house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my left would tell how, when he was unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack of influenza, and on the day when a chance offered itself would get up and don his only suit—a glorious one—and, fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him look older, would go forth to confront ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... the Sicilians, whom he called his clients, by acts of mutual kindness, and he now stood forth to avenge them with a good will. The friends of Verres tried to procure a Praevaricatio, or sham accusation, conducted by a friend of the defendant, but Cicero stopped this by his brilliant and withering invective on Caecilius, the unlucky candidate for this dishonourable office. The judges, who were all senators, could not but award the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... They stormed a village after the march past, which was a charming sight to see. The people in the village used black powder, so you could tell from what parts of the brown, sun-dried cane houses the shots came from. They took cover wonderfully, considering it was only sham fight, ran in in sections, generally aimed at something, and fired without flinching, though they wore boots, which must have been a new and painful experience. I felt quite martial myself, and felt how excellent it must be to go fighting with some hundreds or thousands ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... of a sham fight in the evening?' cried the soldier's daughter indignantly. 'There, I can't see ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had a sinister look that made us realize, if we had not done so before, that this was real war that we were about to engage in—no sham battle or manoeuvres. ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... shallow trivialities of the land and found consolation in the strength of your stately solitudes! How often have I turned from the tinselled presence of the shore, the infinite pretensions of dry land that make life a sorry, hectic sham, and found in the black bosom of the Great Mother solace and comfort! Dear, lovely sea, man—half of every sphere, as far removed in the sequence of your strong emotions from the painted fripperies of the woman-land as pole ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Midaun, or Parade Ground, with its long-drawn arrays of Sepoy chivalry, its grand reviews before the Burra Lard Sahib, (as in domestic Bengalee we designate the Governor-General,) its solemn sham battles, and its welkin-rending regimental bands, by whose brass and sheepskin God saves the Queen twice a day; from Government House, with its historic pride, pomp, and circumstance, and its red tape, its aides-de-camp, and its adjutant-birds, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... people. He talked to the Rajput chiefs, and persuaded them—they were not difficult to persuade—that Dr. Roberts was an agent and a spy of the English Government at Calcutta, that his medicines were a sham. When it was necessary, Surji Rao said that the medicines were a slow form of poison, but generally he said they were a sham. He persuaded as many of the chiefs as dared, to remonstrate with the Maharajah, and to follow his example of going about looking as if ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... his sublime paganism to her petty creed. With a woman's withering contempt for her own art displayed in another woman, she thought how she herself could have touched him with the peace that the majesty of their woodland aisles—so unlike this pillared sham—had taught her own passionate heart, had she but dared. Mingling with this imperfect theology, she felt she could have proved to him also that a brunette and a woman of her experience was better than an immature blonde. She ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of arms, "Attributed to Padeloup" The sham Deromes have lost their charms, The things Le ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... bear-kill, right then t' go home 'n' lie about, tellin' how they fit with it, would 'a suited our sham hunters better 'n' a whole passle o' antlers; so I busted through th' bush fast as I could, fallin' 'n' rippin' my clothes nigh off—only t' find our hounds snappin' 'n' bayin' round a mighty big buck, that when I first sighted him, seemed to be jest standin' still watchin' th' hounds. ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... people all my life; but I'd rather die twenty times than owe anything to him. He knew before I was born that he was going to wreck my life, and he did it, and he wrecked yours, and his marriage with any other woman but you is a lie and a sham, and Estelle knows it very well. Now I hate her as much as him, and I hate those who let her marry him, and I hate the clergyman that will do it; and if I could ruin them by killing myself on their doorstep, I would. But ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... in a bad dilemma; he had to insist that Rosie should keep his conversion a secret. But Rosie became indignant, she set her lips and declared that a conversion that had to be kept secret was no conversion at all, it was simply a low sham, and Peter Gudge was a coward, and she was sick of him! So poor Peter went away, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... women saw in it a message of encouragement for the aspirations they themselves were cherishing. "The moral indignation which her political opponents exhibited," said a leading jurist, "was unfortunately a mere sham. They had not only tolerated, but had actually patronised, a female who formerly held the equivocal position which the Countess of Landsfeld recently held, because the former made herself subservient to the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... not only fought better, but (which was not always the case) moved and manoeuvred better, than the picked veterans of the French army—is sufficiently shown by the fact that "he selected it in preference to all his other victories, as the most fitting to be fought over in sham-fight on the plains of St Denis, in the presence of the three crowned heads who occupied Paris after the second abdication of the Emperor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... all a sham. Perhaps I have indulged her too much, and not begun early enough to subdue her violent temper. She is very wilful, ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... bore, with visage sad and pale, And tortures you with some lugubrious tale; Relates stale jokes collected near and far, And in return expects a choice cigar; Your brandy-punch he calls the merest sham, Yet does not scruple to partake a dram. His prying eyes your secret nooks explore; No place is sacred to the college bore. Not e'en the letter filled with Helen's praise, Escapes the sight of his unhallowed gaze; Ere one short hour its silent course has flown, Your Helen's charms to half the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... governed him now. He was not exactly the man to go back on a 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... been most friendly since the night I had dug him out from under the catmen, and I knew no way to refuse without exposing myself for the sham trader I was. But I was deathly apprehensive. Even with Rakhal I had never entered any ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... don't understand and I am afraid to tell you, but I am such a wicked girl—such a hypocrite, and so unworthy of your relationship and love. I am a cheater and a waster. My life is all lies and sham. It always has been lies and sham. I wish to tell you everything so that you may ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... in order to show how destitute of all strategetical combinations was the whole plan of campaign in Syria. Malte Brun estimates the population of the district of Sham at two millions, but we are inclined to question the accuracy of this calculation, since no two travellers are agreed as to the numbers of the Druses, some estimating them at 120,000, others at a million. The Turks form two-fifths of the population—they ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... injuriously break up a man alive; and that it seems but reasonable that we should carry ourselves as favourably, at least, towards the use of pleasure as we do towards that of pain! Pain was (for example) vehement even to perfection in the souls of the saints by penitence: the body had there naturally a sham by the right of union, and yet might have but little part in the cause; and yet are they not contented that it should barely follow and assist the afflicted soul: they have afflicted itself with grievous and special torments, to the end that by emulation of one another the soul and body might ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... nations. Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's right truth would have made them free. They have become enchanted; stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge peril, because they were not wise enough. They have forgotten the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true. They answer the Sphinx's question wrong. Foolish men cannot answer it aright! Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for eternal fact, and go ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... was not a religious meeting; it was a meeting full of religion. And it was a picture that will ever stand fresh in my memory and which will be an inspiration in time of doubt. There was nothing there but the real things, absolutely no sham of any kind. Oh, it was wonderful! I hope you can get just a little idea of what it was. I wish you would keep this letter. I want to be able to read ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... conservative, and responsible statesmen walk off with the portfolios of place and privilege and pay under their honest arms. But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a mushroom republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and such sham and selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their miserable heads among faithful, fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen. At the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... study them, and especially their weaknesses. He would not cheat them; for there was in him an innate vein of honesty, so surly and explosive, at times, as to give him much trouble. The severest part of his self-education had been the repression of his dangerous inclination to call a sham a sham on the spot, and to answer fools according to their folly. That youthful rashness, however, was now well-nigh subdued, and Tom could flatter and bully also, when it served his turn—as who cannot? Let him that is without sin among my readers, cast the first ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Pickering, and Beverly Randolph were ordered by the president to go to the Maumee to conclude a general treaty which Indians had declared their willingness to enter into. But the commissioners were detained at Niagara by sham conferences with Gov. John Graves Simcoe, of Canada, until the middle of July, when the Indians sent them word that unless they would in advance "agree that the Ohio shall remain the boundary between us," the proposed "meeting would be altogether unnecessary." The commissioners ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... cab-horse that took him to the station had hammered it out remorselessly all the way. The engine had caught it up, and repeated it with unvarying, endless iteration. The newspapers were full of it. When Dare turned to them in desperation he saw it written in large letters across the sham columns. There was nothing but that anywhere. It was the news of the day. Sick at heart, and giddy from want of food, he sat crouched up in the corner of his empty carriage, and vaguely wished the train would journey on for ever and ever, nervously dreading the time ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... condemnation. The following superlative summary is put into the mouth of a minor character, but I think it is fairly representative of Remington's later attitude. "But of all the damned things that ever were damned," says the plain-spoken Britten, "your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest." As a commentary, I find this exaggerated; and although it is in the mouth of one who is not presented ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... up cheating the public, the students apologize but never stop their mischiefs. Society is made up, I think it probable, of people just like those students. One may be branded foolishly honest if he takes seriously the apologies others might offer. We should regard all apologies a sham and forgiving also as a sham; then everything would be all right. If one wants to make another apologize from his heart, he has to pound him good and strong until he begs ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... over the ground, dressed in uniform, and mounted on their splendid steeds: their plumes waving over their cocked-hats in true military array. A band of music, as is usual, accompanied the soldiers. There was also a "sham-fight," before the breaking up of the encampment, and it was really terrifying to me, who had never seen a battle fought, to witness two columns of troops drawn up, and, at the roll of the drum, behold them engage ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... 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
... S—— preaches those saintly sermons to us about our baptismal vows, and the nobleness of an unworldly life, and calls on us to live for something purer and higher than we are living for, I confess that sometimes all my life seems to me a mere sham,—that I am going to church, and saying solemn words, and being wrought up by solemn music, and uttering most solemn vows and prayers, all to no purpose; and then I come away and look at my life, all resolving itself into a fritter about dress, and sewing-silk, cord, braid, and buttons,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... For instance, there is the confidence trick, in which the rustic is beguiled by the honest stranger into trusting him. This trick was practised three hundred years ago. Or there is the ring-dropping trick, it is as old as the hills. Or there is the sham sailor—now very rarely met with. When we have another war he will come to the front again. We have still the cheating gambler, but he has always been with us. In King Charles the Second's time he was called a Ruffler, a Huff, or a Shabbaroon. ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... whole, the Democrats were less successful in manufacturing enthusiasm. When one convention of young Democrats failed, for want of support, Douglas saved the situation only by explaining that hard-working Democrats could not leave their employment to go gadding. They preferred to leave noise and sham to their opponents, knowing that in the end "the quiet but certain influence of truth and correct principles" would prevail.[112] And when the Whigs unwittingly held a great demonstration for "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," on the birthday of King ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... gentleman's disadvantage, of whom I must declare myself an admirer; namely, that Signior Nicolini and the lion have been seen sitting peaceably by one another, and smoking a pipe together behind the scenes; by which their common enemies would insinuate that it is but a sham combat which they represent upon the stage: but upon inquiry I find, that if any such correspondence has passed between them, it was not till the combat was over, when the lion was to be looked upon as dead according ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... tarpaulin hat, it was a very cheap one; and therefore proved a real sham and shave; it leaked like an old shingle roof; and in a rain storm, kept my hair wet and disagreeable. Besides, from lying down on deck in it, during the night watches, it got bruised and battered, and lost all its beauty; so that it ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... back to Valparaiso. Being Yankee born and not a stocking-banker like old Buck Vliet, he was all for Valparaiso with an island to sell to the Chilian Government, and a concession and a syndicate fair in view. This cargo of beads, cheap guns, sham jewellery, canned meats, and rum, that he had aboard for the islands, would keep: the rum would even be improved by a little Christian delay. But, if he sank it all, all was nothing to the ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... they 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 might be more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... red tablecloth, two canaries, and a window-sill array of turnips sprouting in bottles. The rush of bead portieres as you walked through them. Hassocks. A freshly washed-and-ironed ribbon bow on a chair back. Pillow shams. Nottingham-lace curtains with sham drapes woven into them. A ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas—these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... as the conventions are respected and the sin hidden—all the rottenness going on beneath the respectable structure of our society. I want as far as is possible to emancipate our lives from such slavery; to make less easy the hypocrisy which law and custom sanction; to gain freedom from a sham morality and the pretense of a righteousness that we do not maintain. It is a necessary step, for me at least, on the way to any kind of improvement. More and more I am convinced that we shall have to ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... got up to my room, and there, as I was ringing the bell for Agnes, Charlie's piece of paper fell out on the floor. I had forgotten all about it. Wasn't it a mercy it did not drop while I was with Lady Carriston? This was all it was: "Come down to tea half-an-hour earlier; shall sham a hurt wrist to be back ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... got so we could adjust them in a remarkably short time. We were also given our steel helmets while here, and we realized fully that we were getting nearer and nearer to the scene of action, and that our sham warfare would soon give way to actual fighting. We were also drilled in rifle shooting and by the time we were ready to leave, we were in every way fit to participate in the great struggle in which we were soon ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... and the United States of America and France and Italy, that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them. Unless this is arrived at before the Covenant is signed the League of Nations will be a sham and a mockery. It will be regarded, and rightly regarded, as a proof that its principal promoters and patrons repose no confidence in its efficacy. But once the leading members of the League have made it clear that they have reached an understanding ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... any rate, in the year in which The Ten Pleasures was published—1682-1683—the following work was registered at Stationers' Hall: The Woman's Advocate, or fifteen real comforts of matrimony, being in requital of the late fifteen sham comforts. Moreover, The Ten Pleasures was in all probability printed abroad—Hazlitt thinks at The Hague or Amsterdam. The very first page in the original edition contains one of several hints of Batavian production—"younger" is printed "jounger." The curious allusion ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... decision and felicitous in his phrases, the permanent presiding officer. One thing was immediately and specially manifest: an overflowing heartiness and deep feeling pervaded the whole house. No need of a claque, no room for sham demonstration here! The galleries were as watchful and earnest as the platform. There was something genuine, elemental, uncontrollable in the moods and manifestations of the vast audience. Seats and standing-room ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... hate tortured him, and striding about the room. "To fight every minute against this monster, to fight in every fashion, to irritate her, to destroy a grain of her influence, in a single mind, in a little community, to expose her pretense, her sham virtues, her splendid hypocrisy, these are the breath of my life. That ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Eleusinia reached from the mythic Eumolpus to Theodosius the Great,—nearly two thousand years. Think you that all Athens, every fifth year, for more than sixty generations, went to Eleusis to witness and take part in a sham? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the Conservative Government is a mere sham, and that it largely reduced the strength of the British artillery in 1888-89. And we know that it does not dare now to call out the Militia for training, nor to mobilise the Fleet, nor to give sufficient grants to the Line and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... previous appearances. At the appointed time the procession enters from one end of the arena, and the combatants parade and salute the emperor, if he is present, or the presiding officer. Their weapons are examined, and there is a preliminary sham-fight, partly for exhibition of skill and to influence bets, partly for practice. The men then return to their places, a trumpet blows, and a pair commences the real fighting. Sometimes a man is in full ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by the ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... jury authorizes all this, or it is a sham and a hoax, utterly worthless for protecting the people against oppression. If it do not authorize an individual to resist the first and least act of injustice or tyranny, on the part of the government, it does not authorize ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... one hundred thousand spectators. In the centre Caesar erected an obelisk one hundred and thirty-two feet high, brought from Egypt. The seats were arranged as in the theatre. Six kinds of games were celebrated: 1st, chariot racing; 2d, a sham-fight between young men on horseback; 3d, a sham-fight between infantry and cavalry; 4th, athletic sports of all kinds; 5th, fights with wild beasts, such as lions, boars, etc.; 6th, sea fights. Water was let into the canal to float ships. ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... said, with a gesture almost of despair, "or rather I will speak it—between you and me runs the river of your parents' blood. It is so, yet, Miriam, I will confess to you that I repent me of that deed. Age makes us judge more kindly. To me your faith is nothing and your God a sham, yet I know now that to worship Him is not worthy of death—at least not for that cause would I bring any to their death to-day, or even to stripes and bonds. I will go further; I will stoop even to borrow from His creed. Do not His teachings bid ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... began his Berlin course in a mocking way. There was an unserved jail sentence hanging over Bismarck's head at Goettingen; and with sham seriousness, as though he were going to turn over a new leaf, Otto humbly set up that, to be strictly honest with the professors, to jail Otto must go and to jail they sent him! But no sooner was ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... equally Asia Minor, Syria, and Armenia. Moreover, the level tract between the mountains and the sea was broad enough for the manoeuvres of such an army as Heraclius commanded, and allowed him to train his soldiers by exercises and sham fights to a familiarity with the sights and sounds and movements of a battle. He conjectured, rightly enough, that he would not long be left unmolested by the enemy. Shahr-Barz, the conqueror of Jerusalem and Egypt, was very soon sent against him; and, after various movements, which it is ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... passionately as I wooed them: there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen certain women—rare, shy, exquisite—made almost invisible by the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just a specious seventeenth ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... else—perpetually taken up with themselves, and their sentimental or sensual relations, and their pretended right to happiness, their conflicting egoism, and arguing, arguing, arguing, playing with their sham grand passion, their sham great suffering, and in the end believing in it, and—suffering.... If only some one would ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... women ran clumsily down the road; others huddled into a corner to urinate, and all of them were howling at the top of their lungs, overcome by the necessity of insulting the women of La Doctrina, as if instinctively they divined the uselessness of a sham charity that remedied nothing. One heard only ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... withers may be supposed professionally unwrung. Otherwise, so exploratory a lash.... I seldom recall the touch of it more shrewd than in Queen Lucia (HUTCHINSON), an altogether delightful castigation of those persons whom a false rusticity causes to change a good village into the sham-bucolic home of crazes, fads and affectation. All this super-cultured life of the Riseholme community has its centre in Mrs. Lucas, the acknowledged queen of the place (Lucia wife of Lucas, which shows you the character of her empire in a single touch); the matter of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... ignorant childish way loves Art. Now, I want him forever to remember this night and these words; to remember that we are what we are, and precious in the eyes of the world, because centuries ago those who were of single mind and of pure hand so created us, scorning sham and haste and counterfeit. Well do I recollect my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He led a wise and blameless life, and wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich, ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... have the honor of introducing you to those ladies of quality. Well, if you were to accept of this kind offer, and go with him, you would find 'au troisieme; a handsome, painted and p——d strumpet, in a tarnished silver or gold second-hand robe, playing a sham party at cards for livres, with three or four sharpers well dressed enough, and dignified by the titles of Marquis, Comte, and Chevalier. The lady receives you in the most polite and gracious manner, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... require little defence against the Philistine of to-day, if only he can be induced to gaze at his intended victim before he delivers his blow. But Thucydides with his long and detailed account of an inter-tribal or inter-municipal war, decked out with sham speeches which were never delivered: Plato with his imaginary Utopia, half a small Greek provincial town, half an impossible and unendurably regimented socialist model community, based on a fine-drawn and fallacious comparison between the qualities ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the so-called beggar was dying,—a room in which the odious spectacle of pretended pauperism was being played. In Paris, everything that is done for a purpose is thoroughly done. Would-be paupers are as clever at mounting their disguise as shopkeepers in preparing their show-windows, or sham ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... out to be false, and the address given is a sham. An hour after—that is at about eight, I went to Wilkin's myself, and there was no trace of Ferdishenko. The maid did tell me, certainly, that an hour or so since someone had been hammering at ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... our feet had on that summit mov'd, When I discover'd that the bank around, Whose proud uprising all ascent denied, Was marble white, and so exactly wrought With quaintest sculpture, that not there alone Had Polycletus, but e'en nature's self Been sham'd. The angel who came down to earth With tidings of the peace so many years Wept for in vain, that op'd the heavenly gates From their long interdict, before us seem'd, In a sweet act, so sculptur'd to the life, He look'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... young man, of tall and robust stature, sanguine, with much sham refinement in his manner; he prided himself on the civility with which he behaved to all who had business relations with him, but every now and then the veneer gave an awkward crack, and, as in his debate ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole, however, the Nazarenes were but little troubled for the first twenty years of their existence; and the undying hatred of the Jews against those later converts, whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a sham Judaism, was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he was a mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and to orthodox Nazarenism; and whose teachings threatened Judaism with destruction. And, from their point ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ampler part. For the literature of the past Page had great respect, but his interest was ever in the present and the future. He was forever fulminating against bad writing, and hated the ignorant and slipshod work of the hack almost as much as he despised the sham of the man who affected letters, the dabbler and the poetaster. His taste was for the roast beef of literature, not for the side dishes and the trimmings, and his appreciation of the substantial work of others was no surer than ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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 woman who ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the European Powers lay dormant under the spell of the new doctrine of non-intervention, the King of Piedmont vigorously pursued his career of spoliation. Having accepted a sham plebiscitum, he annexed, by a formal decree of 18th March, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Parma and Modena, and that portion of the Papal States known as the Legations, to his ancient kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont. This was done with the full consent of his ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... poor have their mantles and clothes carefully washed, and the rich deck themselves out in their gold and silver brocaded vests and pantaloons. During these seven days there is general rejoicing, and the Arabs spend most of this time in the village street, racing, firing guns, or engaging in sham battles between the different camps, during which one carries the green, or sacred banner, which is supposed to render the bearer invulnerable. The battle ends by the standard-bearer being fired at by all parties, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... perhaps—disgraced," Durrance repeated. "Well, the shock of the disgrace is, after all, his opportunity. Don't you see that? It's his opportunity to know himself at last. Up to the moment of disgrace his life has all been sham and illusion; the man he believed himself to be, he never was, and now at the last he knows it. Once he knows it, he can set about to retrieve his disgrace. Oh, there are compensations for such a man. You and I know a case ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... of his abode on the Quai d'Orleans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on, although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming, but in the 'Sham-Antique.' ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... they see that we do not respect truth and honesty, they will not respect truth and honesty; and he who does not respect them, does not respect God. They will learn to look on religion as a sham. If we are ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... after the First Empire style, hung and furnished in yellow satin, whose high white panels were decorated with trophies of antique weapons carved in wood and gilded. A dauber from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts would have branded with the epithet "sham" the armchairs and sofas ornamented with sphinx heads in bronze, as well as the massive green marble clock upon which stood, all in gold, a favorite court personage, clothed in a cap, sword, and fig-leaf, who seemed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dressed in gipsy costume, who ran one on each side of the carriage, begging that the kind gentleman would give them sixpence, as they were poor strangers who had taken nothing all day. Mr. Howitt, who had made a special study of the gipsy tribe, perceived in an instant that these were only sham Romanys. He paid no attention to their pleading, but observed that he hoped they would enjoy their frolic, and only wished that he were as rich as they. Subsequently, he discovered that the mock-gipsies, who ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar-candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost - there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whole thing is galling me, I tell you, the whole—" Brenton hesitated; "infernal sham." The last two words he flung ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... all she is allowed to get quietly, as a sop for her quietness regarding Egypt, and she will cheerfully fight you for the rest—small blame to her. She knows Africa is a superb training ground for her officers. Sham fights and autumn manoeuvres have a certain value in the formation of a fighting army, but the whole of these parlour-games, put together in a ten-year lump, are not to be compared to one month's work at real war, to fit an army for its real work, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... name of a rope, except the one thats to hang ye, theres no need of singing out, as if ye was hailing a deaf man on a topgallant yard. May-hap you think youve got my true name in your sheep skin; but what British sailor finds it worth while to sail in these seas, without a sham on his stern, in case of need, dye see. If you call me Penguillan, you calls me by the name of the man on whose hand, dye see, I hove into daylight; and he was a gentleman ; and thats more than my worst enemy will say of any of the family of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... saying: "Task done or no done—night's my time—go home!" Whippoorwills flitted about the woods in cotton picking time chattering about Jack marrying a widow. He could not remember the story that goes with this. Oppossums were a "sham faced" tribe who "sometimes wandered onto the wrong side of the day and got caught." They never overcame this shame as long as they ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your academic copier of fossils offers them to ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... betrayed into the contrary; but they were by this time in the High Street, bowing to others of the committee on their way to the town-hall, a structure of parti-coloured brick in harlequin patterns, with a peaked roof, all over little sham domes, which went far to justify its title of the Rat-house, since nothing larger could well use them. The facade was thus somewhat imposing; of the rear the less said the better; and as to the interior, it was at present one expanse of dust, impeded by scaffold-poles, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was, however, erected in Donatello's time, but was removed for no reason which can be adequately explained, except that on the occasion of a royal marriage it was thought necessary to destroy what was contrived in the maniera tedesca, substituting a sham painted affair which was speedily ruined by the elements. The ethics of vandalism are indeed strange and varied. In this case vanity was responsible. It was superstition which led the Sienese, after incurring defeat by the Florentines, to remove ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... passed away? Ay, well, an old man he was and an aged one, on the brink of the grave. What—not dead? Well, well, we've much to be thankful for, and that's a solemn word! Me talking nonsense, you say? Oh, if I'd never more to answer for! How was I to know your uncle he was lying there a sham and a false pretender before the Lord? Not long to live, that's what I said. And I'll hold by it, when the time comes, before the Throne. What's that you say? Well, and wasn't he lying there his very self in his bed, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... that will do!" Chia Lien rejoined laughing, "none of these sham attentions for me! So long as you don't pry into my doings it will be enough; and will I go so far as to bear you ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... no value beyond the sham: As well the counter as coin, I submit, When your table's a hat, and your ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... what was to take place, Damper and Rigar were fetched from their charges, and gladly joined in, while the dogs nearly went mad—all three seeming to fully understand what was going to take place, and displaying their mad delight by charging and rolling one another over, and a sham worry all round, that suggested horrors for any unfortunate dingo with which they ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... see that it is an Elgin watch. Of course you know the reputation of that make. They don't make any sham watches ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... a sham, and your bogus option a piece of your own sneaking dishonesty. What chance have we townsmen, put ashore, penniless, in an unknown wilderness, far from any human habitation, knowing nothing of the way back to Frankfort? ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... tactical exercises under the directions of General Rees. One day was given to field firing practice, on which occasion I acted as one of the 'casualty' officers—that is to say, I had to select various men during the sham attack and order them to drop out as casualties. Live ammunition was used in rifles and Lewis guns as well as live rifle-grenades; and I remember there were seven slight casualties from accidents ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... woman whose chief attraction had, for me, consisted not so much in her surpassing loveliness of person, though doubtless that had had its effect upon me, as in that angelic purity and fascinating simplicity and truthfulness of character which I now discovered to be a mere worthless sham. It was evident enough that Merlani had been her lover—most probably her accepted lover—when I appeared upon the scene; and that, dazzled by my appearance of superior wealth, she had in the most heartless and cruel manner thrown him overboard; ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... temples devoted to the healing gods (usually Asclepius, but sometimes Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hera). Here the patient is expected to sleep over night in the temple, and the god visits him in a dream, and reveals a course of treatment which will lead to recovery. Probably there is a good deal of sham and imposture about the process. The canny priests know more than they care to tell about how the patient is worked into an excitable, imaginative state; and of the very human means employed to produce a satisfactory and informing dream.[] Nevertheless it is a great ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... please, but they sha'n't feel sorry for her!" She threw her handkerchief on the table. "What idiots we are to go masquerading through life! All playing a part—all! Pretending not to care when we do care. Pretending we do when we don't. What a shabby little sham most of this thing called life is! ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... you," the agent said. "That house was let as it stood to some sham philanthropist whose name I forget. The whole thing was a fraud, and the swindler only avoided arrest by leaving the country. Probably the goods were stored somewhere or perhaps seized by some creditor. But I really can't say definitely without looking the matter up. There are some books ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... billiards with them, was pleased to see the English officers mix at proper times with them, admired heartily the beautiful handiwork of the common men. The only man he could not abide was the one who, whether officer or private, was a fraud or a sham. ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... to receive their Money. I saw huge Quantities of Money drawn in, and little or none issued out; vast Prizes taken from the Enemy, and then taken away again at home by Friends; Ships sav'd on the Sea, and sunk in the Prize Offices; Merchants escaping from Enemies at Sea, and be Pirated by Sham Embargoes, Counterfeit Claims, Confiscations, &c a-shoar: There we saw Turkey-Fleets taken into Convoys, and Guarded to the very Mouth of the Enemy, and then abandon'd for their better Security: Here we saw Mons. Pouchartrain ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... Vogelschiesser, is going on; it began last Sunday and ends next Sunday. About half a mile from the town there is a very large meadow by the river, where a small town of booths, tents, &c., is erected, and where shooting at targets with wooden darts, sham railway-trains and riding-horses, confectionery of every kind, beer of every name, strength, and colour, pipes, cigars, toys, gambling, organ-grinding, fiddling, dancing, &c., goes on incessantly. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sinking—modern cases of bombast, triviality, false rhetoric. "Speaking generally, it would seem that bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing," says an author who himself avoids it so well. Bombast is the voice of sham passion, the shadow of an insincere attitude. "Even the wretched phantom who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious blackmail," cries bombast in Macaulay's Lord Clive. The picture of a phantom who is not only a phantom but wretched, stooping ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... me for favour,—to me, because I am her friend. You cannot win her yourself, and think I may help you! I do not believe in your love for her. There! If there were no other reason, and I could help you, I would not, because I think your heart is a sham heart. She is ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... crisis Shelby saw Dr. Crandall step from his phaeton to his little sham Greek temple of an office at the foot of his lawn, and followed him. The bluff physician ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... had made, with regard to his commission; at which the other gave no signs of surprise, but, taking the pipe from his mouth, "Why look ye, captain," said he, "that's not the only good turn you have owed him. That same money you received from the commodore as an old debt was all a sham, contrived by Pickle for your service; but a wool drive under his bare poles without sails and rigging, or a mess of provision on board, rather than take the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... in Mr. Langton's Collection. Hay was third in command in the expedition to North America in 1757. It was reported that he said that 'the nation's wealth was expended in making sham-fights and planting cabbages.' He was put under arrest and sent home to be tried. Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 170. Mr. Croker says that 'the real state of the case was that he had gone mad, and was in that state sent home.' He died before the sentence ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... great doubt of the reality; seeming innocence comes very near in meaning to probable guilt. Apparent indicates less assurance than probable, and more than seeming. A man's probable intent we believe will prove to be his real intent; his seeming intent we believe to be a sham; his apparent intent may be the true one, tho we have not yet evidence on which to pronounce with certainty or even with confidence. Likely is a word with a wide range of usage, but always implying the belief that the thing is, or will be, true; it is often used with the infinitive, as ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that is wholly a sham,' said Treitschke, speaking of the British Empire, 'cannot in this world of ours, endure for ever.' Why did this Empire appear to Treitschke to be 'wholly a sham'? Was it not because it did not answer to any definition of the word 'Empire' to be found ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... the Senate ought to be furnished very frankly with the following reason, which seems to me quite convincing, for not at present publishing the complete treaty: namely, that if our discussion of the treaty with the Germans is to be more than a sham and a form it is necessary to consider at least some of the details of the treaty as subject to reconsideration and that, therefore, it would be a tactical blunder to publish the details as first drafted, notwithstanding the fact that there is no likelihood ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... your likeness. You do not care to admit it; but it is so. You are not content with yourself. The desire to be more truly literary persists in you. You feel that there is something wrong in you, but you cannot put your finger on the spot. Further, you feel that you are a bit of a sham. Something within you continually forces you to exhibit for the classics an enthusiasm which you do not sincerely feel. You even try to persuade yourself that you are enjoying a book, when the next moment you drop it in the middle and forget to ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... false, and generally of wood. It is built some three or four feet from the real wall of the room, thus forming a closet. As the whole room is papered and but dimly lighted, a visitor cannot detect the fact that it is a sham. A panel, which slides noiselessly and rapidly, is arranged in the false wall, and the chair with the visitor's clothing upon it is placed just in front of it. While the visitor's attention is engaged in another quarter, the girl's confederate, who is concealed in the closet, slides back the panel, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... was in form voting but in fact only a simple certification that he had received the highest number of electoral votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution established an election without an option; that the electors were to vote for a person ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of sham fight of horsemen," said Rollo, "that they used to have in old times, when they wore steel armor, and fought with spears and lances. They used to ride against each other with blunt spears, and see who could knock the other one off his ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... was not unnaturally called in to aid; and that cabinet-counsellor pronounced me rather short, thick-set, with a cast of features fitter, I trust, for the bar than the ball—not handsome enough for blushing virgins to pine for my sake, or even to invent sham cases to bring them to my chambers—yet not ugly enough either to scare those away who came on real business—dark, to be sure, but—NIGRI SUNT HYACINTHI—there are pretty things to be said in favour ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... we ought not to forget that similar dangers surround our inner culture and our spiritual life, and that an intellectual underworld threatens our time, which demands a no less rigorous fight until its vice is wiped out. The vice of the social underworld gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sensual life; the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and for truth. The infectious germs which it spreads in the realm of culture may ultimately be more dangerous to the inner health ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... so far carried away by jealousy as to attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass; and no great matter as regards HIM. But it would be a sad thing for me to find myself hanged; and for what, I beseech you? for murdering a sham, that was either nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often. But if you show to Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man will not be much like Wordsworth—the great man will not be Wordsworth's ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... no; one never does that, you know, unless, possibly, the ideals are very low; but more than I can hope to find elsewhere. Even now I am certainly happier in the work than I have been for years." She looked up at him quickly, her eyes pleading. "It is not the glitter, the sham, the applause," she hastened to explain, "but the real work itself, that attracts and rewards me—the hidden labor of fitly interpreting character—the hard, secret study after details. This has become ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... sure," I remarked, entering the room where only a few short hours before Mrs. Blair had related her strange tale. "Whatever the cause of it, the devil dancers don't sham." ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... and who abandoned his intention of entering the Church when he became possessed of a secret for making imitation diamonds, rubies, garnets, etc. In 1809 he added bookselling to that of manufacturing sham stones. After getting into trouble with the Excise on account of the latter accomplishment, he devoted himself entirely to the book-trade. The elder Rodd died in 1822, and his son, the more famous bibliopole, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... His mercy, Joe. 'Twas the God us worships, you mind, not Him of the Luke Gosp'lers nor any other 'tall. Theer's awnly wan real, livin' God; an' you left Him for a sham." ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... not care in the least what anybody thought of her. She was in no sense of the word a sham. She was well-born, well-educated, respectably married, and fairly well-off. The people in Northbury considered her rich. She always spoke of herself as poor. In reality she was neither rich nor poor. She had an income of something like twelve hundred a year, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Berlin, in the wanderlust of its darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in the Behrenstrasse; nor the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling from her "reserved" table in the silly sham called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the more baby-glanced, shirtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Cafe Lang. Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstrasse; nor the frowsy she who sings in the bier-cabarets that hover about the Lichtprunksaal. Berlin, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... thy charms to see When childhood stubborn stood Fix'd in the faith, that thou must be Too wholesome to be good. Just as we loved the cloying jam, By no effects dismay'd, Regarding as a bitter sham The honest marmalade. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various |
