"Belittling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to his own place." Her motive, the day-star of her life, was the Mother-Love for an only son. In spite of poverty and pain, she must reward him for love and loyalty, by being bright and cheerful and by belittling her own ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... all events, was of an unexpected kind. The adventure had served only to make me understand Paulina's abhorrence of such experiments, and at every turn of the slight intrigue I had felt how exasperating and belittling such a relation was bound to be between two people who, had they been free, would have mated openly. And so from a brief phase of imperfect forgetting I was driven back to a deeper ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... and I haven't missed a lot, I'm not belittling youth and its love and its hopes. But I do say that I wouldn't change this last year of my life for any that might have been. Why, when I wake up in the morning, my head's full of the children, thinking of 'em and planning for 'em and sometimes worrying about ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... question whether he is as good in sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are, of course, rather futile. They differentiate among excellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's action, to say that he is great because he describes so well ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of the assault and the escape, interrupted by Edgar, who protested that Albert was always belittling his own doings, and giving him credit when everything had been ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... vanity which induced this long survey. He felt so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal appearance having changed during the night. What he saw in the glass, however, was the man he knew before. It was almost a disappointment—a belittling of his recent experience. And then he smiled at his naiveness; for, being over five and thirty years of age, he ought to have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable mask of the soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is put out of sight where no changes ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... in a glass, the glory of the Lord." My thought has been set free from the cramping distractions devised by men, and I am now to feast my gaze upon the holy splendours of my Lord. It is like coming out of a little and belittling tent, to feast upon the sunny amplitude of the open sky! I can "cease from ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... more than a suggestion of scorn in his refusal to mention his real rival by name, and in the belittling adjective. His assumption that she cared nothing for Leigh would perhaps have found acceptance in her mind only the day before, but now a memory of last night's scene made her as cruel to her husband as he had just been to Lena Harpster. She looked at him coolly, aware of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... have been told to the world, had it not been that, after her death, a woman, whom she had never injured by thought, word, or deed, has seen fit to rake up this unpleasant subject again, for the purpose of throwing mud on her memory, impugning her motives, and belittling the magnitude of her sacrifice. It is solely in defence that the truth ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... conditions continuing to cause stagnation or congestion. The school thus founded by Borelli was the outcome of the unbounded enthusiasm, with its accompanying exaggeration of certain phenomena with the corresponding belittling of others that naturally follows such a revolutionary discovery as that of Harvey. Having such a founder as the brilliant Italian Borelli, it was given a sufficient impetus by his writings to carry it some distance before it finally collapsed. Some ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... worthy, embittered foe against whom this last decisive struggle is aimed. France is fighting for her existence. She is no weaker than we are in men, guns, or munitions. Only one thing decides between us—will and nerves. Every doubting, belittling word is a creeping poison which kills joyful, strong hope and does more damage than a thousand foes. Only if we are convinced to our marrow that we shall win, shall ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of his assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of crimes. Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of Henry ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... arrive at that conclusion, Doctor? You seem very fond of belittling our abilities. Personally, I think that we shall be able to attain our objectives within a few weeks—certainly long before you can possibly return from such an extended trip as you have in mind. And ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Ridiculing and belittling the power of the bosses, he called them "warts upon the body politic." "It is not," said the new chief of Democracy, "a capital process to cut off a wart. You don't have to go to the hospital and take an anaesthetic. The thing can be done while you wait, and it is being ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to be husband and wife to-morrow. It makes me tremble, darling—with happiness and hope, and with fear, too. What have I done, a rough Bushy like me—to win a woman like you? Well you know how I think about that. And I don't believe in a man belittling himself to the woman he loves, though it's just because he loves her so that he feels unworthy of her. And then it comes over me again—badly sometimes—how little I really know of you, and of your life, and ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... sails for Europe Saturday!" and the sudden appeal of the notion to go "out there," its sharp striking-in.... Carington and he taking counsel with some of the other fellows in his rooms later on, all the deep voices roaring at once, all the boys insulting him at once, belittling his cigars, saying sharp things about his pictures, that being their way of showing him that they were badly broken up over his leaving them; all their eyes shining interest in him and hope for him and even envy of him, as the young man who was "going out West," while ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... nonsense with the stupid persistence of a poll-parrot praising its own personal pulchritude. The editor of Puck should avoid political economy as a subject a trifle too large for the knot on the end of his neck, and confine himself to his threadbare specialty, that of belittling the Jews with his watery wit and atribilarious art. The only funny thing I find in his paper is its solemn "notice to publishers" that all its raccous rot is copyrighted, that infringement will be "promptly and vigorously prosecuted." The editor who would steal from Puck would ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the lie to all the arguments that had ever been employed against slavery as degrading and brutalizing to its victims. He said it was "to pay the highest compliment to the institution of slavery," and "stultify ourselves." But this was belittling a great national question, by the side of which all considerations of party consistency were utterly trivial and contemptible. The ballot for the negro was a logical necessity, and it was a matter of the least possible consequence ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... prayed up to God by way of Drummond. We make our most vital approaches to God in that way and we always have, from the time we prayed to God through our fathers and mothers until now, when we find God in Christ. We want in God a personality that can answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... that the defeated minority knows that it has a free hand, and that nothing less than eight hundred men could prevent it from using its physical power, were it so inclined. Only a force and supremacy that was real, and not nominal, could make it to submit. The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pass in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter of fisticuffs. When every statesman in our country was eagerly seeking a ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... not belittling the work of Sturm, thinks that the celebrated course has but little in it different from the courses of the Wittenberg reformers. He says, "If Melanchthon had had the planning of a school course for a large city, it would have been much the same (as Sturm's). The ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... but he did not inform his valued client that he was well acquainted with the agent of the Cuban insurgents, who had come West to meet the Senor da Cordova, for he had no intention of belittling the difficulty of the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... entrance. Standing here, facing the interval between the Main Building and Machinery Hall, our eyes and steps are conducted from great to greater by a group of buildings which must bear their true name of offices, belittling as a title suggestive of clerks and counting-rooms is to dimensions and capacity exceeding those of most churches. Right and left a brace of these modest but sightly and habitable-looking foot-hills to the Alps of glass accommodate the executive and staff departments of the exposition. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... I happened to be thinking about them," she said, instinctively belittling her fear. "And then I never saw Pat act ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... accursed, of proud and puffed-up little half-breeds, of young sages and little philosophers, of pettifoggers, of picayunish students, and so on. Well known is this habit that many have when they wish to ridicule their enemies; they apply to them belittling epithets because their brains do not appear to furnish them any other means, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a creator. Remember, I'm not belittling your job. It's a wonderful job—for Ella Monahan. I wish I had the gift of eloquence. I wish I had the right to spank you. I wish I could prove to you, somehow, that with your gift, and heritage, and racial right it's as criminal for you to be earning your thousands at Haynes-Cooper's as it would ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... as they surely would, of lifting the women of the State into full suffrage, would give them new life, prestige and power greater and grander than they ever possessed; and they would not be halting and belittling themselves with such idiotic stuff and nonsense as their advice to let the amendment go to the electors of the State "on its own merits." But however politicians may waver, our suffrage women must not have a doubt, but must persist in the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... magnificent impatience had prevented her from feeling any stronger emotion than astonishment. It was too ridiculous, said the bride to herself tolerantly; it could not go on, of course, this preposterous consideration of a child of ten, this belittling consideration of her own place in the scheme as less Clarence's wife than Billy's mother. It must adjust itself with every week that they three lived together, the child slipping back to her own life, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... express the indignation with which I read these belittling and weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than forgery—worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... sooner one got used to it the better...But no! Life was not like that. Her adventure was a hideous accident. She dreaded above all the temptation to generalise from her own case, to doubt the high things she had lived by and seek a cheap solace in belittling what fate had refused her. There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it, and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it. What had happened to her was grotesque and mean and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... rather than the personal feeling and experiences of the individual. A large number of his hymns are, in fact, faithful but often striking adaptations of Bible stories and texts. For though he was frequently accused of belittling the Book of Books, his hymns to a larger extent than those of any other Danish hymnwriter are directly inspired by the language of the Bible. He possessed an exceptional ability to absorb the essential implications of a text and to present it with the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... all, but interesting! I asked him for supper, Sunday night. You'll be crazy about him—all the bunch will!" Thus Jimsy King on the day Carter Van Meter limped into his life; thus Jimsy King through the years which followed, worshiping humbly the things he did not have in himself, belittling his own gifts, enlarging his own lacks, glorifying his friend. He had never had a deeply intimate boy friend before; the team was his friend, the squad; Honor had sufficed for a nearer tie. It was to be different, now; a sharing. She ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... deprivations necessary in order to accomplish what they had come into the country to do. For this reason they could endure hopefully all that was hard. It is worth notice, too, that there was nothing belittling in their life, there was no pauperism, no shirking. Each family provided for its own simple wants, and had the conscious dignity which comes from being ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... finally belittling the two poets, he shot a parting shaft at German idealism in his farewell to the academicians. He bade them beware of idealogues as dangerous dreamers and disguised materialists. Then, raising his voice, he exclaimed: "Philosophers plague themselves ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... leisurely tapping of his iron-shod stick accompanied his footfalls with a self-confident sound on the flagstones. It was impossible to connect such a fine presence and this unruffled aspect with the belittling troubles of poverty; the man's whole existence appeared to pass before you, facile and large, in the freedom of means as ample as the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... especially careful of his attitude toward the representatives of rival houses and their products. His eagerness to advance his own cause should never lead him into belittling them. He need not go out of his way to praise them nor should he speak of them insincerely in glowing terms; but an honest word of commendation shows that he is not afraid of his rivals in spite of the fact that they too have excellent goods, and when it is impossible ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds. These modifications are dependent on the nature of the crowds, or of the race to which the crowds belong, but their tendency is always belittling and in the direction of simplification. This explains the fact that, from the social point of view, there is in reality scarcely any such thing as a hierarchy of ideas—that is to say, as ideas of greater or less elevation. However great or true an idea may have been to begin with, it ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... revealed. "They used to take dignified walks on Sundays. I used to tease her, and she'd get so mad she'd ask Dad to ask me to be more refined. She said that Mr. Little was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his dignity to have me suppose that a man and a woman couldn't have an intellectual friendship. This in May, my dear, and after the thing was settled and Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin had gone to Dad and asked where he could buy ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... to have his identity revealed to his cousin in any such belittling manner as this. He had dreamed of Janice getting into some difficulty, and his stepping forward to defend and protect her. But this situation ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... his job and she went out to get one of her own, had she succeeded in getting anything with dignity in it? No! She had become an extra woman in a movie mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for a woman—she had lent him money. He could never forgive or forget the horrible fact that he had borrowed her last cash to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Ting springing out with his "Hi! hi! you laugh at us Chinese barbarians; you call yourselves in America the head of civilization; you claim that the glory of your civilization is your estimate of women; you sneer at us Chinese for belittling women's souls and squeezing their feet. Who belittle their capacities? Who squeeze their minds?" We must confess it. The old theory of the subservience of women ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 385. Nicolay and Hay seem to me to go too far in belittling the opposition to Mr. Lincoln ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... fuller life for American women has always suffered from the disregard of some of its noblest followers, both for things as they are and for things as they have been. The persistent belittling for campaign purposes of the Business of Being a Woman I have repeatedly referred to in this little series of essays; indeed, it has been founded on the proposition that the Uneasy Woman of to-day is to a large degree the result ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... explosion are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to Europeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down before the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his hands, and pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't belittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got to be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-biting of Europe, the congressional wrangles, ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... not Marion show an exquisite delicacy of feeling by belittling, as it were, her kindness ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... man than Homer (I mean the author of the Iliad); but the very people who are most angry with me for (as they incorrectly suppose) sneering at Homer are generally the ones who never miss an opportunity of cheapening and belittling Handel, and, which is very painful to myself, they say I was laughing at him in Narcissus. Perhaps—but surely one can laugh at a person and adore him at ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... No combination of words could more perfectly express the relationship which this bit of sunrise has established between us—devotion, loyalty, telepathic communication without publicity. I am sure you are belittling yourself. ... you are a game bird,— good, you understand, but with a tang, a something wild in flavor, a touch of the woods and mountain flowers and hidden dells in bosky places, and wanderings and sweet ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... occasionally in composing, too, as may be seen by some sonnets that are to be found of his. Concerning some of them, there have been published—"Lectures and Criticisms by Varchi." But he wrote these sonnets more for his pleasure than because he made a profession of it, always belittling them himself, accusing himself of ignorance in ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... 1784, it belongs in its substance and its spirit, not to the Mannheim period of Schiller's life, but to the period which he had spent in hiding. It is a freeman's comment upon high life as he had known it. Scrupulously enough Schiller kept the letter of his promise not to use his pen in belittling the Duke of Wuerttemberg. But the Wirtschaft in Stuttgart was fair game, and there were other ways of masking a dramatic battery than to lay the scene in Italy. In 'Cabal and Love' the reigning prince does ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... part been freely guided by the author's imagination, he has endeavored to bring nearer to the sympathizing reader the human side of the mighty destiny of the nation which it was incumbent on him to describe. If he has succeeded in doing so, without belittling the magnificent Biblical narrative, he has accomplished his desire; if he has failed, he must content himself with the remembrance of the pleasure and mental exaltation he experienced during the creation of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hermit and a vagrant, he was on good terms with most of the famous men of letters of his day from Hugo downwards, and seems never to have quarrelled with any man, except with some of his editors and publishers, by his own fault. Balzac was indeed, in no belittling sense of the word, one of the most good-natured of men of genius. But his friendships with the other sex are of much more importance, and not in the least matters of mere gossip. His sister Laure, as has been said, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... after with a relieved belittling of her complaints, "Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a nurse to take you out with the other ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Him; and, when read in the light of its culmination in Christ, it approves itself to the Spirit of Christ within Christians as a correct record of their experiences of God, and the mighty inspiration to such experiences. Surely it is no belittling limitation to say of this unique book that it is an authority only on God. Every fundamental question of life is answered, every essential need of the soul is met, when God is found, and becomes our ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... animal, its effort to make the best use of its organs, to apply them at need in new ways to meet new demands. Why then did he not go a step further and admit that the animal could by its own subconscious efforts form entirely new organs? Why did most morphologists join with him in belittling ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... wonder why men ever finalize their status with women," Kennon murmured. "It does no good. It doesn't convince the woman. She's still fearful, jealous, and suspicious—always belittling her ability to hold what she has, always alert for competition, clinging, holding, absorbing—when she should be working ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... something or some one," he said. "Oh," as she made a gesture, "don't think I'm belittling it! I know it was something big. But the finish you chose wasn't meant to be, or it would have come off. You see that, don't you? The very sun in its course took pains to show you to me in time to stop it. That means ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... belittling the greatest of marvels to call it a stroke of genius. He made it possible for the most ordinary laborer to accomplish a hundred times as much in an hour, and with the most exquisite perfection, as a skilled laborer could ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... priveleges so as to induce him to leave. Between 1850 and 1860 this question reached a crisis and free colored people from the South were to be seen taking up their homes in the Northern States and in Canada. (Many of the people, especially from Charleston, carried with them all their belittling prejudices, and after years of sojourn under the sway of enlightened and liberal ideas, proved themselves still incapable of learning the new way or forgetting ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... Ghislain, La Bete, Une Gageure, which closes the list of my acquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raise his expectation too high. Olivier Maugant is perhaps the strongest. But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both France and England such novel-writing had become almost a trade—certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a noble ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... shrugged his shoulders in belittling fashion. "As our houses are to that house, so that house was to the houses ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr Moore's high position and his assured self-confidence, we should not trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it. It was a review of The Secret Rose by W. B. Yeats, but it passed after one single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson—an abuse that was justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead. Had he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at least, of fable and moral. And when towards the close Mr Moore again ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Strange that to-night it would still be standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty—still be gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... name. They are identified by their order and their side, as "The first speaker on the affirmative" or "The speaker who preceded me," or "My colleague," or "My opponent." Avoid using these with tones and phrases of sarcasm and bitterness. Be fair and courteous in every way. Never indulge in such belittling expressions as "No one understands what he is trying to prove. He reels off a string of figures which mean nothing." Never indulge in cheap wit or ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... been a great conflict of opinion as to the number of troops engaged in every battle, or all important battles, fought between the sections, the South magnifying the number of Union troops engaged and belittling their own. Northern writers have fallen, in many instances, into the same error. I have often heard gentlemen, who were thoroughly loyal to the Union, speak of what a splendid fight the South had made and successfully ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... of past ages. These results bear living testimony to the wonderful progress of the kindred sciences of Geology and Palaeontology in the last half-century; and the development-theory has but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to strengthen itself by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of which, in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... meetings must render the God of orthodox theology quite obsolete. But, as a compensation, it gives to us the most enlarged and beautiful concept of Him that we have ever had. It ennobles, broadens, purifies, and elevates our idea of Him. It destroys forever our belittling view of Him as but a magnified human character, full of wrath and caprice and angry threats, and delighting in human ceremonial and religious thaumaturgy. And, most practical of all for us, it renders the age-long problem of evil amenable ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the reminder of his former wrongdoing and the implied accusation of cowardice, but he had brought it on himself by his unwise belittling of Beowulf's feat, and the applause of both Danes and Geats showed him that he dared no further attack the champion; he had to endure in silence Beowulf's boast that he and his Geats would that night await Grendel in the hall, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box. Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were assisting her a good deal with the house in exploring and being explored, enabling Colonel John ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... little dinner proved an unqualified success. With sole and chicken saute, with trifle and savoury, he mutely pleaded his cause; feeling vaguely guilty, the while, of belittling his childhood's idol, whom he increasingly admired and loved. But this India business was tremendously important, and the dear old boy ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... married, he knew. What might have happened had he gone back? And when he next saw Alice Yorke there would be a softer tone in his voice, and he would talk a deeper and higher philosophy to her than she had ever heard, belittling the gaudy rewards of life, and instilling in her mind ideas of something loftier and better and finer than they. He even told her once something of the story of his life, and of the suffering and sorrow that had been visited upon the victims of a foolish pride and a selfish ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... gods—his gods: to Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite; and from them down to the lesser guardian deities of the hearth, the field, the farmstead. We modern men suffer a double temptation to misunderstand, by belittling, the reverence in which Hellas and Rome held their gods. To start with, our religion has superseded theirs. We approach the Olympians with no bent towards venerating them; with minds easy, detached, to which ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... satisfied the inspired author of The Song of Songs, and yet the women who owned such physical graces have not conspicuously possessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do not enhance one half of human perfection by belittling the other half. And we rarely conceive of any high perfection on one side without some approach to it on the other. Even Jesus—though the whole of his story demands that his visage should be more marred than any man's—is always pictured ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... I had heard Cludde call for wine and dice, from which it was clear that he did not intend to leave yet awhile. There was no way out except by going through the inn taproom, and I was not inclined to face Dick Cludde there, for he would of a certainty make some sneering or belittling remark, and my temper being not of the meekest I feared things might come to a brawl. Not that I cared a fig's end for Cludde, or feared any ill result from a personal encounter; but I knew the inn was a property of Sir Richard's, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... and undesired. It did not belong to her world. Yet there it sat on its usurped throne deformed and hideous, driving out all tenderness and compunction, ruling her with a rod of iron, hardening her, embittering her, and belittling her, making a mockery of all sweetness, fleering at nobility and magnanimity, lowering the queen to the level of ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... had thrown the mud into his eye purposely. There had been bad feeling between them, and even worse, for some time, and the gap separating them seemed to be growing wider all the while. Each had said exasperating and belittling things of the other, and a wall of hate had been built up where once there had been a bond of strong friendship. The pain in Badger's eye was excruciating, and it rendered him for a little while absolutely reckless. Fortunately, it also rendered him incapable of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... sinks, etc., a sentiment common in the poet's day, but entertained by few persons in these times. Formerly, in many European countries, trade, even on a large scale, was considered belittling. A gentleman's son might enter the Church, the army, or the navy, but he must not become ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests, strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... man's love: but, before answering, he honestly needed more assurance. As for another world and a continuing life there, should he happen to fall to-morrow, John searched his heart and decided that he asked for nothing of the sort. Such promises struck him as unworthy bribes, belittling the sacrifice he came prepared to make. He despised men who bargained with them. Here was he, young, abounding in life, ready to risk extinction. Why? For a cause (some might say), and that cause his country's. Maybe: he had never thought this out. To be sure he was proud ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Europe, several had special reasons for viewing the progress of the Revolution with misgiving. The Bourbons of Spain and of the Two Sicilies were united by blood and family compacts with the ruling dynasty of France: any belittling of the latter's power was bound to affect disastrously the domestic position and foreign policy of the former. Then, too, the French queen, Marie Antoinette, was an Austrian Habsburg. Her family interests were in measure at stake. In the Austrian ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Elizabeth Barrett discerned his personal worth. He was essentially manly in all respects: so manly, that many frail souls of either sex philandered about his over-robustness. From the twilight gloom of an aeesthetic clique came a small voice belittling the great man as "quite too 'loud,' painfully excessive." Browning was manly enough to laugh at all ghoulish cries of any kind whatsoever. Once in a way the lion would look round and by a raised breath make the jackals wriggle; as when the poet wrote to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Turns in on thine own soul, be most severe. But when it falls upon a fellow-man Let kindliness control it; and refrain From that belittling censure that springs forth From common lips ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... before they were half a mile on their way back to the family place in Canaan. Weak part of his position is that he is trying to serve two Bills, BALFOUR'S and PARNELL'S. Can't recommend BALFOUR'S scheme without belittling PARNELL'S; same thing other way about. Reminds me, TOBY, of a passage in WORDSWORTH'S prose writings; not so much read as his poetry; but daresay you remember it. There was a Bishop WATSON who began his official career as a Liberal. He was frightened ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... the well-bred, tolerant smile that loyal New Yorkers reserve for all such barbaric belittling of their empire. Then he politely asked Uncle Peter to show Mrs. Drelmer and himself ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... you?" There was a grin on Eyer's face. But his eyes were stern. He wasn't belittling their deadly danger. And there was also a chance that ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... when he told King that he had no knowledge of "nautical surveying," he said so because he knew King thought he had not, and it looks as if the admission was made as a pretext to obtain his passage to England, rather than for the purpose of belittling his own capabilities. That Grant was a fine seaman goes without saying. That he was personally courageous, his subsequent naval services proved. He seems to have handled his ship at all times with extraordinary care, and it may have been that he had ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... separated the two classes was clearly seen, when on her Sabbath the missionary could speak to the Nestorian of her Saviour out of her Bible, while the Moslem knows nothing beyond her kohl and her henna,[1] her dresses and her follies, and other topics at once belittling, debasing, and corrupting. [Footnote 1: Kohl is a black powder used to paint the eyebrows and eyelashes. Henna is a plant employed to stain the nails, and sometimes the entire hand and part of the foot, of a ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... It is a satire on modern man and his belittling virtues. In verses 23 and 24 of the second part of the discourse we are reminded of Nietzsche's powerful indictment of the great of to-day, in the Antichrist (Aphorism 43):—"At present nobody has any longer the courage ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... added, "if it were not so, I should try to be blind to it. A woman must understand that she lowers herself by belittling her sisters. How immensely we increase man's ascendancy ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... his opinion that I shall be seen above the gaslights. It was very civil and complimentary of Mahomet M. M. But I mean to make myself heard. Mahomet M. M. did not seem to think of this." Since Frank had known her she had taken every opportunity in her power of belittling Mahomet M. M., as she was wont ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,—the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy of many-colored ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... have consulted neither the good Brother Pasquerel nor the good Friar Richard nor indeed any of the churchmen of her company. They would have told her that the true pope was the Pope of Rome, Martin V. They might also have represented to her that she was belittling the authority of the Church by appealing to a revelation from God concerning popes and anti-popes. Sometimes, they would have told her, God confides the secrets of his Church to holy persons. But it would be rash to count ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... applied to the most honored matrons, such as the wife of Deacon Ingersoll. It was a term of respect; conveying, perhaps, an affectionate sentiment, but not in the slightest degree disrespectful, derogatory, or belittling. Surely no better terms were ever used to characterize a worthy person. "Goodman" comprehends all that can be ascribed to a citizen of mature years in the way of commendation; and the whole catalogue of pretentious titles ever given by flatterers ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... is remarkable how much chewing this Book of God will stand, in comparison with other books. You chew a while on Tennyson, or Browning, or Longfellow. And I am not belittling these noble writings. I have my own favourite among these men. But they do not yield the richest and yet richer cream found here. This Book of God has stood more of that sort of thing than any other, yet it is the freshest book to be found to-day. You read a passage over the two hundredth time ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... dexterous party is the winner; it is a mere counting, in which the bare fact that one party is the more numerous puts it in power if it will only come up and be counted; to insure which a certain time is spent by each party in reviling and belittling the candidates of its opponents and lauding its own; and this is the canvass, at the likening of which to a campaign every honest soldier ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Without belittling the nobility of purpose or disregarding the self-sacrificing devotion of the missionary for his task, let us also grant to the civil servant his due share of praise. His duty he also performs in the dangerous wilds of the earth; beset with insidious disease, stifling ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... inhaled in every breath of air, abiding its opportunity to become an active principle. Absorbed in our own peculiar form of egotism, we believe that a Supreme Being has cast the cause of humanity upon one die, to prosper or perish by the chances of our game. What belittling of the Almighty! what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the belittling "that." "Of course I couldn't promise—anyway I don't believe you could ever do it, so what's the ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... rather enjoy seeing you and Monty open up on that bunch. I'm thinking I'd be glad to meet Don Carlos. But Miss Hammond! Why, Nels, such a woman as she is would never recover from the sight of real gun-play, let alone any stunts with a rope. These Eastern women are different. I'm not belittling our Western women. It's in ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... designate the "bringing forth of legitimate children and officiating as a faithful warder of the house" as the only occupation of woman, to-day we have traveled past that point. Who, to-day, would dare uphold such a position of woman as "natural" without exposing himself to the charge of belittling her? True enough, there are even to-day such sots, who share in silence the views of the old Athenian; but none dare proclaim publicly that which 2,300 years ago one of the most eminent orators dared proclaim frankly and ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Rudolf did this or that, set this precedent or that, laid down this or the other policy, and that the king could do no better than follow in Rudolf's steps. Mr. Rassendyll's name seldom passed his wife's lips, but when she spoke of him it was as one speaks of a great man who is dead, belittling all the living by the shadow of his name. I do not believe that the king discerned that truth which his wife spent her days in hiding from him; yet he was uneasy if Rudolf's name were mentioned by Sapt or myself, ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the consciousness of that nature, reaching out beyond the finite, which dwells within him. Both of them were thus placed upon the height from which they really originate. To safeguard them upon this height, to save them from being desecrated by every paltry and belittling view, to rescue them from every sentiment which did not spring from their purity, was really Schiller's aim, and appeared to him as his true life-mission determined for him by the original ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of worry as well as of its frequent associate, anger, have been dwelt upon by writers philosophical, religious, and medical. "Worry," says one author, "is the root of all cowardly passions,—jealousy, fear, the belittling of self, and all the introspective forms of depression are the children of worry." The symptoms and the evil results seem to receive more elaborate and detailed attention than the treatment. "Eliminate ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... illusion vanished. Back into his self-belittling he slipped and was silent. Away fled the ease and complacency, and the wind came up from the river ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... abstract or concrete probability, and still less literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation—or, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... cover fallen leaves and dead twigs with their blackish fructifications; a remarkable piece of work, full of the most valuable documentation, as were the theses whose subjects I have just detailed; but without belittling the fame of their author, one may say that another, in his place, might ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the second act is laid at a delightfully picturesque street-corner. Sachs is musing before his shop-door when Eva comes to find out how Walther had fared before the Mastersingers. Hans tells her of his discomfiture, and, by purposely belittling Walther's claims to musicianship, discovers what he had before suspected, that she loves the young knight. Sachs loves Eva himself, but finding out the state of her affections, nobly determines to help her to win the man of her heart. Walther now comes to meet his love, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... lies here. Certainly a nation does not seem threatened with immediate dissolution because an able clerk is sent away and a middling sort of man replaces him. Unfortunately for the welfare of nations individual men never seem essential to their existence. But in the long run when the belittling process is fully carried out nations will disappear. Every one who seeks instruction on this point can look at Venice, Madrid, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Rome; all places which were formerly resplendent with mighty ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... who always seemed to find a peculiar pleasure in belittling any opinion that I might express. "What we are in for is a thunderstorm that will make some of ye sit up and take notice. I guess it will bring with it some pretty considerable squalls, so it will be a good plan to stow a few of them flyin' kites of ours. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... give, and no one ever has, no one ever will, see there exactly what he sees. If a man's mind cannot create a beautiful frame, then the picture must have but a poor effect for him, and he will go away belittling it. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... view surely a serious, thoughtful, and thorough study of the louse, in all its varieties and species, is neither belittling nor degrading, nor a waste of time. We venture to say, moreover, that more light will be thrown on the classification and morphology of insects by the study of the parasitic species, and other degraded, wingless forms that do not always live parasitically, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... understand. Our god is different. He is the one who exists in essence. The one who lives in substance, the sole procreator who was not engendered, the father of the fathers, the mother of mothers. The one and only. And we crave his pardon for belittling him by miracles. But they are part of that faith which alone contents the simple-minded. You are above them—I admit freely that the miracle could be prevented. You declared it would not take place—you have found the ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... passed away. Our nation may disappear. But we believe our race has yet but fairly started in its line of progress; time only is wanted. We can but think that that view which limits man to an existence extending over but a few thousand years of the past, is a belittling one. Rather let us think of him as existing from a past separated from us by these many thousand years; winning his present position by ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... of belittling his flying feats, Mr. Nighthawk was secretly very proud of his skill at sky-coasting. And when Kiddie Katydid asked him if he wouldn't kindly give an exhibition of the art of fancy flying, Mr. ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... "car fares" traveling expenses, for he was familiar with Doctor Kane's habit of belittling his many charitable acts. He knew also that, if necessary, the doctor would gladly lend him the sum of money which stood, a tangible barrier, between his mother and total darkness; but with a sense of indomitable ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... his choice of technique. He was a naturally witty man who, sometimes out of fear and sometimes out of malice, expressed himself best through circuitous irony. In 1724, when he himself considered his oratorical practice, he argued that his matter determined his style, that the targets of his belittling wit were the "saint-errants." We can only imagine the exasperation of Collins's Anglican enemies when they found their orthodoxy thus slyly lumped with the eccentricities of Samuel Butler's "true blew" Presbyterians. It ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... the market, speculating in bubbles. He admired the snowy fountains, too, and the doves that darted in and out of the wind-blown spray. There was nothing like this in America, either. He was not belittling; he was only making comparisons. He knew that he would be far happier in his adopted country, which would accomplish all these beautiful things ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... social reform and "character," she give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Judiciary Committee's inquiry at Albany, sought in every way to belittle the significance of his and his party's Chicago Manifesto, the Moscow Manifesto, and the evident connection between the two, belittling, also, his party's affiliation with the Third (Moscow) International. How unscrupulous and hypocritical his testimony seems in the light ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... hour of a woman's birth to her death, there is a continuous system of belittling her, which, if it does not succeed in destroying her self-respect, thus teaching her that she may, as her only means of retaliation, allow herself in any little meanness which may occur to her, is so galling to that self-respect, that the wonder is that her very nature has not become revolutionized. ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... Bourke, because of the interference of a man I fired for lack of common sense, experience and recognition of his superiors. Westlake is a hot-head and I suppose he has some idea of trying to get even with me by belittling me in your eyes and running down my management. I think I have shown my interests allied with yours. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn |
