"Contemptuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drawings came to him, he glanced at them for a moment, and then threw them down with a little contemptuous laugh. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the intense splendor of Pasta's perfected genius. One of the notices of the opening performance at the King's Theatre, when Mme. Camporese sang the leading role of Cimarosa's "Penelope," followed up a lavish eulogium on the prima donna with the contemptuous remark, "Two subordinate singers named Pasta and Mari came forward in the characters of Telamuco and Arsi-noe, but their musical talent does not require minute delineation." There is every reason ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... trip, for when we got as far as Stanhope, on the Morris and Essex road, our money had given out. I offered the station-master my watch as security for the price of two tickets to New York, but he bestowed only a contemptuous glance upon it and remarked that there were a good many fakirs running about the country palming off "snide" gold watches on people. Our lantern outfit found no more favor with him, and we were compelled to ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... coursed, burning, through his veins; the other's contemptuous manner stung him more fiercely ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... effort to resist, but the stout sailors easily handled him, and bore him down into the steerage. He was thrust into the brig, ironed as he was, and the door locked upon him. Shuffles glanced at the interior of the prison, and broke out into a contemptuous laugh. He then commenced kicking the pales of the partition? but he might as well have attempted to ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... make it perfect. In truth I am ashamed of even combating such an essential falsehood. Were it not that here and there a weak soul is paralysed by the presence of the monstrous lie, and we dare not allow sympathy to be swallowed up of even righteous disdain, a contemptuous denial would be enough. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... present such a Fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. Pathos like this may affect women, and people of weak nerves, with sickness at the stomach;—it may move those of stouter fibre to scornful derision; but we doubt whether, in the whole extensive circle of novel readers, it has ever drawn ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... place at the store. With a promptness in which he took a pride, he sent a check to the detective. He did this even before he went down to the Colossus. The physician had urged him to put aside all business cares, and the merchant had replied with a contemptuous grunt. He appeared to be stronger when he came home at evening, and he joked with Ellen; he told her that she had narrowly escaped the position of temporary manager of the Colossus. They were in the library, and a cheerfulness that ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... singular being, to whom we have just been listening, and whose song I shall hear to-night in my dreams—can she be a politician, a republican? I have never seen a countenance more likely to be contemptuous of the canaille!" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... place," he muttered, "except for color and for a poet. A man would have to shut himself up in a cellar to escape those glorious hills and the bay, if he wanted to work at that putty." He cast a contemptuous glance at a rough bust of his Cousin Della, the only thing he had attempted. As a solution of his hopeless problem he picked up a pipe and was hunting for some tobacco, preparatory to a stroll up Newport, when ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... a sudden laugh and looking at me with a contemptuous expression which made my heart ache): "Oh, no, you couldn't! Never mind me! But you might tell them ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... Among our earth's foundations'—'The god's great altar Must be the last far coping of our work'— It should inaugurate the broad main stair'— 'Or end it'—'It must stand toward the East!' But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out 'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?' Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds'— ''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow'— 'It has the nature of a woman's ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... was forwarded (post-paid) to Hon'ble AUSTIN'S official address at Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey (opposite the Royal Aquarium), but—hoity-toity and mirabile dictu!—no answer has yet been vouchsafed to yours truly save the cold shoulder of contemptuous inattention! ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... nature or by national instinct, never restrained in their dealings by any regard for truth, never to be trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings of disgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even before he has seen them; the feelings of distrust with which he approaches them, and the contemptuous way in which he treats them when brought into contact with them for the transaction of public or private business? When such tares have once been sown by the enemy, it will be difficult to gather them up. It has become almost an article ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... journals and the hostile criticisms of Coleridge and Trollope and Burton, West Indian and African travelers. Very many of you may remember the philosophical disquisitions of the ethnological school of 1847, the contemptuous dissertations of Hunt and Gliddon. But it is worthy of notice in all these cases that the sneer, the contempt, the bitter gibe, have been invariably leveled against the black man—never against the black woman! On the contrary, she has ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... made a contemptuous gesture toward the canvas with his outstretched brush. "A mere daub," said he. "One step higher than painting a barn or a ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... breathless silence. To me Mr. Parker's statement seemed too good to be true; yet he had spoken with the easy confidence of a man who knows what he is about. Standing there, the personification of respectability, a trifle indignant, a trifle contemptuous, his words could not fail to carry with them a certain amount of conviction. The inspector rang a ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a display of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatest military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem not to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of what subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... fact it did. Judah had forsaken God, and because they had done so, they had gone to seek for themselves delights—alliance with Damascus. The image of planting a garden of pleasures, and 'vine slips of a stranger' refers to sensuous idolatry as well as to the entangling alliance. Then follows a contemptuous description of the rapid growth of this alliance and of the care with which Israel cultivated it. 'In a day thou makest thy plant to grow' (or fencest it), and next morning it was in blossom, so sedulously ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... common-sense drove Bartley almost mad. "You have given these cursed Cliffords a triumph over me," he cried; "you have brought shame to my door; but it shall never pass the threshold." Here the Colonel uttered a contemptuous snort. This drove Bartley wild altogether; he rushed at the Colonel, and shook his fist in his face. "You stand there sneering at my humiliation; now see the example I can make." Then he was down upon Mary in a moment, and literally yelled at her in his fury. "Go to your paramour, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... him, and their mistress laughed unfeelingly at the "old Jew," and lifted the children up, one after the other, to get a sight of him as he neared the house. He came to the door, and entered the house boldly enough, and inquired after his parents. The mistress answered him in a surly and unusually contemptuous manner, and wished to know "What the drunken old Jew wanted there," for they thought he must have been drinking or he would never have spoken in the way he did. The old man looked at everything in the house with surprise and bewilderment, but the little children about the floor took ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... had exclaimed, "What, May, have you one as young as this?" on discovering the existence of the baby; and when Norman observed that was not so atrocious either, she proceeded, "You did not hear the contemptuous, compassionate tone when he asked papa what he meant to do ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... her a contemptuous and angry silence for answer. In the street he looked up at the stars and filled his lungs with an expanding sigh of relief. This companion of Ruiz Rios who paid passionate claim to an intense hatred of the man whom she allowed to escort her here and ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... signify that it could not hear. Then he pointed to its mouth, and in the same way tried to explain that it could not eat the meat placed before it. Then he touched its head, to show that it could not understand. We fancied that the chief comprehended his meaning, for he laughed, and cast a contemptuous look at the ugly block. Although he did this, however, in our presence, it is possible that he still had some superstitious fear of the idol, or of the evil spirit it might have been ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... did," responded Polly, in a most contemptuous voice. "Will a duck swim? I led you into mischief—of course you followed. Well, Fly, it rests with yourself. Don't obey our dear, good, gentle Nelly, and you'll have Miss Jenkins here. Won't it be fun to see her squinting at you over ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... illegality of that divorce, and told Charles so in all good faith. With an extraordinary effort of reticence he withheld the name of his affianced, and pressing Charles's arm, begged him to ask no more. And Charles, half-sorry, half-contemptuous, wholly ashamed of having allowed such a confidence to be forced upon him, marched on in silence, now divided between mortal anxiety for Raymond and pity for Dare, now striving to keep down a certain climbing rapturous emotion ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... man's impatience was such that he could scarcely forbear thrusting in his own hand to snatch at the papers which were to explain this vexatious mystery. What could equal the utter confusion of Master Horner and the contemptuous anger of the father, when no letters were to be found! Mr. Kingsbury was too passionate to listen to reason, or to reflect for one moment upon the irreproachable good name of the schoolmaster. He went away in inexorable wrath; threatening every practicable ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought his laugh the most contemptuous, the cruelest sound in the world. "He doesn't deserve that I should tell him about Him," she thought, "and I won't. I ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... believe you, he have read his paper. When he read it, he jumped out of bed and swore most awful. I cut as soon as I could," continued Mr. Bowman, who was on familiar—nay contemptuous terms with the other ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... women at length delivered their reports in a quiet and orderly manner; and as they did not presume to be as contemptuous and offhandish as they had been before, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... it was more or less the result of his "artfulness," and that he was unduly "puffed up" by it, was, in Hooker's characteristic reasoning, equally clear. As his host smilingly advanced with outstretched hand, Mr. Hooker's efforts to assume a proper abstraction of manner and contemptuous indifference to Clarence's surroundings which should wound his vanity ended in his lolling back at full length in the chair with his eyes on the ceiling. But, remembering suddenly that he was really the ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... his prowling; and the two look at one another, she steadfastly, with a sort of awe behind her contemptuous disgust: he stealthily, with a carnal gleam in his eye and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the grinning or contemptuous glances of the bellmen on the seat. It would have been good to be able to hurl something among them. But ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... having perused this doggrel with a contemptuous look, tore off the first word of the last line, and said to the nurse, angrily, "Get thee gone, O mother of Yama, [FN59] O unfortunate creature, and take back this answer" —giving her the scrap of paper — "to the fool who writes such bad verses. I wonder where he studied ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... youth, Madame Fauvel had been secretly loved by Gaston de Clameron. It was a result of certain contemptuous words spoken of the girl he loved that Gaston had committed those deeds which had compelled him to fly the country. Shortly after his flight, the girl, finding that she was about to give birth to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... and composed a new oratorio, "Samson," for the following Lenten season. This, together with the "Messiah," heard for the first time in London, made the stock of twelve performances. The fashionable world ignored him altogether; the newspapers kept a contemptuous silence; comic singers were hired to parody his noblest airs at the great houses; and impudent Horace Walpole had the audacity to say that he "had hired all the goddesses from farces and singers of roast-beef, from between the acts of both theatres, with a man with one note ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... seemed ebonized by the grinding in of particles of blackened wood. Some women, even, in gay, primitive clothes, stood back of the men. As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose. He halted, and met them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the murmur died in a shuffling of feet in the dry grass. He turned again, and walked slowly away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled by his head. In an overpowering rage he whirled about, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... decried every infringement of caste custom and etiquette. Nature and education had combined to deprive her of any adaptability to the new order of things; and she rejected the idea that "a lady should transact business", with the same contemptuous indignation that would have greeted a proposition to wear "machine-sewed garments", that last resort of impecunious plebeianism. However unwelcome Leo had found this assumption of the grave duties of mature womanhood, she met the responsibility unflinchingly, and gathered very ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... complexion, he was reckoned, in the Mercato Nuovo, as little better than an ill-conditioned braggadoccio! His shortness of stature he sought to atone for by his accentuation of the Florentine pout and the Tuscan strut—he was well known, too, for his contemptuous jokes ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... Archie's habit to greet courteously the policemen he passed at night in the Avenue, little dreaming that the day would come when he would view the policing of the world with contemptuous disdain. The Governor spoke of policemen and detectives with pity; they were so stupid, he said, though he admitted under Archie's cross-examination that they could ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the corps of janissaries. Notwithstanding the horrors which attended the Ottoman conquest, the condition of the peasantry during the first three centuries of Turkish government was scarcely worse than it had been under the tyrannical rule of the boyars. The contemptuous indifference with which the Turks regarded the Christian rayas was not altogether to the disadvantage of the subject race. Military service was not exacted from the Christians, no systematic effort was made to extinguish ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... poems may be worth a little, perhaps; but they have not so much goodness as to overcome the badness of the blasphemy of Aeschylus.' The volume, which was published anonymously, received two sentences of contemptuous notice from the 'Athenaeum,' in which the reviewer advised 'those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation to touch anyone rather than Aeschylus, and they may take warning by the author ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... In reading this letter at the trial the Attorney interspersed comments. At the phrase, "Mr. Guelph and his profligate sons," he exclaimed: "This passage is contemptuous, scandalous, false, cruel. Why, gentlemen, is Mr. Paine, in addition to the political doctrines he is teaching us in this country, to teach us the morality and religion of implacability? Is he to teach human creatures, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... troops would be sufficient to quell them." He was now importuned to use the troops at his command to disperse the merchants' meeting at its adjournment. He held that this meeting was contrary to law. He characterized its resolves as contemptuous and insolent, and derogatory to the authority of Parliament. He never grew weary of holding up to reprobation the objects which the merchants had in view. And his political friends now asked him to make good his professions by acts. But he declined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... good-bye—I tell you this because it will amuse you—he said with a kind of angry grief that if Providence were determined in its unaccountable freakishness to place a gift which should be so exclusively man's in the shell or husk (I forget which he called it, but anyhow it sounded contemptuous), of a woman, it might at least have selected an ugly woman. "It need not," he said angrily, "have taken one who was likely in any case to be selected for purposes of love-making, and given her, besides the ordinary collection ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... have taken a sudden turn, as Mr Tomplin said they would: the men were evidently getting over their dislike to us and the new steel, making it up and grinding it in an ill-used, half contemptuous sort of way, and at last the necessity for watching by night seemed so slight ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... the point. Attwater had food and a treasure of pearls; escape made possible in the present, riches in the future. They must come to grips, with Attwater; the man must die. A smoky heat went over his face, as he recalled the impotent figure he had made last night and the contemptuous speeches he must bear in silence. Rage, shame, and the love of life, all pointed the one way; and only invention halted: how to reach him? had he strength enough? was there any help in that misbegotten packet ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... gone down to see the two armed bands move off. They had been gone but a few minutes when he noticed General Halliday, finely mounted, come from a stable behind the hotel and trot smartly toward him. The few store-keepers left in town stared in contemptuous expectation, but to John this was Fannie's father, and the boy longed for something to occur which might enable him to serve that father in a signal way and so make her forever tenderly grateful. The telegraph office was up these same stairs ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... occasion, and desiring to be appreciative, he smiled pleasantly into the golfer's face and murmured, "Beastly fluke!" Mr. Balfour, by the way, has a particular and decided taste in caddies, for he has written that he can gladly endure severe or even contemptuous criticism from them; can bear to have it pointed out to him that all his misfortunes are the direct and inevitable result of his own folly; can listen with equanimity when failure is prophesied of some stroke he is attempting, and can note unmoved the self-satisfied ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... make you into my confidant, my good man," said Mr. Carson, in a contemptuous tone, "I think it might be as well to inquire your right to meddle with our affairs. Neither Mary, nor I, as I conceive, called you in as a mediator." He paused: he wanted a distinct answer to this last supposition. None came; so he began to imagine he was to be ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... packed together in a corner and hustled by their real inferiors. Consider what sort of a voyage Socrates and Aristides and Phocion had of it, on short rations, not venturing, for the filth, to stretch out their legs on the bare deck; and on the other hand what a comfortable, luxurious, contemptuous life it was for Callias or Midias ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... inexplicable to herself, poor child! To the good-natured, careless, jovial American, she would not have even hinted at them for worlds, and not less carefully did she shun appealing to her father for sympathy. That contemptuous "vraiment" dwelt in her memory, not as a matter of resentment, but as something to be avoided henceforth at the cost of any amount of self- repression. She would sit leaning her languid little head on his shoulder; but when he ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... interest. To the perception of his keenly sensitive Southern nature they at once became ribald Yankee vandals, hoping for unseemly amusement from the detection of some awkwardness in the Indian-club-play of a defeated but not conquered Southern Gentleman; and, in the haughty sectional pride of his contemptuous soul, he indignantly determined to show not the least consciousness of their disrespectful observation. Twirling the club around and around his battered head with increasing velocity, he smiled scornfully to himself, nor deigned a single backward glance at ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... streets to the Guildhall. Giles and Stephen would naturally have been put together, but poor little Jasper cried out so lamentably, when he was about to be bound to a stranger, that Stephen stepped forward in his stead, begging that the boy might go with Giles. The soldier made a contemptuous sound, but consented, and Stephen found that his companion in misfortune, whose left elbow was tied to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a word since Ruggiero first turned to him, but had stood with a tranquil and almost contemptuous expression upon his face; but every nerve and muscle of his body were strained, and in readiness to spring into action. He had expected that Ruggiero would at once attack him, and was determined to leap upon him, and to sell his life as ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... about sixty years of age, accompanied by her attendants and her pug-dog. This woman had rather a bulky head, a long face, a snub-nose, high cheek-bones, a keen, bright eye, a large mouth, about which played a smile, at the same time spirituel, imperious, and contemptuous. Abel grew pale, and became at once convulsed with terror; he could not withdraw his eyes from this markedly Mongolian physiognomy, which from afar he had recognised. "Ah, yes," he said, "it is she!" He drew over his face the cape of his mantle, and disappeared as completely as it is possible ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Thou wilt have no need Of enemy to bring thee to thy doom. . . . For not alone by war a nation falls. Though she be fair, serene as radiant morn, Though girt by seas, secure in armament, Let her but spurn the vision of the Cross; Tread with contemptuous feet on its command Of mercy, Love and Human Brotherhood, And she, some fateful day, shall have no need Of enemy to bring her ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... exclamation, as she looked back, that sounded exceedingly comical to Lady Charlotte's ears. They were the repressions of a poignant outcry. "Doggies make that noise," thought the lady, and succeeded in feeling contemptuous. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reeled across the stage and was greeted by a storm of hisses. With savage grandeur he turned on them: "What! do you hiss me—me, George Frederick Cooke? You contemptible money-getters, you shall never again have the honor of hissing me. Farewell! I banish you!" He paused, and then added, with contemptuous emphasis, "There is not a brick in your dirty town but is cemented by the blood of a negro." Edmund Kean treated one of his audiences with less vigor, but with equal contempt. The spectators were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... beyond it, that not a voice or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one. But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... represented by some as a democrat. He was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word. See the quotation from him in my 'Convention of Cintra.'[259] Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms, of the populace. 'Comus' is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in 'Samson Agonistes.' When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized. Indeed, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and was silent when the thousands applauded. In coming out he saw, while unobserved himself, Mr. Vosburgh, and was struck by the proud, contemptuous expression of his face. The government officer had listened with a cipher telegram in his pocket informing ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... to you, may I ask, Sieur de Artigny?" he said, coldly contemptuous. "You are but our guide, and it is no concern of yours who may compose the company. 'Twill be well for you to remember your place, and attend to your duties. Go now, and see that the men have ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... the slave were done before I joined his cause. In thus referring to them, do not suppose me merely seeking occasion of eulogy on my predecessors and present co-laborers. I recall these things only to rebut the contemptuous criticism which some about us make the excuse for their past neglect of the movement, and in answer to "Ion's" representation of our course as reckless fanaticism, childish impatience, utter lack of good sense, and of our meetings ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... repress a shudder. Hitherto he had never been able to take Fakrash quite seriously, in spite of all his supernatural powers; he had treated him with a half-kindly, half-contemptuous tolerance, as a well-meaning, but hopelessly incompetent, old foozle. That the Jinnee should ever become malevolent towards him had never entered his head till now—and yet he undoubtedly had. How was he to cajole and disarm this formidable being? He must keep cool and act ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... here the procession was joined by the lord mayor and other authorities; the shops being closed, and the bells of the different churches tolling. It is said that his majesty, who, at the time these commotions took place, was enjoying the pleasures of conviviality in Ireland, expressed in somewhat contemptuous terms his dissatisfaction at the want of arrangement and energy on the part of ministers. But this seemed to proceed from the failure of their plans rather than from any respect to his deceased queen. She was persecuted even to the last. In the course ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... PARAMORE (utterly contemptuous of Craven's narrow personal view of the matter). Yes. That was all I could get a ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... depths of long experience came up the cynical, slightly contemptuous consolation, "You know this never lasts. You always throw this same fit, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... upon his personal qualifications, might be found at her side endeavouring to persuade its pretty possessor of the eligible investment that might be made of the property in himself. Report, however, had invidiously declared that Georgiana looked with a cold and contemptuous eye upon the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was unequal to further conversation. Deeply it pained her that this girl, whom she wished so to love, should evidently turn from her, not in dislike, but in a sort of contemptuous indifference. Still she made one effort more. As she was retiring, she went up, bade her good-night, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... his hand heavily upon the priest's shoulder. He was prepared even to have used force had it been necessary, but it was not. The latter moved away at once, shaking his robes free from Paul's touch with contemptuous gesture, and calling one of the monks to him, Paul sank on one knee by the side of the dying woman, and bent ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a cool, indifferent, almost contemptuous manner, which made the frowns grow blacker, and the mutterings deeper and louder. But no man as yet sought to beard him, for his courage and his daring were well known throughout the shore, and it would have taken a bold man indeed to ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... they lolled within a yard of me, manifesting a lofty and contemptuous disregard for all save themselves, waited upon most deferentially by the smiling fat fellow, and stared at by the aged man with as much admiring awe as if they had each been nothing less than a lord mayor of London at the very least. But now they leaned their heads ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... told me the gentleman whom I so absolutely persisted in seeing was quite unwell, and unable to converse with any one that day; that I must come tomorrow or the day following, or some other day, when he would be quite well and at leisure! With a contemptuous toss of her pretty head, she showed me the door, and motioned me ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... contemptuous mention of these uncertain legends and vain repetitions amply justified? And can we be too thankful to the sturdy champions of the Reformation, who in the face of no little opposition and by efforts scarcely appreciated ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts. Sailing up the Brahmaputra at one place in Assam, the writer saw a not uncommon occurrence, the great river actually eating off the soft bank in huge slices, five or ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... her life had Dolly loved her mother. At best, she had felt towards her that contemptuous toleration which inferior minds often extend to higher ones. And now—why, she ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Lilburne, raising his eyebrows with a slight expression of contemptuous impatience; "it rests on yourself whether or not he prove it to YOUR satisfaction! For my part, as a third person, I am persuaded the marriage did take place. But if I had Beaufort Court, my convictions would be all the other way. You understand. I am too happy to serve you. But no man can be expected ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... red men knew enough of English to understand his meaning. With a contemptuous sneer one of them tossed Rudolph on Tom's back; then set one of his arms free, and drove him onward with many a brutal stroke. It was hard work for Tom, shackled as he was, to bear the frightened boy, who at times clung to his throat so tightly as ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... crowded circus once: The fool was in the middle. Loud laughed contemptuous Common-sense ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... rode, my mind was still occupied with my growing concern for the poor child I had come to pity so. Within me a furtive tenderness was growing which sometimes shamed, sometimes angered me, or left me self-contemptuous, restless, or dully astonished that my pride permitted it. For in my heart such sentiments for such a maid as this—tenderness, consciousness of some subtlety about her that attracted me—should have no place. There was every reason ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... himself until after the train had passed Palo Alto, when others joined him. The first to emerge on the platform was a Japanese. Farrel favored him with a cool, contemptuous scrutiny, for he was a Californian and did not hold the members of this race in a tithe of the esteem he accorded other Orientals. This Japanese was rather shorter and thinner than the majority of his race. He wore large, round tortoise-shell spectacles, and clothes that ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the same, but Martin turned away, the tears streaming from his eyes. Sandy was looking to the future; Martin to the past; and Lansing Treadwell stood between the two with a light laugh upon his lips and a vague, contemptuous wonder in his eyes. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... man answered with a contemptuous shrug. Turning on his heel, he started to walk away. ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... hear this wretched girl thanking God for her son's life; as if, in fact, she had any lot or part in him, and to dare to speak to the Almighty on her son's behalf! Mrs Bellingham looked at her with cold, contemptuous eyes, whose glances were like ice-bolts, and made Ruth ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... manifesting the most boisterous and exulting joy. They congratulated and embraced each other, loading him with imprecations, and pressed near to view him more closely. The gendarmes pointed him out with their sabres. As to him, he seemed to regard the crowd with contemptuous pity; Saint-Just looked calmly at them; the rest, in number twenty-two, were dejected. Robespierre ascended the scaffold last; when his head fell, shouts of applause arose in the air, ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... represented every morning in the Times. But the real life of the house was something quite different from this. It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than he was. But did she really believe ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... Bellefonds' brother, Alphonso; and as he paid her more attention than from such a quarter was agreeable to Jacques, the young men had had more than one quarrel on the subject, on which occasions they had each, characteristically, given vent to their enmity, the one in contemptuous monosyllables, and the other in a volley of insulting words. But Claudine had another lover more nearly of her own condition of life; this was Claperon, the deputy governor of the Rouen jail, with whom she had made acquaintance during one or two compulsory visits paid by her brother ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... in danger to-day of losing the firmness of our grasp on Christ, as our Saviour and the world's, from a precisely similar cause? We live in an atmosphere of hesitancy and doubt, of scornful rejection of His claims, of contemptuous disbelief in anything which a scalpel cannot cut. We cannot but be conscious that to hold by Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God, the supernatural Beginning of a new life, the sole Hope of the world, is to expose ourselves to the contempt of so-called ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... but the prelude to greater glories. Cope was rallying his forces at Dunbar—was marching to the relief of Edinburgh. Charles, acting on the advice of his generals, marched out to meet him. Cope's capacity for blundering was by no means exhausted. He affected a contemptuous disregard for his foes, delayed attack in defiance of his wisest generals, was taken unawares in the gray morning of the 21st, at Prestonpans, and routed completely and ignominiously ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... horses crouched back with a sudden recoil, as if he had struck them back with his arm, and plunged the runners of the cutter into the deeper snow beside the beaten track. He made a slight pause, long enough to give Northwick a contemptuous glance, and then continued along the road at a leisurely pace to the deep cut through the snow from the next house. Here he stood regarding such difficulty as Northwick had in quieting his horses, and getting underway again. He said nothing, and Northwick did not speak; Elbridge growled, "He's ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... impossible to believe him; she thought of the letters she had received from Raymond, the money—the presents—why even this coat she wore had come from him; she felt that she could laugh at this man opposite to her. A little smile curved her lips; a contemptuous smile it seemed ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... sometimes do see, those whom the world calls unsuccessful, furnished with every virtue and adorned with every grace, made considerate through suffering, sympathetic by isolation, spiritedly patient, meek, yet defiant, calm and contemptuous, tender even of the sorrows and tolerant of the joys which they despise, enduring the sympathy and accepting the companionship of weakness because it is kindly offered, though it be a burden to be dropped just inside the door, and not a treasure to be taken into the heart's chamber, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... gave utterance to a loud, contemptuous laugh, and began to fumble somewhat ostentatiously ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... do, sister? Why are you so contemptuous of your relatives? You might run over once in a while for tea; your feet ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... discovered the death of the Long Arrow there had been rage and consternation. Disputes had followed, the band had divided, and a part had crossed the lake to hunt the trail of the Big Buffalo. He folded his arms and gave them a long, contemptuous look. ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... him as Dr. Dorrimore, of Calcutta. As each of us was presented in turn he acknowledged the fact with a profound bow in the Oriental manner, but with nothing of Oriental gravity. His smile impressed me as cynical and a trifle contemptuous. His whole demeanor I can ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... tie, and his general air of sleek well-being, was at that moment—it was the month of May, 1914—something of a hero with the Belfast working man. And the Belfast working man, as everybody knows, is more bitterly contemptuous of the idle rich, especially of the idle rich with titles, than any other ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... such a work as this, even if, like most summaries, it be something of a repetition. It must surely be obvious to any careful reader that here is something much more than—unless his reading has been as wide elsewhere as it is careful here—he expected from Romance in the commoner and half-contemptuous acceptation of that word. Lancelot he may, though he should not, still class as a mere amoureux transi—a nobler and pluckier Silvius in an earlier As Yon Like It, and with a greater than Phoebe for idol. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... pent-up animosity of Hamilton Burton could remember only the contemptuous curl he had recognized on the other man's lips. He came forward until he stood confronting Edwardes and as he was about to speak Mary interrupted him. Her voice was vibrant with anger and scorn. "If any one should feel called upon to make explanations and apologies, Hamilton, it is yourself ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... resumed, looking very serious in the shifting half-lights that entered the carriage as they passed the street lamps, "I don't feel altogether comfortable about this business. If your friend had not irritated me by the contemptuous manner in which he treated my doubt of his endurance—a purely physical quality—and by the cool incivility of his suggestion that the corpse be that of a physician, I should not have gone on with it. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Rob opened the battle yesterday morning by saying to me in his most aggressive manner, "G., I believe these are your sentiments"; and then he read aloud an article from the "Journal des Debats" expressing in rather contemptuous terms the fact that France will follow the policy of non-intervention. When I answered, "Well, what do you expect? This is not their quarrel," he raved at me, ending by a declaration that he would willingly pay my passage to foreign parts if I would like to go. "Rob," ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... these opinions and words—for the opinions, because they are mine and my mental property, and for the words, because they are the free expression and use of that property. And yet the basic principle remains that injury to the honor of individuals generally, abuse, libel, contemptuous caricaturing of the government, its officers and officials, especially the person of the prince, defiance of the laws, incitement to revolt, etc., are all offenses and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... slighting words and condoned the insult to his niece, no one had a right to exact vengeance; and in truth, whatever were his arguments, he so dealt with the two young men as to force them into shaking hands before they separated, though with a contemptuous look on either side—a scowl from Sedley, a sneer from Peregrine, boding ill for the future, and ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a sufficient weight of commercial distress the states would break up their feeble union, and come straggling back, one after another, to their old allegiance. The fiery spirit of Adams could ill brook this contemptuous treatment of the nation which he represented. Though he favoured very liberal commercial relations with the whole world, he could see no escape from the present difficulties save in systematic retaliation. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... that some young people, and even some people not young, may smile, and be a little contemptuous over the idea of so much interest and delight in so small a matter. It can only be said of them, that there are some things happening every day in the world, that such people don't know of, and cannot be supposed ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... you adored the hills, and the lake, and the villagers, and your pony, and Maulevrier's dogs,' said, Lesbia faintly contemptuous. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... prosperities and not averse from showing them off a little; and she was humanly grateful to have the warm shoulder turned to her and he smiled upon by her friends and the village again; for of all the hard things to bear, to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I found myself now honestly hating them all alike for their former coolness to me and their present odious attitude toward my people. And it was not difficult, recalling all my boyish dislike for John Johnson and his steadily contemptuous treatment of me, to make him the chief ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous, unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... take thou this, and give me my cimeter." And then, receiving the ruby-hilted sword of Solomon in exchange for the mace of Ilderim, without more ado he spurred his horse up the few broad stone steps, and into the vestibule. Thence, the contemptuous impulse yet possessing him, he said loudly: "The house is defiled with idolatrous images. Islam is ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... it is!" with a contemptuous curl of the lip, "you aspire to the character of a good, dutiful wife,—to become an example of enduring patience to all the refractory conjugals in the place, myself among the rest. I understand it all. How amiable some people can be ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... sought to accomplish this end by a new mode from which more might be expected. On every occasion they and their adherents openly showed the contempt which they felt for him, and contrived to throw ridicule on everything he undertook. By this contemptuous treatment they hoped to harass the haughty spirit of the priest, and to obtain through his mortified self-love what they had failed in by other means. In this, indeed, they did not succeed; but the expedient on which they had fallen led in the end to the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sensibility, and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from without ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of common clay. It was her vanity that was wounded, not her heart. She scourged herself because she had been so easily deceived, because she had let herself become a victim of his good looks and his impudence. For that she had let him kiss her—yes, and had returned his kiss—she was heartily contemptuous of herself. Always she had held herself with an instinctive pride, but in her passion of abandonment the tears confessed now that this pride had been humbled ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... language at times obscure but never colourless. He was a new sensation to Bud King's men, who rarely encountered new types. They hung, delighted, upon his vainglorious boasting, the spicy strangeness of his lingo, his contemptuous familiarity with life, the world, and remote places, and the extravagant frankness with which he conveyed ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... repeated Manual, with a sort of contemptuous echo. "Would a soldier part with his liberty, but with his life, unless the chains were made ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wages most likely more even than we had advanced him; and this he would be proud to bring into the common treasury on his return. [Dr. Keil gave me several instances of such conduct; and then proceeded, with a contemptuous air.] But if a young man wants to study languages, he may do so here, as much as he likes—no one will object; but if he wanted to go to college for that—well, we don't labor here to support persons in such undertakings, which have no bearing on the general ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... staring at the pair. The man returned his stare, looking him up and down in a manner meant to be contemptuous. Kerry's fierce, intolerant gaze became transferred to the face and then the figure of the woman. He tilted his hat further forward and turned aside. The woman's glance followed him, to the marked disgust ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Fellows had not formerly the rather contemptuous meaning that it has now; it meant ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... did not notice his feeble compromise, while Alfaretta only gave him a quick, contemptuous look, for her father, opening and shutting his mouth slowly for a ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... betrayal from any toothless old peasant, and found themselves in the grip of fear because these Frenchwomen, these old men of the farm and the workshop, and even the children, stared at them as they passed with contemptuous eyes and kept an uncomfortable silence even when spoken to with cheerful Teuton greetings, and did not hide the loathing of their souls. All this silence of village people, all these black looks seemed to German soldiers like ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... profound and contemptuous silence, he strutted up and down the passage—without going, however, more than two or three yards either way—in front of the door of his lordship's apartment, keeping his huge form proudly erect, as he thus paced the short walk to which ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... with a contemptuous sneer. "Didn't you just tell me that we were living in an age when no one has any money except those who are in business? The richest of my friends have only enough for themselves, even if they have enough. The time of old stockings, stuffed full of savings, is past! Shall I apply to a banker? ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... contemptuous sniff, and the triumvirate descending from their pedestal, all six men returned amicably ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the trial, and in the second place the object of such hatred, that another prosecution against him is called for every day. His position is such that he is more likely to be nervous even if you do nothing, than contemptuous if ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the people like is pooh-poohed; whatever is popular is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... The men hurled a contemptuous cheer after him; they thought they had beaten him off. But Dodd knew better. He was but retiring a little way to make a more deadly attack than ever: he would soon wear, and cross the Agra's defenceless bows, to rake her ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... courtesy, to the cold air and repelling hauteur of the dark-browed captain, the blood rushed throbbing to my forehead; and as I walked to my place at the table, I eagerly sought his eye, to return him a look of defiance and disdain, proud and contemptuous as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... him to oppose that King and England's injustice and encroachments on it, no doubt he had made as great a figure in the world as any other whatsoever, and that either in a civil or military capacity."[34] "The Duke of Hamilton's love for his country," observes a contemptuous, anonymous assailant, "made him leave London, and follow King James, who had enslaved it. His love to his country had engaged him in several plots to restore that prince, and with him, tyranny and idolatry, poverty and slavery."[35] Upon the odious ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... arch of the Place du Carrousel. Haughty, contemptuous, the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel. Like a woman raped by force, rising above her fate, Borne up by the cold rigidity of hate, Stands the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel. Tap! Clink-a-tink! Tap! Rap! Chink! What falls to the ground like a streak of flame? Hush! It ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... few years later Pizarro established the Spanish power in Peru. It is hardly necessary to say that Europeans exhibited an utter disregard for the rights of the people with whom they came in contact, and treated them with contemptuous cruelty. Spain now superseded Portugal as a maritime power and her importance in the sixteenth century is to be attributed largely to the wealth which came to her from her ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... is a plant of slow growth. The tone of good society, though responsive to political talent, and openly, eagerly sensitive to money-making talent, is contemptuous of genius and rates the utmost brilliancy of the talker hardly higher than the feats of an acrobat. Men are obstinate, slow, trusting a bank-balance rather than brains; and giving way reluctantly to sharp-witted superiority. The road up to power or influence ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... eyes shifted to the trapdoor, and into them crept a contemptuous and sardonic smile—the man who was coming up now and hoisting himself to the floor was the man who, half an hour before, had threatened ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... an alliance with her weak-chinned brother; and the ministers of state who suggested another husband, as a compromise, were dismissed with a look. They said she was intractable, contemptuous, unreasonable, and was scheming for the sole possession of the throne. She was not to be diverted even by ardent courtiers who were sent to her, and who lay in wait, ready with amorous sighs—she scorned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... then hundreds and hundreds of small silvery bream would bite, tug, and drag out, and finally reveal the line attached, and then the scheme has come to naught, for once the cute and lordly black bream sees a line he is off, with a contemptuous eye and a ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... only be decided by the application of truth, as the test of ridicule. Two men fearing, one a real, and the other a fancied danger, will be for a while equally exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice, contemptuous censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state of both cases must be known before it can be decided whose terror is rational and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be despised. Both are for a while equally exposed to laughter, but both ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson |
