"Falseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... willing to break off the match; she owned to him all her troubles, all her doubts; how she had made up her mind to write to him, but had not dared to do so, lest his answer should be such as would kill her at once. And then she prayed to be forgiven for her falseness; for having consented, even for a moment, to forget the solemn vows she had so often ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... was strong to reply with an affirmative. If she believed his father to be utterly irreconcilable, there could be no excuse for lingering; yet his nobler self prevailed, to her no word of falseness. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... summit of that pile, would have slain elephants. And all the facade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit. The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself misplaced and perverted gradually left you as you gazed. You perceived its falseness. You perceived that Mr. Oxford's club was a monument, a relic of the days when there were giants on earth, that it had come down unimpaired to a race of pigmies, who were making the best of it. The sole descendant of the giants was the scout behind the door. As Mr. Oxford and Priam climbed towards ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Charles from the results of his own double-dealing. Glamorgan was imprisoned for a time, with tremendous threats; all publicity was given to Charles's letters authorizing proceedings against him as "one who either out of falseness, presumption, or folly, hath so hazarded the blemishing of his Majesty's reputation with his good subjects, and so impertinently framed these Articles out of his own head;" and meanwhile Charles's letters of consolation to Glamorgan, with his thanks, and ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... went on, very softly, and lowering her look, from the half conscious shame of half unconscious falseness, "I can't be all my life here at Lossie? We shall have to say goodbye to each other—never to meet again most likely. But if you should turn out to be of good ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... their masters that they are fighting for the very life and existence of their empire, a war of desperate self-defense against deliberate aggression. Nothing could be more grossly or wantonly false, and we must seek by the utmost openness and candor as to our real aims to convince them of its falseness. We are in fact fighting for their emancipation from the fear, along with our own-from the fear as well as from the fact of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals or schemers after world empire. No one is threatening the existence or the independence of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... stood confessed now. "Why did you deceive us?" It sounded more like, "Tell us we may trust you; make us happy again!" One word from him, and the poor sad lady would have banished from her heart the long-staying, unwelcome guest—belief in his falseness, and closed it ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a suite inspired by the Arabian Nights. The Sultan, persuaded of the falseness and faithlessness of woman, had sworn to put every one of his wives to death in turn after the first night. But Scheherazade saved her life by interesting him in the stories she told him for a thousand and one nights. Many marvels were told by her in Rimsky-Korsakoff's fantastic poem,—marvels ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... not vile, not bad, not lost, but groping like he was down those vast and naked shores of life. He wept for the hard-faced Mrs. Wrapp, whose ideal had been wealth and who had found prosperity bitter ashes at her lips, yet who preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all perhaps, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come about that during all this civilization-period the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such an extraordinary degree. Society has been built on a false base, not true to fact or life—and has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its falseness. Meanwhile at the heart of it all—and within all the frantic external strife and warfare—there is all the time this real great life brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... With you, I wonder how you're stranger than Another woman to another man; But parted—and you're as a ship unknown That to poor castaways at dawn is shown As strange as dawn, so strange they fear a trick Of eyes long-vexed and hope with falseness sick. Parted, and like the riddle of a dream, Dark with rich promise, does your beauty seem. I wonder at your patience, stirless peace, Your subtle pride, mute pity's quick release. Then are you strange to me and sweet as light Or dew; as strange and dark as starless night. ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... to prayer. But what a silence comes over all such questionings when one notices that this prayer of Jesus uttered thus {157} in this most solemn hour was not, in the sense of these discussions, answered by his God. It was the moment of the supreme agony of Christ. The falseness of friends, the blindness of his people, the malice of their leaders,—all these things seem more than he can bear. "Let this cup pass from me," he prays, and, behold, his prayer is not accepted, and what he asks is denied, and the cup is ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... direction opened by Herder. It evinces an unprejudiced and catholic mind, a just, poetic, sensible, clear and secure understanding, as well as the most extensive and thorough acquirements. Before her return to America she also published, in German, a small work on The Falseness of the Songs of Ossian. An article from her pen, entitled From the History of the First Settlements in the United States, published in 1845 in Rumei's Historiches Taschenbuch, is also worthy of notice. In 1847 she brought out at Leipzic, a historical work ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... which has given them considerable notoriety; and has placed them at the head of their particular school; but it is a school whose distinctive characteristics consist in extravagance, unhealthiness of tone, and falseness ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... falseness; falsity, falsification; deception &c 545; untruth &c 546; guile; lying &c 454; untruth &c 546; guile; lying &c v.. misrepresentation; mendacity, perjury, false swearing; forgery, invention, fabrication; subreption^; covin^. perversion of truth, suppression of truth; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sometimes falseness among some pastors, either for the sake of carnal relations, or the like; at this hole Tobiah, the enemy of God, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Guinevere, after her falseness to Arthur had been proved, had withdrawn to a nunnery at Almesbury. Here Arthur had had an interview with her before setting out on his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... for our instruction, as fatal as to write for our amusement. A work of art must suggest everything, but it must prove nothing. Bad imaginative work like "La Gioconda" is really, in its way, better than this unimaginative and theoretical falseness to life; for it at least shows us beauty, even though it degrades that beauty before our eyes. And Duse, of all actresses the nearest to nature, was born to create beauty, that beauty which is the deepest truth of natural things. Why does she after all only tantalise us, showing us little ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... hid from all, that these two were twin sisters. It was Frene's lot to be doubly abandoned, and to see her lover become her sister's husband. When she learned that her friend purposed taking to himself a wife, she made no outcry against his falseness. She continued to serve her lord faithfully, and was diligent in the business of his house. The sergeant and the varlet were marvellously wrathful, when they knew that she must go from amongst them. On the day appointed for the marriage, Buron bade his friends and acquaintance ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... though many of the rascals and rapscallions, who were open menaces to good government were left with arms in their hands so as to be an argument in favour of drastic police-rule. Thus it is significant of the underlying falseness and weakness of the dictator's character that he never dared to touch the troops of the reprobate General Chang Hsun, who had made trouble for years, and who had nearly embroiled China in war with Japan during the so-called Second Revolution ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... as Mrs. Daw was left alone with Paul, she began to upbraid him with his falseness,—"You vulgar, stuck-up, ugly, awkward deceiver! you have neither honesty enough to live by, nor wings enough to fly with." Whereupon she jumped at him and gave him such a plucking as spoilt his ...
— The Faithless Parrot • Charles H. Bennett
... to aim at. Then the energy of the society may be diverted from its interests. Such a drift of the mores is exactly analogous to a vice of an individual, i.e. energy is expended on acts which are contrary to welfare. The result is a confusion of all the functions of the society, and a falseness in all its mores. Any of the aberrations which have been mentioned will produce evil mores, that is, mores which are not adapted to welfare, so that a group may fall into vicious mores just as an individual ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... delicate moustaches. The sorrow, quiet but profound, the amiable smile and the lost arm, were appealing details which at once arrested attention and excited sympathy. But to me this sympathy was mingled with a vague repulsion, occasioned by a certain falseness in the amiable smile, and a furtiveness in the eyes, which I saw—or fancied—and which, with an inexplicable reserve, forming as it were the impregnable citadel in the center of his outwardly polite and engaging manner, gave me something of that vague impression which we ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... we have a right to regard the ideas of truth, beauty, goodness as objectively embodied in living personalities we have no right to regard the ideas of falseness, hideousness, evil and malice, as objectively embodied in living personalities? To answer this question it is necessary to define more clearly the essential duality which we discover as ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... still their eyeballs shrink tormented Back into their brains, because on their sense Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black; Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh —Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses. —Thus their hands are plucking at each other; Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging; Snatching after us who smote them, brother, Pawing us who ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... thing about such opinions as these is not the exact height and depth of their falseness, but the considerations which could recommend them to a man of so much knowledge, both of books and of the outer facts of life, and of so much natural acuteness as De Maistre. Persons who have accustomed themselves to ascertained methods ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... murmured. "Oh, if you would only try to open my cousin's eyes to his friend's falseness—I know he's false, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... Jefferson's inaugural, then six months old. The principles laid down in that address, in the midst of much fine rhetoric, had begun to be shown in practice, and Webster employs argument and invective to lay bare the falseness of Jefferson's professions. His longest and sharpest attack is upon the policy pursued by the President in rewarding his followers with office,—a policy in accord with the principles laid down in the inaugural. We are accustomed nowadays to strong statements ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... idealisation of a protege's regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion, amiable compliments on a woman's hair or touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind—all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare's. He borrows very many of his competitors' words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... glow of understanding. She loved the memory of this man because he, her brother, had loved him. And after these hours came the nights when truth, smiling at him, flung aside its mask and stood a grinning specter, and he measured to the depths the falseness of his triumph. His comfort was the thought that she knew. Whatever happened, she would know what John Keith had been. For he, John Keith, had told her. So much of the truth had ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... each human being. This is seen most absolutely in the sphere of morals. The ultimate standard for a man is his own individual conscience, and neither the constraint of affection, nor the authority of numbers, can atone for falseness there. One of the most forceful illustrations of this final position of all religion is to be found, in the passage of terrific intensity from the Book of Deuteronomy, which we have transcribed as a preface to this chapter. The form of the passage ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... must not imagine that he had ever wavered in his intention with regard to Dorothy Stanbury, because he had been driven into a corner by the pertinacious ingenuity of Miss French. He never for a moment thought of being false to Miss Stanbury the elder. Falseness of that nature would have been ruinous to him,—would have made him a marked man in the city all his days, and would probably have reached even to the bishop's ears. He was neither bad enough, nor audacious enough, nor foolish enough, for such perjury as that. And, moreover, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of eulogy in his ears. Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter. Falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth; if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... she's herself! A girl like her couldn't play anybody false because there's no falseness in her to do it with. What are you ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... falseness of his wild narratives was established, was it a far cry to Betty Gallup's suspicions and accusations? What and who was this man, who called himself Amazon Silt who had taken Cap'n Abe's place in the store on ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... duke was all-powerful within his realm: the clandestine union was pronounced null and void, and the countess expelled. Her latest act of vengeance was to inform Rudolph that their child had died. This was in 1827. But this assurance was on a par with her former falseness: the child, a girl, was handed over to Jacques Ferrand, a miserly notary in Paris, whose housekeeper got rid of it to a rogue known as Pierre Tournemine. When he at last ran to the end of his tether, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... prosecution, was involved in the indiscriminate charges of the informers, who were beginning to aim at more exalted prey. The minister, alarmed at the unexpected result of his own agitation, was now convinced of the falseness of the whole proceeding. It was a fortunate occurrence. From that time ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... or the child, who is introduced to them by the kind novelist as a being without faults. Do they stop to consider whether this is a true picture of humanity? It would be a terrible day for the book if they ever did that. But the book is in no danger. The readers would even fail to discover the falseness of the picture, if they were presented to themselves as perfect characters. 'We mustn't say so, but how wonderfully like us!' There would be the only impression produced. I am not trying to dishearten you; I want to encourage you to look at humanity from ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... were left alone over their wine. There was a strong personal contrast between them. Mr. Vanborough was tall and dark—a dashing, handsome man; with an energy in his face which all the world saw; with an inbred falseness under it which only a special observer could detect. Mr. Kendrew was short and light—slow and awkward in manner, except when something happened to rouse him. Looking in his face, the world saw an ugly and undemonstrative little man. The special observer, penetrating under the surface, found ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... such a confession, I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... interrupt her flow of talk, conscious of the falseness of his position, squirming under her caresses, and cursing himself heartily for yielding to the absurd impulse that had placed him in so ridiculous a predicament, Sanderson opened his month a dozen times to make his confession, but each ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some may have learned from them that modesty is a charm well worth preserving. I think that no youth has been taught that in falseness and flashness is to be found the road to manliness; but some may perhaps have learned from me that it is to be found in truth and a high but gentle spirit. Such are the lessons I have striven to teach; and I have thought it might best be done by representing to my readers characters like themselves,—or ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... cities and islands—Nicaea, Chics, Rhodes, Smyrna, Ephesus, Philadelphia, Sardis, and in fact most of Asia Minor (1097-1099). This is ascribed as a credit to his policy and diplomacy by his daughter, by the Latin historians of the crusade to his treachery and falseness, but during the last twenty years of his life he lost much of his popularity. They were marked by persecution of the followers of the Paulician and Bogomilian heresies (one of his last acts was to burn Basilius, a Bogomilian leader, with whom he had engaged in a theological ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... out of the room. First of all I felt intensely proud of what I had done, and secondly I hated the student from the bottom of my heart. Not because he had struck me, but because to him my conduct must have been supremely gratifying. By degrees the falseness of my position became clear to me, and this set me thinking. For a couple of weeks I was like one demented, and after that I ceased to feel proud of my false moral victory. At the first ironical remark on the part of my adversary I thrashed him until he became unconscious. This brought about ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... therefore become afraid of herself, or in the least realise at once the danger of her own position. Her immediate glance at the matter did not go beyond the falseness of men. If it were so, as she suspected,—if Phineas had in truth transferred his affections to Violet Effingham, of how little value was the love of such a man! It did not occur to her at this moment that she also had transferred hers to Robert ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... light haze hung about the elm-trees in the calm morning, and the smoke rose straight into the air from the roof of the kindred. And he said: "What is this? am I death-doomed this morning that this sight cometh so clearly upon me amidst the falseness ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... eternal punishment for error in, 9; falseness of, 7 ff.; Greek, extensive study of, xiii; ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... and engaged in battle off the Isle of Pines. The victory was decidedly with the English, but the Spaniards were apparently the same then as they are to-day. Everybody remembers Blanco's famous dispatches, famous for their absurd falseness. So then the Spanish admiral issued a bulletin in which he claimed a magnificent triumph. Baskerville was so angry that he publicly declared the admiral to be a liar and challenged him to a duel. Nothing, however, ever ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... fifth of January in 1919, after sixty years of life, full of unwearied fighting against evil and injustice and falseness, he "fell on sleep." The end came peacefully in the night hours at Sagamore Hill. But until he laid him down that night, the fight he waged had known no relaxation. Nine months before he had expected death, when a serious mastoid operation ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... by the Church is that each one may freely affirm and act upon the highest human conceptions he can attain of the{249} power, wisdom, and goodness of God, His watchful care, His loving providence for every man, at every moment and in every need; for the Christian knows that the falseness of his conceptions lies only in their inadequacy; he may therefore strengthen and refresh himself, may rejoice and revel in conceptions of the goodness of God, drawn from the tenderest human images of fatherly care and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... fixed upon the white streak of motionless sea which was still visible through the gloom. She was thinking of him, of his ways of life, of his happiness, and of her duty towards him. She had told him, with her pretty feminine falseness, that she could wait without impatience; but now she said to herself that it would not be good for him to wait longer. He lived alone and without comfort, working very hard for his poor pittance, and she could see, and feel, and understand ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity which would fain regard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, at noble morality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the "gospel of the lowly," the doctrine ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche. |
