"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to like Ethel before this trip had been planned, and as she knew her better she liked her more. Ethel Banks, though the only daughter of a millionaire, was not in the least proud or ostentatious. She was a sweet, simple-minded girl, with friendly ways, and a good comradeship soon developed between ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... confusion occasioned by the breaking up of the company, the tutor and his pupil—the latter of whom had naturally dropped into the less ostentatious posture of a quadruped—were forgotten, or at least overlooked, by the crowd of courtiers, who rushed to congratulate Mar Yusef, or laid their heads together, to whisper their surprise or their suspicions. Titus, therefore, having briefly given directions to Timothy to take care that the book was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... Reformation" was chiefly due to the ostentatious patronage of it by the lay chiefs of the Irish oligarchy. Mr. Synge, in Clare, Lord Lorton, and Mr. McClintock at Dundalk, were indefatigable in their evangelizing exertions. The Earl of Roden—to show his ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Forsite,' he had the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sought office with as much desire as More avoided it; Bacon used as much solicitation to obtain it as More endured to accept it, and each, when in it, was equally true to his character. More was simple, as Bacon was ostentatious. More was as incorruptible as Bacon was venal. More spent his private fortune in office, and Bacon spent the wages of corruption there. Both left office poor in worldly goods; but while More was rich in honor and good deeds, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... have to depend on you." I told him that such a remark might well be accepted in some quarters as a British surrender. Then he came up to the scratch: "Surrender? Never." But I fear we need—in some practical and non-ostentatious way—now and then to remind all these European folk that we get no particular encouragement by ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... and hung over him with ostentatious anxiety, while Simmons, weeping with pain, was carried away. "'Ope you ain't 'urt badly, Sir," said Slane. The Major had fainted, and there was an ugly, ragged hole through the top of his arm. Slane knelt down and murmured: "S'elp me, I believe 'e's dead. ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... here, even among the poorer classes, and that too in a country where the soil is not at all to be compared with our own, I mourn for our down-trodden countrymen, who are plundered, oppressed, and made chattels of, to enable an ostentatious aristocracy to vie with each other ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... addressing the House of Commons. Burke was raised into public life: and he seems to have been prouder of this new dignity than became so great a man. For this reason, most of his speeches have a sort of parliamentary preamble to them: there is an air of affected modesty, and ostentatious trifling in them: he seems fond of coqueting with the House of Commons, and is perpetually calling the Speaker out to dance a minuet with him, before he begins. There is also something like an attempt to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was indeed no part of the character of Themistocles, although he has been accused of those vices, because guilty, at times, of extortion. He was profuse, ostentatious, and magnificent above his contemporaries and beyond his means. His very vices were on a large and splendid scale; and if he had something of the pirate in his nature, he had nothing of the miser. When he had to choose between two suiters for his daughter, he preferred the worthy ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... convinced, that he preferred their society to her own. The rank of Count Morano procured him that distinction which she refused to the rest of the company. The haughty sullenness of her countenance and manner, and the ostentatious extravagance of her dress, for she had not yet adopted the Venetian habit, were strikingly contrasted by the beauty, modesty, sweetness and simplicity of Emily, who observed, with more attention than pleasure, the party around ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of merriment ran through the crowd, breaking in many places into ostentatious guffaws. To those who knew the underside of those meetings, the mild request appeared so ineffectual as to be merely ridiculous. The honorable chairman, on the stage, hid a ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the air of the most simple of edifices. Such, take him for all in all, was Michael Angelo, the salt of art; sometimes, no doubt, he had his moments of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy; both met with armies of copyists, and it has been his fate to have been censured for their folly." This studied panegyric is nevertheless vigorous—emulous as that of Longinus, of showing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... sword in Germany's hand was broken. Autocracy, defeated in the eyes of its deluded subjects and discredited in the eyes of the world, was in headlong flight. Its only concern was to save as much as possible from the ruins of the ostentatious temple ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... either by customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secret, disowning its own existence, baptized with ostentatious names of democracy, obsequious to the people for the sake of governing them; this nameless, lurking aristocracy, that ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, that produced nothing, but lay ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... can you talk such nonsense?" said Mrs. Peyton impatiently. "But I have no fear of that," she added, with a slightly ostentatious confidence. "I only ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... force of character. The Duke of Lerma was "the Atlas who bore the burden of the monarchy."[1] He was a man, according to Quevedo, "alluring and dexterous rather than intelligent; ruled by the interested cunning of his own creatures but imperious with all others; magnificent, ostentatious; choosing his men only by considerations of his own special policy or from personal friendship." Under such a man, who ruled the King at his will, it was not likely that any portion of the royal benevolence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... suggested by the situation, Falkner exhibiting a general knowledge and intuition of things without parade or dogmatism. Doubtful of all versatility as Kate was, she could not help admitting to herself that his truths were none the less true for their quantity or that he got at them without ostentatious processes. His talk certainly was more picturesque than her brother's, and less subduing to her faculties. John ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... recognising personally that labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repetition ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... Prodicus and others he learnt to laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wealth, the men who control these great corporations— these great mills—give millions away in ostentatious charity. They send missionaries to foreign lands. They endow schools and universities and allow the men who earned the surplus to die in want. I believe in no charity that is founded on robbery. I have no admiration for generous ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to an end at last, and the whiskered waiter presented his bill and evacuated the apartment and closed the door behind him with an almost ostentatious discretion. Ramage stood up, and suddenly turned the key in the door in an off-hand manner. "Now," he said, "no one can blunder in upon us. We are alone and we can say and do what we please. We two." He stood ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... worthy persons indulge in this fond notion, that they are imposing upon the world; strive to fancy, for instance, that their bankers consider them men of property because they keep a tolerable balance, pay little tradesmen's bills with ostentatious punctuality, and so forth—but the world, let us be pretty sure, is as wise as need be, and guesses our real condition with a marvellous instinct, or learns it with curious skill. The London tradesman is one of the keenest judges of human nature extant; and if a tradesman, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and few can hope to stand on the same literary pedestal. The tyro in composition should never seek after the heavy style. The best of all authors in the English language for style is Addison. Macaulay says: "If you wish a style learned, but not pedantic, elegant but not ostentatious, simple yet refined, you must give your days and nights to the volumes of Joseph Addison." The simplicity, apart from the beauty of Addison's writings causes us to reiterate the literary command—"Never ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... drive in a carriage instead of an omnibus; you would sit in the stalls instead of the upper circle; you would give quantities of money to poor people; and you would buy as many second hand books as you pleased. There are rich people, I believe, ostentatious people, who buy new books. But you, my dear, have been better brought up. No books are worth buying till they have stood the criticism of a whole generation at least. Never buy new ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... Marlow I regard as one of our greatest successes. It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious. We had insisted at all the shops we had been to that the things should be sent with us then and there. None of your "Yes, sir, I will send them off at once: the boy will be down there before you are, sir!" and then fooling about on the landing-stage, ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... tact or the very malice of the times have placed me in Patmos when I desire a more splendid theatre. I can here be useful to my family—to my district. I can live cheaply, increase my fortune, be upon a par with the best of my neighbors, which I prefer to the feasts of your ostentatious mayor or the more real luxury of Phil Brasher's Table. Our population is small, our society contracted, but we are growing rapidly in numbers; and the society we have is in my opinion and to my taste fully equal to anything in your home. ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... mother had come to disturb her mind; but she had been anxious not to judge hastily and without sufficient cause, and had succeeded in putting it from her as an unworthy thought. Now it came back to her, and remained and rooted itself in her mind. Now she understood why her mother, with an ostentatious pretence of fairness, even of generosity, towards her daughter, had left it to Fan to decide whether she would walk in the woods or spend the morning receiving religious instruction at home. Now she understood why Fan, a lover of flowers and of the singing of birds, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... world; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now! I do not expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are your own, and your faults those of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... calf-skin, and attached to the forehead or the left arm; originally connected with acts of worship, they were eventually turned to superstitious uses, and employed sometimes as charms and sometimes by way of ostentatious display. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... me was that, contrary to what one is made to expect, I did not find among the clergy that aggressive and ostentatious proselytism. Everything is conducted in ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... that such merry-making was not only the sole object of the conference, but the great concern of life.[382] Two nations, floundering in hopeless bankruptcy, yet found money enough to lavish upon costly but unmeaning pageants, while many a noble, to satisfy an ostentatious display, made drafts which an impoverished purse was little able to honor. The banquets and jousts, the triumphal arches with their flattering inscriptions, the shows in which allegory revelled almost to madness—all have been faithfully narrated with a minuteness worthy ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... where is that to come from?" And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de Restaud's drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which Goriot's daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de Beauseant. As his fancy wandered ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... that kind are such as it is not very easy to forgive. If he attacked great men, it has been said in his defence, he attacked those parts of their writings which were really objectionable. And, of course, nobody will deny that (for example) Wordsworth's wilful and ostentatious inversion of accepted rules presented a very tempting mark to the critic. But—to say nothing of Jeffrey's failure to discharge adequately the correlative duty of generous praise—it must be admitted that his ridicule seems to strike pretty much at random. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of official appointments, too, Governor Irving was consistent in his ostentatious hostility to Creoles in general, and to coloured Creoles in particular. Of the fifty-six appointments which that model Governor [66] made in 1876, only seven happened to be natives and coloured, out of ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... horses, and his kinsman, Bernabo, jewels and golden coins to a large amount, the whole sum disbursed on this occasion would appear so enormous as to make one doubt whether a petty sovereign could really afford such ostentatious prodigality. But when we consider that the flourishing state of the commerce of Italy attracted thither all the wealth of Europe, we are no longer surprised at an expenditure which, however great, might at that time have been borne not by a reigning ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... vicious, and are always to be regulated according to the Circumstances of Time and a Man's own Fortune. A constant Benignity in Commerce with the rest of the World, which ought to run through all a Man's Actions, has Effects more useful to those whom you oblige, and less ostentatious in your self. He turns his Recommendation of this Virtue in commercial Life: and according to him a Citizen who is frank in his Kindnesses, and abhors Severity in his Demands; he who in buying, selling, lending, doing acts of good Neighbourhood, is just and easy; ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the charm. The hands of big Boone lowered; the others assumed more natural positions, but each, it seemed to Pierre, took particular and almost ostentatious care that their right hands should be always far from ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... A gray sky leaned over the great, barrack-like church that gives an ecclesiastical flavour to Smith's Square. A few dirty sparrows fluttered above the gray pavement—feverish, unresting birds, Trenchard named them silently, as he watched their meaningless activity, their jerky, ostentatious deportment, with lacklustre, yet excited, eyes. How gray everything looked, tame, colourless, indifferent! The light was beginning to fade stealthily out of things. The gray church was gradually becoming shadowy. The flying forms of the hurrying sparrows ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... gone, I crossed to her and spoke. She looked inexpressibly charming in her white cotton gown and neat straw sailor hat with black velvet band. There was nothing ostentatious about her dress, but it was always well cut and fitted her to perfection. She possessed a style and elegance all ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... old car he got the oars of the old flat bottom boat belonging to the troop. He also procured a black marking stick used for marking scout signs on rocks, and a pasteboard target on the back of which he printed in ostentatious lettering. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious entertainment—lodge his guest in the style of a prince for weeks together, nor exhibit a feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion in the mind of his inmate. In public, the populace had no complaints to urge of his ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Berkeley endeavoured to secure another measure of reform—the conducting of elections by vote by ballot. The government resisted this, and Lord John Eussell, with a tone of ridicule and acrimony, offered the motion an ostentatious opposition. The government was beaten by a majority of eighty-seven to fifty. The bill was read a first time, but Mr. Berkeley did not proceed with it, the same pretence set up by the government on Locke King's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that are only a little bit worse than the average. That diamond ring of his is a real diamond, but you can buy imitations that can't be told from the real thing except by an expert, so his diamond doesn't offend anyone by being ostentatious. And it's unfaceted, to ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... awakens in dyspeptics, came the more pretentious and the more permanent structures of the restaurants and eating-places, with stairways and verandas, facades of ornate but inexpensive stucco, masking the frailty of such pomp under ostentatious names: The Paris Hotel and Restaurant, The Miramar, The Fonda del Buen Gusto; and between these pedants of summer-time gastronomy, the lunch-rooms of the natives, huts with roofs of matting, rickety tables with ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... little cynic would get, becoming rather more scarlet, however, over the process of reflection than was quite compatible with the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then a sudden inward restlessness would break through, and she would spend a passionate hour pacing up and down, and hungering for the moment when she might avenge upon herself and him the week of silly friendship ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... none class), doing a little cooking, seeing to the dusting and cleaning, helping make the beds, wash the children, and everlastingly producing her big basket of Handarbeit, the Finnish woman, although just as domesticated, is less ostentatious in her performance of such duties, and, like her sisters in England, attends to her household matters in the morning, according to a regulated plan worked out for herself; trains her servants properly, and, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... descried by several young Mosses, who immediately ran in with the exciting news to their mother, so that Mrs. Moss was again on the door-step when her brother rode up. She had been crying, but was rocking baby to sleep in her arms now, and made no ostentatious show of sorrow as her brother looked at her, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... people—was being taken out of the country. O'Connell, early in the Famine, said: close your ports against the exportation of your corn—open them to the corn markets of the world. This and the like advice was ridiculed as "Protection," and "Ignorance," by those ostentatious apostles of free trade, who kept the Navigation Laws in full force, in order to protect the monopoly of English shipowners; and who, rather than share with other nations the profits arising from carrying the food which would have saved the Irish people, protected ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... shortest and the plainest. In no description of composition is elaborate and ornate phraseology so much out of place. Where a world-wide reputation has been achieved, the name alone, with the addition perhaps of a date, is often calculated to produce a more impressive effect than an ostentatious inscription. It has been observed that ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... undrowned (had the watchers been too vigilant?), on a long foreign tour, and in three months the Princess and Victoria returned. I saw at once that the new relations were permanently established between them; my mother displayed an almost ostentatious abdication of authority; her whole air declared that since Victoria chose to walk alone, alone in good truth she should walk. It was the attitude of a proud and domineering nature that answers any objection to ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... at. Her strong, regular features suggested neither youth nor age. She was of the goddess breed. Every detail of the lady's envelope was perfect—velvet and fur, a glimpse of exquisite antique lace, a sheen of pearl necklace, neither so large as to be ostentatious nor so small as to suggest economy. The Great Man's instinct of the masterpiece stirred. "What can I do for you?" he said, as she showed no further desire to ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... expanse I learn my own extreme meanness, I would also discover the abject littleness of all terrestrial things. What is the earth, with all her ostentatious scenes, compared with this astonishingly grand furniture of the skies? What, but a dim speck hardly perceptible in the map of the universe? It is observed by a very judicious writer, that if the sun himself, which enlightens this part of the creation, were extinguished, and all the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the best History of England for her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and value the greatest part of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Why should such a writer be so forgetful of human comfort, as to give any countenance to ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... suddenly that the woman rocking the cradle was laughing with an ostentatious affectation of covert slyness, and a responsive twinkle gleamed in the eyes of John Ronackstone. As he caught the grave and surprised glance of his visitor he made a point of dropping the air of a comment aside, which he, as well as she, had insistently brought to notice, and Mivane was aware that ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... supernatural. Claudian's ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and invention. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, and coloured from the inexhaustible resources of the poet's treasury. This is not done with ostentatious pomp, as the hyperbolical heroes of vulgar novelists are painted, but always with taste, which ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... dial-plate; and when I asked him the reason, he said, 'It might do very well upon a clock which a man keeps in his closet; but to have it upon his watch which he carries about with him, and which is often looked at by others, might be censured as ostentatious.' Mr. Steevens is now possessed of the dial-plate ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... was fond of splendor and ostentatious display. He courted admiration from whatever source it could be obtained, and even sought it by means to which the frivolous and the vain are supposed alone to resort. He is described, therefore, as returning to Rome, from which he had made so perilous and furtive ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... matter?" she called out languidly. Then perceiving the matter she hastily followed. The Appleboys were standing on their lawn viewing the whole proceeding with ostentatious indifference. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... He pities these miserable kings, the slaves of all who obey them; he pities these false prophets fettered by their empty fame; he pities these rich fools, martyrs to their own pomp; he pities these ostentatious voluptuaries, who spend their life in deadly dullness that they may seem to enjoy its pleasures. He would pity the very foe who harmed him, for he would discern his wretchedness beneath his cloak of spite. He would say to himself, "This man has yielded to his desire ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... either put on a stock with a sham tie, (now all sham things, of what kind soever, militate against good taste,) or else, to make the most of our scarf, we fill up the aperture of the waistcoat with an ambitious quantity of drapery, and we stick therein an enormous and obtrusively ostentatious pin. This is both vulgar and foolish. If we want a stock, it should be perfectly plain—a la militaire, for it is, in truth, an article of military attire, worn for the express purpose of giving stiffness and smartness to the figure. If ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... cared for, and one tree. There was the usual porch furniture, and the house was going to need painting in another six months or so, but not quite yet. There was a three-year-old hover car parked at the curb of a make that anywhere else in the world but America would have been thought ostentatious in view of the seeming economic status of ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... perpetually outraged by the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of the middle-classes wore ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... moves rapidly and silently. I will venture no more at present, but I think it works in the dark. The study was dark, remember, save for the bright patch beneath the reading-lamp. I have observed that the rear of this house is ivy-covered right up to and above your bedroom. Let us make ostentatious preparations to retire, and I think we may rely upon Fu-Manchu's servants to attempt my removal, at any ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very perk, almost comical look. His tail stands more than perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there on the log and pours out his music, looking straight before him, or even down at the ground. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... and nobles and knights waited in his antechamber. There never passed a day when he did not make rich presents." His expenditure was enormous. He rivalled the King in magnificence. His sideboard was loaded with vessels of gold and silver. He was doubtless ostentatious, but his hospitality was free, and his person was as accessible as a primitive bishop. He is accused of being light and frivolous; but this I doubt. He had too many cares and duties for frivolity. He doubtless ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... enemies of his country may rely on his word. The artful he can encounter with art; those who menace, with fortitude; and with wise foresight can avert the rising storm. He seeks not splendour in sumptuous and ostentatious retinue; but if he can only enrich the state, and behold the poor happy, he is himself willing to remain poor. His estate, Briess, near Berlin, is no Chanteloup, but a model to those patriots who would study economy. Here he, every Wednesday, enjoys ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... returned from our journey I wrote a second article, a review of Professor Cairnes' book, published in the Westminster Review. England is paying the penalty, in many uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment which her ruling classes stirred up in the United States by their ostentatious wishes for the ruin of America as a nation; they have reason to be thankful that a few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, standing firmly by the Americans in the time of their greatest difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these bitter feelings, and made Great Britain ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... said the old gentleman, also rising, and placing Phronsie on her feet, observing ostentatious care to keep her hand. "My house is open to you, Eunice," with a wave of his disengaged hand in old-time hospitality, "but of course ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... Arthur; and in enforcing a severe attention to etiquette and outward respectability, he perhaps erred on the side of virtue. Honest, brave, and high-minded, he was also penurious and cold, and the ostentatious good humour of the colonists dashed itself in vain against his polite indifference. In opposition to this official society created by Governor Arthur was that of the free settlers and the ticket-of-leave men. The latter were more numerous ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... made up for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved. Much beauty there must needs be where there are vegetation and the seasons. But even the seasons, in park scenery, are marred by the little too much: too complete a winter, too emphatic a spring, an ostentatious summer, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... though not ostentatious, and seemed well adapted as a social setting for Joseph Crawford and his family. It should have been inhabited by men and women in gala dress and with smiling ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... might have made her a prey to suspicion, and all but misanthropic. Had she been vulgar-minded, she would have been purse-proud; if cold-hearted, she would have become only the more selfish. Vanity would have made her ridiculously ostentatious and conceited; a jealous temper would ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the increase, many of which were left, by persons unknown, in the houses of poor women, who received with them very considerable sums of money. At first, no suspicion whatever fell on the friars, who continued their offices of preaching, saying mass, confessing penitents, and giving ostentatious indications of their leading humble and ascetic lives. A diligent watch was instituted by the authorities, but as far as exterior observances went, there was no reason to believe that any suspicious ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... to re-enter in Green's ship (he had served in one before) for a twelvemonth, and to leave the service or remain in it as he may decide then. This is perfectly true; Mr. Noel had it from his brother the very day before he wrote it to me. He says that Lady Lovelace's funeral was too ostentatious. Escutcheons and silver coronals everywhere. Lord Lovelace's taste that, and not Lady Byron's, which is perfectly simple. You know that she was buried in the same vault with her father, whose coffin and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... arbitrary and irregular exercise of power, by which their people are reduced to a condition of miserable slavery. Indeed, very few of them, in the course of ages, are capable of conceiving any other means of maintaining the ostentatious state, the luxurious and indolent pride, which they mistake for greatness. I heartily wish that this observation and censure may not, in some instances, be applicable to great landed proprietors in some parts of Britain."—Travelling Memorandums, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... its ill looks and disreputable suggestions, those who dwelt in Geneva Square would not have seen it furbished up and occupied for any money. They spoke about it in whispers, with ostentatious tremblings, and daunted looks, for No. 13 was supposed to be haunted, and had been empty for over twenty years. By reason of its legend, its loneliness and grim appearance, it was known as the Silent House, and formed quite a feature of the place. Murder had been done long ago in ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... supposed to have amassed a sum equal to ten or twenty thousand dollars, which is kept in ingots of gold and silver, much of the latter consisting of small Dutch money (not the purest coin) melted down; and of these they make an ostentatious display at ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... men whose last chance had been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those worst off went out game—no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of those broken on the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... when I saw him dispute with a poor gardener who had laid the sods in his yard, about fifty cents, take sixpence off of a weary strawberry woman, or chaffer with his boot-black over an extra shilling, I could not think that it was genuine love for his fellow-men that prompted his ostentatious charities. ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... group was composed of men who had risen from poverty to wealth in a short time. From one point of view such a man is a "self-made" man, industrious, frugal, able, energetic, bold. From another point of view he is a parvenu, narrow, overbearing, ostentatious, proud, conceited, uncultivated. The relatively small size of the propertied class and an obvious community of interest tended to make its members reach a class consciousness even during the Civil War. The success of the group in preventing all tariff reduction after 1865 was a striking ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... enough and though nothing about her home was ostentatious or over ornate, it was quietly and in the ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... and so they made their way from the rathskeller into the sunlight. The Polo Club occupied a magnificent modern building in a prominent location. They passed in at a door which was opened by a man in uniform, ostentatious in its soberness; at the end of a room, rich in rugs and paintings, they encountered another man, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... fashion had degraded, with fragments of tissues, odd yards of brocade, vast bales of faded silk, and innumerable boxes of antiquated ribbons. His shop was soon celebrated through all quarters of the town, and frequented by every form of ostentatious poverty. Every maid, whose misfortune it was to be taller than her lady, matched her gown at Mr. Drugget's; and many a maiden, who had passed a winter with her aunt in London, dazzled the rusticks, at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... daisy? The little word already had a wonderful and living sound—soft, sweet, and beautiful. But to tell the truth about this ordinary masterpiece was no easy matter. An ostentatious lily, a blazing rose, a wayward hyacinth, a mass of showy wisteria— advertised, notorious flowers—presented fewer difficulties. A daisy seemed too simple to be told, its mystery and honour too humble for proud human minds to understand. So he answered gently, while a Marble White sailed ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... own wit, his thin-featured face and keen gray eyes lighting up to a kindliness that his brusque speech denied in vain. He had a fluency of good English at command that he would have thought ostentatious to use in speaking with a ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... it was Raffles's hand that they had, but now I was in the hall among them. A red-faced barrel of a boy did all the holding, one hand round the wrist, the other palm to palm, and his knees braced up against the panel. Another was rendering ostentatious but ineffectual aid, and three or four others danced about in their pyjamas. After all, they were not more than four to one. I had raised my voice, so that Raffles might hear me and take heart, and now I raised it again. Yet to this day I cannot account for my inspiration, that proved ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... down; and as the tresses of the Cavaliers waved more luxuriantly, the hair of the Roundheads was more scrupulously shorn. And the same instinctive exaggeration was constantly extending into manners and morals also. Both sides became ostentatious; the one made the most of its dissoluteness, and the other of its decorum. The reproachful names applied derisively to the two parties became fixed distinctions. The word "Roundhead" was first used early in 1642, though whether it originated with Henrietta Maria or with David ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... towards the open window. It was Sister Cecilia, walking with that mincing lightness of tread which seems to be the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual superiority over the remainder of womanhood. Good women—those mistaken females who move in an atmosphere of ostentatious good works—usually walk like this. Like this they enter the humble cot with a little soup and a lot of advice. Like this they smilingly step, where angels would fear to tread, upon feelings which they are ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... wealth is counted by scores of millions; he has palaces in this country and abroad. His domination over the lives of the thousands who slave in his foundries is kept unshaken by reason of the fact that he coats the bitter acts of oppression of which he is constantly guilty, with ostentatious gifts in the name of benevolence. He presents the cities of the country with ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... strictly by her nurse's side. Once, when she was about ten years old, a newcomer, a dramatic and too richly dressed little person, after a day of wonderful imaginative playing appeared in the Gardens the morning following to turn an ostentatious cold shoulder. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... other, he said it looked "like a damned soul." This was by way of being Dantesque, as Michael Angelo was. Fuseli was an ingenious caricaturist of that master, making great bodily displays of mental energy, and being ostentatious with his limbs and muscles, in proportion as he could not draw them. A leg or an arm was to be thrust down one's throat, because he knew we should dispute the truth of it. In the indulgence of this willfulness of purpose, generated partly by impatience of study, partly by want of sufficient ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the lady whom I was about to meet. If the parlor of Mrs. Clifford bore such sufficient tokens of her weakness of intellect, her own costume betrayed still more. She had made her person a sort of frame or rack upon which she hung every particle of that ostentatious drapery which she was in the habit of wearing at her fashionable evenings. A year's income was paraded upon her back, and the trumpery jewels of three generations found a place on every part of her person where it is usual for fashionable ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... seemingly, of writing a dispatch like Caesar's, announcing, in the same breath, the sight and conquest of his enemy. Marion and his little troop of twenty men, made but a sorry figure in the presence of the Continental General. Gates was a man of moderate abilities, a vain man, of a swelling and ostentatious habit, whose judgment was very apt to be affected by parade, and the external show of things. Some of his leading opinions were calculated to show that he was unfit for a commander in the South. For example, he thought little of cavalry, which, in a plain country, sparsely ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... season only; while, as touching the few provincial newspapers which have so vainly assailed me, or that ignorant and itinerant libeller of New England who goes lecturing from village to village in such open and ostentatious isolation, be sure I have no time to waste on them. Youth being so glorious, art so godlike, and the very world about us so full of beautiful things, and things worthy of reverence, and things honourable, how should one ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... abominandus': or, to pun a little, 'abhominandus'. Be bold in denouncing the heresy, but slow and timorous in denouncing the erring brother as a heretic. The unmistakable passions of a factionary and a schismatic, the ostentatious display, the ambition and dishonest arts of a sect-founder, must be superinduced on the false doctrine, before the heresy ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... speaking, to say that Wordsworth is as proud as Lucifer; but, inversely, to say of Lucifer that some people have conceived him to be as proud as Wordsworth. But, if proud, Wordsworth is not haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of descending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimedes if he now walked upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton? ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff, scanty raiment of the active classes, the shapeless masses of lined cloth of the merchants and magistrates, the prudish and ostentatious starched dress of the women, and the coarse, lumpish garb of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... and disappointed ambition, pour out their sighs, their groans, and imprecations, unseen and unheard. The halls resound with mirth and revelry, and the eye grows dim with its glittering splendour; but amid all this ostentatious brilliancy, poor human nature refuses to be comforted with diamonds and pearls, or to acknowledge that happiness consists in gilded galleries, gay equipages, or fashionable parties. They are cold and artificial. The heart longs ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of such a memento of weakness and mortality did not operate as a strong, quiet stimulus to do with his might what his hand found to do—to lower pride, and to prompt to labour? If Saladin had had for his companion some such faithful hound of sorrow, it would have saved him the ostentatious flag stretched over his head, in the hour of wassail, with the inscription, 'Saladin, Saladin, king of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in their enthusiastic pledges to favourite toasts, strewed the stone floor with their fragments. As for the articles of plate, lent for the purpose by friends and kinsfolk, those had been carefully withdrawn so soon as the ostentatious display of festivity, equally unnecessary and strangely timed, had been made and ended. Nothing, in short, remained that indicated wealth; all the signs were those of recent wastefulness and present desolation. The black ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... would have a basis of any but a sort of courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... lazy habits of wealthy men and women who insist on getting an unnecessary number of paid persons to do for them what they could very well do for themselves, are chiefly to blame for all our tiresome and ostentatious social conditions. Servants must, of course, be had in every well-ordered household—but too many of them constitute a veritable hive of discord and worry. Why have huge houses at all? Why have enormous domestic retinues? A small house is always cosiest, and often prettiest, and the fewer servants, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... interred on the 16th of October, with his provincial aide-de-camp, at Fort George. His surviving aide-de-camp, Major Glegg, recollecting the decided aversion of the general to every thing that bore the appearance of ostentatious display, endeavoured to clothe the distressing ceremony with all his "native simplicity." But at the same time there were military honors that could not be avoided, and the following was the order of the mournful procession,[102] "of which," wrote Major Glegg, "I ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... till bedtime came, and disrobement, and prayers even more mechanical than usual, and lastly bed itself without so much as a giraffe under the pillow. Harold had grunted himself between the sheets with an ostentatious pretence of overpowering fatigue; but I noticed that he pulled his pillow forward and propped his head against the brass bars of his crib, and, as I was acquainted with most of his tricks and subterfuges, it was easy for me to gather that a painful wakefulness ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... the once famous Jesuits' Estates Act. This Act was then before Sir John's Cabinet and he was under strong pressure to disallow it. While Sir John had no love for Mercier or his Government, and while he thought the preamble of the Jesuits' Estates Act, with its ostentatious references to the Pope, highly objectionable, he had no doubt that the Act was wholly within the competence of the {163} Quebec legislature and was not a subject for disallowance. Obviously Quebec could ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... disapproved. They were carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But, though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... in producing sun-pictures of all the treasures and curiosities in his possession. One complete copy of the collection of the photographs is to be presented to the Mechanics' Institution of Carlisle, mounted on the finest cardboard, with ostentatious red-letter inscriptions underneath, "Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Copper coin of the period of Tiglath Pileser. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique Rembrandt etching. Known ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... as delineated by Shakspeare, reminds me of the Farnese Hercules. There is an ostentatious display of power, an exaggerated grandeur, a colossal effect in the whole conception, sustained throughout in the pomp of the language, which seems, as it flows along, to resound with the clang of arms and the music of the revel. The coarseness and violence of the historic portrait are ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... nobody ever speaks boastingly. I once knew the nephew of a barber who always blushed when his uncle was named in his hearing. But an attorney's lady, or a banker's daughter, are often paraded in an ostentatious manner before one by their friends, and I have never known the nephew of a soldier-officer, whose business is to take people's lives, blush at the profession of his relative. It cannot be expected that men will labor in callings that gain them ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... inductive power and capacities of new expressions; and there were the boundless wealth and power of Rome. But Rome had her own ideas to enunciate; and so possessed was she with the impulse to give form to these ideas, to her ostentatious brutality, her barbarous pride, her licentious magnificence, that she could not pause to learn calm and serious lessons from the Greeks who walked her very forums, but, seizing their fair sanctuaries, she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... France, Charles IX., who was of about the same age with Henry, and who had been his companion and playmate in childhood, was now married to Elizabeth, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II. of Austria. Their nuptials were celebrated with all the ostentatious pomp which the luxury of the times and the opulence of the French monarchy could furnish. In these rejoicings the courts of France and Navarre participated with the semblance of the most heartfelt cordiality. Protestants ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... middle of the death-chamber, is not often to be found in tragic scenes. Her shoulders were bent beneath the burden of an enormous bundle of bed clothing, and her arms were dragged down by the weight of two large baskets of provisions. She was much too absorbed in her own ostentatious benevolence to look at once towards the bed and see what had happened there. Probably, if she glanced at the group at all, she supposed that Hannah was only bathing Nora's head; for instead of going forward or tendering any sympathy or assistance, she just let her huge bundle ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... took him so near the back of the car that he had to turn out, a step or so, to avoid collision with it. He accompanied this turning-out maneuver by another which was less ostentatious, but more purposeful. Timing his steps, so as to pass by the rear of the car just as the Master was busy helping his wife to descend, the youth thrust an arm over the side of the tonneau, with the speed of a striking snake. His hand closed on the handle of a traveling ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... on a visit to his uncle Harrison, who in after years, in his usual plain-speaking style, Johnson described as "a very mean and vulgar man, drunk every night, but drunk with little drink, very peevish, very proud, very ostentatious, but, luckily, not rich." That our local governors have a due appreciation of the genius of the famed lexicographer is shown by the fact of a passage-way from Bull Street to the Upper Priory being named ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... fussy, ostentatious, irrepressible busybody, without the faintest conception of delicacy or modesty, who seems to think he has a heaven-born right to patronize Gainsborough, and to take ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the king himself made an ostentatious entry into Silesia. The majority of the Silesians were Protestants. The King of Prussia, who had discarded religion of all kinds, had of course discarded that of Rome, and was thus nominally a Protestant. The Protestants, who had suffered so much from the persecutions of the Catholic church, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... attitude of Juliet's mother. She had always been more than kind to him. On the announcement that he wished to marry her daughter, she had expressed herself well pleased, and during the engagement, which had lasted some six months, she had received him as Juliet's intended husband, with almost ostentatious delight. Now, for some inexplicable reason, she suddenly changed her mind and declined to explain. But rack his brains as he might, Cuthbert could not see how the death of a sister she had quarrelled with, and to whom she had been a stranger for so ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... looked strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's Parisian toilet had an air of provincial assumption; her own pretty Zouave jacket and black silk skirt horrified her with its apparent ostentatious eccentricity; and Mrs. Markham and Miss Chubb seemed dowdy and overdressed beside the satin mantillas and black lace of the Senoritas. Nor were the gentlemen less outres: the stiff correctness of Mr. Banks, ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... exception of an ostentatious parade of paltry equipages, tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some haunted place, it appears to be beloved and frequented only by the apparitions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... similar pretexts, will at the moment of her own selection assuredly break through her boundaries in Asia Minor. The position of England will be contemptible. We have thrown down the gauntlet to Russia by an ostentatious alliance with Turkey, but we hesitate to insist upon the overwhelming necessity of British official and military officers to organise the civil administration and an army of defence; thus, when the sudden emergency shall arise, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Remarks with some general Observations, and shall avoid (as I have hitherto done) repeating any Thing which has been said by others, at least as much as I possibly can: Nor do I think it necessary to make an ostentatious Shew of Learning, or to draw quaint Parallels between our Author and the great Tragic Writers of Antiquity; for in Truth, this is very little to the Purpose in reviewing Shakespeare's Dramatic Works; since most Men are I believe ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... That is to say, his needless austerity was as much affected as the dandy's excessive and ostentatious refinement.] ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... discharged; if repentance were laid upon the scale of the balance, it would weigh down sin. I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion, if men do not conform their manners and life to the profession; its essence is abstruse and occult; the appearance easy and ostentatious. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to offend them, I tried to avoid all literary subjects. I confined my conversation to topics of common interest; but this gave greater offence than the most ostentatious show of learning, for they concluded that I would not talk on such subjects, because I thought them incapable of understanding me. This was more wounding to their self-love than the most arrogant assumption on ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... been unproductive, business looked 'pretty smiling in various directions.' John Duke Coleridge, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, was at this time Attorney-General. Fitzjames differed from him both in opinions and temperament, and could not refrain from an occasional smile at the trick of rather ostentatious self-depreciation which Coleridge seemed to have inherited from his great-uncle. There was, however, a really friendly feeling between them both now and afterwards; and Coleridge was at this time very serviceable. He is 'behaving like a good fellow,' reports Fitzjames July 5, and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be nothing but unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes of good luck. And it is these very parasites—bankers, etc.,—who live in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, and holding offices of trust, as a reward ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... began to cringe With dapper coat and sash of fringe, And, as his master walk'd between The trees upon the tufted green, Finding the weather very hot, Officiates with his wat'ring-pot; And still attending through the glade, Is ostentatious of his aid. Caesar turns to another row, Where neither sun nor rain could go; He, for the nearest cut he knows, Is still before with pot and rose. Caesar observes him twist and shift, And understands the fellow's drift; "Here, you sir," says th' imperial lord. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... outside, that it was not inhabited by high-bred people. There were pink linings to lace curtains at the windows, and quantities of green vines drooped from the balconies, as if to attract attention from the passers-by. Madame Strahlberg, with her ostentatious and undulating walk, which caused men to turn and notice her as she went by, went swiftly up the stairs to the second story. She put one finger on the electric bell, which caused two or three little dogs inside to begin ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the equanimity of Sir John Hawkins, one of the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his kindness in remembering a faithful and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... were inviting conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... few months he was again in favour. "Thus," says Roger of Wendover, "the king set the worst of examples, and encouraged future rebellions." Randolph of Chester came out with the spoils of victory. He secured as the price of his ostentatious fidelity the custody of the Honour of Huntingdon, during the nonage of the earl, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the short way; and the short way is the natural: accordingly say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble, and warfare, and all artifice and ostentatious display. ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... of an enlightened nation that could pay adoration to cold inanimate pieces of marble. His public entry into Rome gained him the hearts of the people; for he appeared on foot, and showed himself an enemy to parade and ostentatious equipage. His wish to listen to the just complaints of his subjects, caused his royal abode to be called "the public palace"; and his people learned to love him as greatly as they ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... her mode of life should not be ostentatious, but she conformed in many ways to the style of her hotel. There were returns of hospitality. There was a liveried coachman when they drove. There was a general freshening of wardrobes, and even Cheditafa and Mok had new clothes, designed ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... years, from which had we the space to spare in this book we would place before the world some of the gems found in his jewel-box, as indicative of the man's industry and the Christian's freedom from ostentatious display. ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... certainly justified. Everything in the house to which she was going was calculated to intimidate people, to set them down, crush them, penetrate and overwhelm them with a sense of their own inferiority. There was an ostentatious and studied show of money, a clever display of wealth. Opulence aimed at the humiliation of less fortunate beings, by all possible means of intimidation, by outrageous or refined forms of luxury, by the height of the ceilings, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short, among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his tongue and to consult Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, book 2, chapter 4, and discover the opinion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... affected solemnity in her discourse, which produces stupidity; but, without any eagerness to talk, she just said what she ought, and no more. She had an admirable discernment in distinguishing between solid and false wit; and far from making an ostentatious display of her abilities, she was reserved, though very just in her decisions: her sentiments were always noble, and even lofty to the highest extent, when there was occasion; nevertheless, she was less prepossessed with her own merit than is usually ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... different which, in her extreme sensitiveness, she was quick to see and feel. There was a new expression in the eyes of the passersby with whom she exchanged glances. Eyes which for years had stared at her with impudence, indifference, or ostentatious blankness now held a sort of friendly inquiry, something conciliatory, which told her they would have spoken had they not been met by the immobile mask of imperturbability that she wore ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... mentioned. An odd volume of the "Spectator" coming into his hands, he read the essays over and over and took them deliberately as a model in language. This was before the date of Johnson's well-known dictum: "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." His method of work was "to make short hints of the sentiments in each sentence," lay these by for a few days, and then having reconstructed the essay from his notes to compare his ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself that there would be great delicacy in the application ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... effective speeding up of Rust. He would have dallied all through the summer, looking feebly for an opportunity to ravish a despatch-case which always accompanied Madame and which had become the inseparable and ostentatious "gooseberry" at their meetings. Madame declared that it was stuffed with papers the most secret. "The English Government would be desolated if they passed for one moment out of my hands." This despatch-case played parts quite human. It was perpetually provocative of Rust's curiosity, ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... it lasted that Paul began to fear he might lose the given moment after all. Yet every line of his friend's face and figure spelled peace; and he was loth to break the silence. Taking the letter from his pocket he opened it with ostentatious cracklings. He read it through twice, very leisurely; and still Desmond sat motionless, absorbed in the changing lights on the water and the hills. Then Paul gave ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... modern, it reads! We who live in a country where everybody is an 'elector' of some sort, and candidates are plentiful, see the same things going on, in a little different dress, before our eyes. Absalom begins operations by dazzling people with ostentatious splendour. In better days Samuel had trudged on foot, driving a heifer before him, to anoint his father; and royalty had retained a noble simplicity in the hands of Saul and David. But 'plain living ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin out of them to write and speak. And, then, for ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... coachmen and footmen wear Mexican dresses, and others have liveries.... But here come three carriages en suite, all with the same crimson and gold livery, all luxurious, and all drawn by handsome white horses. It is the President? Certainly not; it is too ostentatious. Even royalty goes in simpler guise, when it condescends to mingle in the amusements of its subjects. In the first carriage appear the great man himself and his consort, rather withdrawing from the plebeian gaze. There is here much crimson and gold, much ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of the President's ostentatious style of living, of his cream-colored coach and six, and liveried lackeys, his velvet and gold apparel, his almost royal levees, and his well known desire that the title of "High Mightiness" should be conferred ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... years, Glory, and Wealth, and Power, and Fame, and Name, Which generally leave some flowers to bloom Even o'er the grave, I have nothing left, not even A little love, or friendship, or esteem, No, not enough to extract an epitaph From ostentatious kinsmen; in one hour I have uprooted all my former life, And outlived everything, except thy heart, The pure, the good, the gentle, which will oft 110 With unimpaired but not a clamorous grief[fs] Still keep——Thou turn'st so pale!—Alas! she faints, She has no breath, no pulse!—Guards! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Nick," I said to him one day, on his making an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered with a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, "I guess 'twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I'd got ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... minister to the suffering woman ; they denied themselves no luxury for her sake. Yet the money they spent in giving a single party would have kept this family for a twelvemonth. The cost of their ostentatious greenhouse would have paid for a nurse, and educated the two orphan boys until able to go to trades. They had seen these twin boys tied to the washtub in their own bleak shed, that the mother might pursue her labor without interruption; yet as they gave no thought to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... silence of perfect astonishment, in which you could have heard the swish of a bird's wing. As the horse's head touched the line of men, they slunk aside as if they knew not what they did, their eyes falling abashed before Sedgwick's quiet glance and air, as devoid of a trace of fear as it was of ostentatious defiance. The calm, unquestioning assumption that no one would presume to stop him, was a moral force which paralyzed the arm of the most reckless ruffian in the crowd. And so, checking his horse when he would have ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... vanished and there was more squeezing of hands. "Ethel Lewisham," said Lewisham several times, and Ethel reciprocated with "Husbinder" and "Hubby dear," and took off her glove to look again in an ostentatious manner at a ring. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... probably never return, or, if it should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither springing from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along with it. Hence, our colleges may content themselves with playing a less ostentatious part, and the most zealous alumnus need not think less of his alma mater for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... overtopp'd his friend. 250 But when both sat, Ulysses in his air Had more of state and dignity than he. In the delivery of a speech address'd To the full senate, Menelaus used Few words, but to the matter, fitly ranged, 255 And with much sweetness utter'd; for in loose And idle play of ostentatious terms He dealt not, though he were the younger man. But when the wise Ulysses from his seat Had once arisen, he would his downcast eyes 260 So rivet on the earth, and with a hand That seem'd untutor'd in its use, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... behaviour often occur in our intercourse with mankind; but, from the fortunes these men have made since the war, and the frequent reports of their generosity, I was led to imagine there was something more than mere idle compliment and ostentatious parade in their offers. I was deceived, and I hope it will be the last time. This affair has wounded my pride so sensibly, that I shall be extremely cautious in future. I must and will endeavour to adopt some mode of ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... drawing discordant notes from a pair of cracked, patched, and greasy fiddles. And there were men, whose red and bloated faces gave faithful witness of their habitual intemperance; and men, whose threadbare and ragged garments betokened sloth and poverty; and men, whose vulgar and ostentatious display of showy clothing, and gaudy chains, and rings and breast-pins, which they did not know how to wear, indicated dishonest pursuits; and men, whose blue jackets and bluff, brown faces showed them to be sailors; and men, whose scowling brows ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... Mrs. Tuttle nodded with ostentatious understanding. Rising, she seized Romeo's cage and placed it more conspicuously near her. She was critically watched by the older women. They viewed the thing with mingled feelings, one or two going so far as to murmur darkly, "Her and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with great parade and pomp is usually more of a vain and ostentatious display than an act of respect towards the dead; at the same time, any meanness or parsimony is in bad taste. The expenses should be governed by the position of the deceased, and ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... been made so common by fashionable salon composers that one cannot help suspecting that it is not quite a natural tone—not a tone of true feeling, but of sentimentality. The vulgar do not imitate the true and noble, but the false and ostentatious. In this piece one breathes drawing-room air, and ostentation of sentiment and affectation of speech are native to that place. What, however, the imitations often lack is present in every tone and motion of the original: eloquence, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
