"Sentimentalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spatulous nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin. For this large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to tears, and a member ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery?" Let us now see the kind of life which the author, freed himself no doubt from "the bugbear of hell," considers eminently sensible—the kind of life of which only an "arm-chair sentimentalist" would disapprove; a kind of life, it may be added, which will appear to most ordinarily minded people as being one of selfishness raised to its ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... was no sentimentalist in religion. She believed with all her heart in Jesus Christ as a living, loving Saviour. Her faith was very simple, and founded on experience. She had prayed, and had been answered. She had sought Jesus in sorrow, and had been comforted. The theologian can ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... inmost thoughts to a lady, one Sunday, after a noble sermon of Robertson's had been read in the cathedral stillness of the forest. His experience was entirely first-hand, and related with unconsciousness that it was not common to all. There was nothing of the mystic or the sentimentalist, only a vivid realism, in that nearness of God of which he spoke,—"as near some-times as those trees,"—and of the holy voice, that, in a time of inward struggle, had seemed to him to come from the depths of the forest, saying, "Poor soul, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... you're a weakling!" Halloran snapped. "You are a—sentimentalist. You lack my stern, uncompromising moral fiber. Like him? Pah! What has that to do with it? I have no weakness, no bowels of compassion. I ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... name amongst some of his contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days; and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient quarrel does not seem a very essential ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... she murmured. "Remember that what you did ... well, in a way it was for my sake, wasn't it?—for love of me? I am here now and we are both free. The old days are passed. Even their shadow cannot trouble us any longer. Don't be a sentimentalist. Listen and I'll tell you something—at the bottom of my heart I rather admire you for what you did. Don't you want ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated dark and dead like the black stone of Memnon's statue, than the clang of the breaking chord was heard through Europe, and men awoke in new day and more spacious air. The sentimentalist has proclaimed him a mere mocker. To the critic of the schools, ever ready with compendious label, he is the revolutionary destructive. To each alike of the countless orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of hell. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... years of three-decker fiction—sat entranced. The cast-off and ill-treated wife returning to the scene of her misery—with the heiress!—grown up—and beautiful: she saw it all; she threw it all into the moulds dear to the sentimentalist. Victoria demurred to the adjective "beautiful"; suggesting "pretty—when we have fed her!" But Mrs. Penfold, with soft, shining eyes, already beheld the mother and child weeping at the knees of the Ogre, the softening of the Ogre's heart, the opening of the grim Tower to its rightful heiress, the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... play-actor," he snarled. Halfman's whole being flashed into activity again. He was no more a sentimentalist but now a ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... no doubt of the fact of a change in the public taste. The hero of action had gone by. In his place had come the hero of observation and reflection, who did not do great things, but who said good things. The exquisite and the sentimentalist were the fashion, to be speedily followed, according to the law of reaction, by the boor and the satirist. At the time when Cooper returned from Europe, Bulwer was the popular favorite. Both in England ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... a button-hole or rolled a pie-crust, despite a gray shimmer at her temples and a significant tracery at the corners of her eyes, has a chamber in her heart marked "private" where she keeps enshrined some tender memory. At the core, every woman is a sentimentalist. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... penned articles innumerable pointing out its baneful influence upon the age? Had he not always condemned it, wherever he had come across it in play or book? Now and then the suspicion had crossed Peter's mind that, in spite of all this, he was somewhat of a sentimentalist himself—things had suggested this to him. The fear ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... to reduce the great building in imagination to the little basilica built by Constantine the sentimentalist, on the site of Nero's circus; built by some other man perhaps, for no one knows surely; but a little church, at best, compared with many of those which Saint Peter's dwarfs to insignificance now. To ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other form," "Let Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... over my letter—I can hear you saying to yourself, "Where did he pick up his experience, I wonder?" I have no experience—I only have something that serves me instead of it, and I don't know what. The Elder Brother, at Tadmor, used to say it was sympathy. But he is a sentimentalist. ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... a man whom it would have been a rare delight to know. His character, so eminently English, compact of courage, of originality, of imagination, and with something coarse in it as well, puts one in mind of Hamlet: not the melodramatic sentimentalist of the stage; but the real Hamlet, Horatio's Hamlet, who called his father's ghost old truepenny, who forged his uncle's signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room. His tragedy, like ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... what now?" the voice squeaked. "I am only sincere. It's not denied that the other was the leading spirit. Well, it would have been better if he had been the one spared to us. More useful. I am not a sentimentalist. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the interest at issue: but, as to the massy stem of a tree 'fort gros et fort prs'—the sarcasm of a Roman emperor applies, that to miss under such conditions implied an original genius for stupidity, and to hit was no trial of the case. After all, the sentimentalist had youth to plead in apology for this extravagance. He was hypochondriacal; he was in solitude; and he was possessed by gloomy imaginations from the works of a society in the highest public credit. But most ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... clanged our bells, and banged our guns,—when there was Glory to God in the highest steeple, and Peace on Earth in the lowest cellar,—I drifted down the Broadway current of a mighty flood of folk, a morose and miserable sentimentalist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Lord Ashley was no mere sentimentalist out for a momentary sensation. At all times he gave the credit for starting the work to Sadler and his associates; and from the outset he urged his followers to fix on a limited measure first, to concentrate ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... a sentimentalist. He would have liked to live in a world of ideally united couples, himself ideally united to some charming and affectionate girl. But, as a matter of cold fact, he was a bachelor, and most of the couples he knew were veterans ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... a mere nothing. It was the creed of Young England; and even greater imaginative power might have failed in the effort to instil the most temporary vitality into that flimsy collection of sham beliefs. A mere sentimentalist might possibly have introduced it in such a way as to impress us at least with his own sincerity. But how is such doctrine to be uttered by lips which are, at the same time, pouring out the shrewdest of sarcasms against ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... account of Mr. Peck." said the doctor, "I should think Brother Gerrish might safely object to him as a certain kind of sentimentalist." ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... misery that he had endured or witnessed rose to his clouded, semi-educated brain, in which claims and theories and exasperated ideas of absolute justice and universal happiness had gathered confusedly. And from that moment he appeared such as he really was, a sentimentalist, a dreamer transported by suffering, proud and stubborn, and bent on changing the world in accordance with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... production, belong to profane as well as to sacred history, and persons with deeply rooted prejudices touching the people of Biblical story will be happiest if they can think of some other than the Scriptural Solomon as the prototype of Mosenthal and Goldmark, for in truth they make of him a sorry sentimentalist at best. The local color of the old story has been borrowed from the old story; the dramatic motive comes plainly from "Tannhuser"; Sulamith is Elizabeth, the Queen Venus, Assad Tannhuser, and Solomon Wolfram. Goldmark's music is highly ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who live with real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon, the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or specially favored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... mockery of love is sentimentality.—The sentimentalist is on hand wherever there is a chance either to mourn or to rejoice. He is never so happy as when he is pouring forth a gush of feeling; and it matters little whether it be laughter or tears, sorrow or joy, to which he is permitted to give vent. ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... across—" here he paused, and looked at me intently—"a yellowed slip of paper between the pages of an old diary that had been accidentally discovered. I knew then that there was really something to be discovered, and that I had not been a visionary sentimentalist when I yielded to my mother's last expressed wish that I should come ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... like what I should do if I were they, I couldn't and wouldn't have them flogged for it. Well, of course, there was an end of plantation discipline; and Alf and I came to about the same point that I and my respected father did, years before. So he told me that I was a womanish sentimentalist, and would never do for business life; and advised me to take the bank-stock and the New Orleans family mansion, and go to writing poetry, and let him manage the plantation. So we parted, and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
