"Supercilious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distinguished-looking woman bore down on them in what appeared to be a chariot. Andrew had never seen anything so high on wheels before. Mrs. Belhaven looked down upon her "Order" as from a throne, and wore a slightly supercilious expression. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... spoil him,—beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which might have made him a universal favorite. Yet he does not seem to have been generally popular at this period of his life. He was wilful, impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious. He would study as he liked, and not by rule. His school and college mates believed in his great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed that he would develop the heroic power ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... what may be termed the cocked hat period seldom maintained the happy mean between too little and too great care for personal appearance. For the most part they were either slovenly or foppish. From the days when as a student he used to slip into Nando's in a costume that raised the supercilious astonishment of his contemporaries, Thurlow to the last erred on the side of neglect. Camden roused the satire of an earlier generation by the miserable condition of the tiewig which he wore on the bench of Chancery, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... leaps, from time to time, in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted, discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes present himself—a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station, like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered long over certain dim manuscripts in the canonical library, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Drieux appeared in the lobby of the hotel and sat himself comfortably down, as if his sole desire in life was to read the evening paper and smoke his after-dinner cigar. He cast a self-satisfied and rather supercilious glance in the direction of the Merrick party, which on this occasion included the Stantons and their aunt, but he made no attempt to approach the corner where ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... one imagine three human beings as astonished as we were to find ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a supercilious air, and I paid him back ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... chief characters, they must be painted in fainter colors—they should be suggested rather than presented in detail. It might be well to give a definite gesture to the Elephant—say, a characteristic movement with his trunk—a scowl to the Tiger, a supercilious and enigmatic smile to the Camel (suggested by Kipling's wonderful creation). But if a gesture were given to each of the animals, the effect would become monotonous, and the minor characters would crowd ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... throes of his mother's heart, felt at the loss of her son, was far surpassed by the indignation of his father, who, with his consanguineous prejudices, and supercilious contempt for riches unaccompanied by birth, deemed the claims of his son by blood far superior to the pretensions of the plebeian trader. He only saw in the confessions of his son, the result of a deep-laid ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... ageing skin that browned slowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew a Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while he ran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on the leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft oval cheeks and the blooming complexion ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... Gay's observations are moderate in tone. Defoe's Review (1704-13) and The Observator (1702-12), begun by John Tutchin, are noticed in rather supercilious fashion. The Examiner (1710-14) is damned with faint praise: though "all men, who speak without prejudice, allow it to be well written" and "under the eye of some great persons who sit at the helm of affairs," Gay's admiration is reserved for its two chief opponents, Addison's ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... awe, and they stood gazing at the pale, supercilious-looking creatures, who returned their gaze through monocles, lorgnettes, ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... pretty one, but the tide of youth was fast receding, leaving uncovered a bleak and barren shore, whose chief salients were a disdainful nose and a mouth which looked as if it might be able to say bitter things. The eyes, however, were still handsome, if supercilious, and her manners velvety. No doubt there were claws beneath the velvet, but they were not for April . . . only for the girl who was using April's name! They had not talked for five minutes before she realized that in this woman Diana had an enemy. Not that Mrs. Stanislaw's words ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He passed the girl and addressed ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... on the young man's face. Sentence of death would have been more welcome to him than this supercilious check to a hazardous attempt, which he had looked upon as daring and heroic. Among the Romans he caught sight of some laughing faces, and hurt, humiliated, confused, scarcely capable of speaking a word, and yet moved by the desire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... concomitants of fashion. The reverse is true. She is an interloper in the circles of good society, and the old fable of the ass in the lion's skin fits her precisely. Many a duchess in England is such an interloper; her supercilious airs betray the falsity of her politeness, but she is obliged by the rules of the Court at which she has been educated to "behave like a lady;" she has to counterfeit good-breeding; she cannot, she ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... wound and vex me with thy questions. Hath he not been gone these five months, and never a word, good or bad, hath been rendered to me? Nay, did he not, ere he went, so deport himself with most cold and supercilious arrogance, and even with ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Motherwell, in which he announced his readiness to accept any concession "which would shorten and smoothen the road to Home Rule." But it is significant that although Mr Dillon was in complete agreement with the Liberals "as to both policy and tactics," yet he devoted, with a rather supercilious levity, his speeches in Ireland to a demand for "Boer Home Rule as a minimum." This was the way in which the country was scandalously hoodwinked as to the real relations which existed ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... superiority. He was neither reserved nor impatient, but suffered her to "commune with him of all that was in her heart. And Solomon told her all her questions; there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not." It ill becomes those who can teach, to be supercilious and uncommunicative. As the rich are required to supply the necessities of the poor with a judicious liberality, being expressly appointed as the trustees of Providence, and dispensers of its bounty; and as those who withhold, when it is in the power of their hands ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... class. He was painfully proud, prouder than any of the nobles. Before entering the service he had made up his mind to "rise." He wanted to become an officer, so that the villagers would have to stand at attention before him, when he returned home. Therefore he gave Zagrubsky a supercilious look of contempt, and unceremoniously closed the pouch when the Pole wanted to take some tobacco. I was sorry for the Pole, and offered him some of my own tobacco. He did not fail to take it, but at the same time I heard him sizzle out "Zhid" from between his tightly closed lips. I ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... mixed feelings with which they regard the mother country. As with a son who is gone forth into the world, there is often on one side the conceit of youth and impatience of restraint, shown in uncalled for acts of self-assertion or in dogmatic speech; and on the other side a supercilious want of sympathy with the changed surroundings, the pursuits and the aspirations of the younger generation. It seems as if there were no bond left between the two. But a day of trial comes; parent or offspring is threatened by a stranger; and then it is seen that the old instinct and yearnings ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... habit of ascending to a superlunary home, was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no allusion to the books. Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and true, But now grown cold and supercilious) Praise Telly's charms of neck and arms— Well, by the dog! ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... me gleamed in his blue eyes and in his supercilious, cold smile. The Legation's wife (no fool) must ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... and epicures, perhaps, the lordly canvas-back—though brown from the oven, I challenge the supercilious gourmet to distinguish between his favorite, and a fat American coot. But for me the loud-voiced mallard, with his bottle-green head and audaciously curling tail; for he ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... handed it to Mr. Hamlin. He read the letter, and found the inclosure contained a twenty-dollar gold-piece. A half-supercilious smile passed over his face at this revelation of the inadequate emoluments of literature and the trifling inducements to crime. Indeed, I fear the affair began to take a less serious moral ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... been heartier and more enthusiastic than was the appreciation of this Burmese dignitary. The soldier element was at first somewhat stiff, but as the dinner proceeded the generals warmed in conversation with the Resident. But the aides were obstinately supercilious, and only partially thawed in acknowledgment of compliments on the splendour of their jewelry. Functionaries attached to the personal suite of his Majesty wore huge ear-gems as a distinguishing mark. The aides had these in blazing diamonds, and were ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... being present when the merits of a book were canvassed. One person declared it to be insufferably dull, when another, who had published some novel, observed, with rather a supercilious air, "You know not how difficult it is to write a ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... was no bore to Carlisle. She recognized it as one of the triumphs of her life. The material dinner could of course be no better than the New Arlington could make it; but then the New Arlington was a hotel which supercilious tourists always mentioned with pleased surprise in their letters home; that is, if they had any homes and ever thought of writing to them. And Cousin Willie Kerr, having got "off" at three-thirty with carte blanche for the arrangements, that night proved that the world of Epicurus ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... bit his lower lip. It was agony to sit by and watch the cool, supercilious expression on the critic's face, the indifferent flick of the fingers with which the sheet ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... considerable uneasiness and solicitude. In a few moments, a slight stir, as of company taking leave, was heard in the front part of the house; and very soon a fashionably-dressed personage of a somewhat swaggering deportment, accompanied with many of those supercilious airs with which the colonial loyalists of the times often thought to dignify their carriage among despised republicans, made his appearance in the yard, where, equipped for riding, stood a stout, well-conditioned horse, which he approached and led out some distance ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... beaten; and it was an overwhelming, a public defeat that made his leadership ridiculous. His vanity was cut savagely; it was impossible for him to control himself to stay and witness the inevitable rout. He lounged down the wide aisle, his face masked in a supercilious smile, his glance contemptuously upon the jubilant barbs. They were thick about the doors, and as he passed among them he said, addressing no one in particular: "A revolt of the Helots." A barb raised a threatening ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... was a Whig and a friend of the Protestant succession. He was an orator, a courtier, a wit, and a man of letters. He was at the head of ton in days when, in order to be at the head of ton, it was not sufficient to be dull and supercilious. It was evident that he submitted impatiently to the ascendency of Walpole. He murmured against the Excise Bill. His brothers voted against it in the House of Commons. The Minister acted with characteristic caution and characteristic energy; caution in the conduct of public affairs; energy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... second's dreaming. "Gape and swallow," as Zinie Shadd said, from his end of the bench. The woman passed with a supercilious turn of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... oracle. I probed their heart, and flattered their caprice; Bestrewed with flowers the precipice's brink; Serving their passions, naught to me was sacred; Measure and weight I changed as they inclined. As much as Joad's unpliant humour pained The softness of their supercilious ear, So much I pleased them with my dexterous art; Concealing from their eyes the bitter truth; Lending convenient colour to their rage; And, lavish, above all, of wretches' blood. At length, to Baal, whom she had introduced, By Athaliah was a temple reared. Jerusalem did weep ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... swooped down and grounded gently within a hundred yards of the kneeling camel, who eyed it with the cold and supercilious disdain of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... contrary! He had been, but was gone! I plainly read the lie in their looks to each other. At that time it was new to me, and gave me great pain; but I soon became accustomed though never reconciled to their manners; which were characterized by that low cunning, that supercilious mixture of insolence and meanness, that is always detested by the honest and the open. A set of—Pshaw! They are unworthy ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... satisfied your critical scrutiny; but your feelings went not out towards her—they were, in a manner, chilled and repulsed. Look, now, at our own Kate Aubrey—nay, never fear to place her beside yon supercilious divinity—look at her, and your heart acknowledges her loveliness; your soul thrills at sight of her bewitching blue eyes—eyes now sparkling with excitement, then languishing with softness, in accordance with the varying emotions ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Richard,' said Brass, darting at him a supercilious and reproachful look, 'it's my opinion that you've mistaken your calling, and will ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the boys saw that there were two occupants on board her. One was a tall, well-dressed lad in yachting clothes, whose face, rather handsome otherwise, was marred by a supercilious sneer, as if he considered himself a great deal better than anyone else. The other was a somewhat elderly man whose hair appeared to be tinged with gray. His features were coarse, but he resembled the lad with him enough to make it ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... spacious marble steps, he saw that the hotel was indeed doing a big business, for already the lobby was thickly peopled and at the desk a group of new arrivals were plaintively arguing with a bored and supercilious room clerk. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... highest spirits, declared with much solemnity that he could already detect the smell of the salt sea air. They had their quarrels of course. It pleased a certain young lady to treat the south coast of England with much supercilious contempt. You would have imagined from her talk that there was something criminal in one's living even within twenty miles of the bleak downs, the shabby precipices, and the muddy sea which, according to her, were the only recognizable ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... influence was felt in the attitude of its bishops was one whose government sent out no diplomatists. While the Austrian Chancellor regarded the issue of the Council with a profane and supercilious eye, and so much indifference prevailed at Vienna that it was said that the ambassador at Rome did not read the decrees, and that Count Beust did not read his despatches, the Catholic statesmen in Hungary ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the lower class, or the great intellects and the less, was similar to the relative positions of teacher and pupil. I recognized in this social condition the great media of their marvelous approach to perfection. This aristocracy was never arrogant, never supercilious, never aggressive. It was what the philosophers of our world are: ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Wishings ain't really in the smart set and they say her husband ain't so rich, and she's horrid to her servants—don't give them cake. I don't care if I lost her head to do! I'm like that, as you know, particular when I'm particular, but—well—just supercilious and negligee when it don't count! Good gracious! [Laughing.] Oh, here's a letter for you I brought up for Lizzie. It's from the Phillypeenys and has a special delivery on. [GEORGIANA takes letter and opens it and reads it.] That's how it come at this hour. ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... half-naked savage challenged the Judge over the sea of moving heads, and drove away the supercilious smile ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind of dusky radiance over the traveller's path. Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness, of his pale colleague? And what will ever efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal tray heaped up with ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... furious; the stormy browbeating of the woman he loved set him a-tingle with the strongest desire he had ever known—a desire to fling himself upon this sneering wretch and vindicate his manhood by battle. His hands crawled in their restraint, in their lust to batter upon that supercilious face. But he dare not. He knew that an outbreak on his part would mean the death of their chance to regain ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Baron Van Arenberg joined the party, and, after saluting Jaqueline in a self-confident manner, stood listening with a supercilious air to ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... their way; the gamesters overlooked him, thinking he was no fish for their net; the chairmen, instead of Please your honour, d—-d him; and the pumpers, who attentively marked his nod before, now denied him a glass of water. Many of the clergy, those disciples of humility, looked upon him with a supercilious brow; the ladies too, who had before strove who should be his partner at the balls, could not bear the sight of so shocking a creature: thus despised is poverty and rags, though sometimes the veil of real merit; ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... who wished to have it supposed, that he was writing concerning a subject rather beneath his notice, and only felt himself called forth to do so by the dogmatism of those who laid down confident rules or laws in matters so trifling. This affectation of supercilious censure appears deeply to have provoked Dryden, and prompted the acrimony of the following Defence, which he prefixed to a second edition of the Indian Emperor published in 1668, probably shortly after the offence had been given. The angry friends were afterwards ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers of one faith from those of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... usually unable to conceive loftier services to mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire, while it implies a particularly shallow idea alike of the position of the mere literary life in the scale of things, and of the conditions under which the best literary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... superiors, it was no wonder she treated her children and inferiors with supercilious contempt. Her eldest daughter (121) and she were long at variance, and never reconciled. When the young Duchess exposed herself by placing a monument and silly epitaph, of her own composition and bad spelling, to Congreve, in Westminster Abbey, her mother, quoting the words, said, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... my readers into two classes, the indolent and the supercilious, and shall accordingly address them upon the present occasion. To the former I have nothing more to say, than to refer them back to the latter part of Chapter I., Part I. where, my dear ladies, you will ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... moment's respite, a habit that recalled his travels and made him interesting. He was on visiting terms with the authorities—the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-general, and the bishop but in every house he was frigid, polite, and slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the favors of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did they lose anything in reputation on that account; then when people began to talk about him and wish to know him, and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... tall. And Sargent, in his portrait of her, had caught with admirable art the indefinable, yet partly supercilious and scornful smile with which she looked down upon the world about her. She possessed the rare gift of combining conventionality with personal distinction in her dress. Her hair was almost Titian red in colour, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... still on the narrow pavement, pondering, and then, in excuse of his flagrant misbehaviour, murmured, "It was meant to be," and went by again. This time he fancied that he detected a somewhat supercilious expression in the dark eyes—a faint raising ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... haughty and dignified Lucian returns to us from his journey! He will not vouchsafe us a glance; he stands aloof, and will hold no further communion with us. Altogether a supercilious Lucian! The change is sudden. Might one inquire the cause of ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... help looking Half a Streets Length after any Man in a gay Dress. You cant behold a covetous Spirit walk by a Goldsmiths Shop without casting a wistful Eye at the Heaps upon the Counter. Does not a haughty Person shew the Temper of his Soul in the supercilious Rowl of his Eye? and how frequently in the Height of Passion does that moving Picture in our Head start and stare, gather a Redness and quick Flashes of Lightning, and make all its Humours sparkle with Fire, as Virgil finely ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... replaced when they're too far gone to stand another stitch. Peter was too small to do any responsible work, and he was getting too big to be paid in pennies and dimes. People didn't exactly know what to do with him. One can't be supercilious to a boy who is a Champneys born, but can one invite a boy who runs errands, is on very familiar footing with all the colored people in the county, and wears such clothes as Peter wore, to one's house, or to be one of the guests when a child of the family ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... heart was hot with rage, and the first impulse was to vent it upon this nearest of the supercilious Melroses. This was all Alice had wanted then, in sending that little overture of friendship: to tell the little nobody that she was nothing to the great family, after all, to prevent her from ever boasting even an illicit relationship! ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... impassable barrier between me and them—a sizar was not a proper associate for the favourites of fortune! But there was one young man, a year younger myself, of high birth, and the heir to considerable wealth, who did not regard me with the same supercilious insolence as the rest; his very rank, perhaps, made him indifferent to the little conventional formalities which influence persons who cannot play at football with this round world; he was the wildest youngster in the university—lamp-breaker—tandem-driver—mob-fighter—a ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Peter, between two heart-beats.—Yet he looked, in his grey flannels, with his straw-hat and his eyeglass, with his lean face, his even colour, his slightly supercilious moustaches—he looked a very embodiment of ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... more thick-skinned branch of the clan. But it bears hardly upon a young, self-conscious, and adolescent nation, which has not yet "found" itself as a whole; and which, though its native genius and genuine promise carry it far, still experiences a certain youthful diffidence under the supercilious condescension of the ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... rules of war require prompt and unquestioning obedience. You may sometimes think the command arbitrary and the officer supercilious, but it is yours to obey. An undisciplined army is a curse to its friends and a derision to its foes. Give your whole influence, therefore, to the maintenance of lawful authority and of strict order. Let your superiors feel assured that whatever ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... years of his political life. We shall not call it an affectation in the instance of so great a man, but it paid all the penalties of folly—and this was his propensity to feel, or at least to express, a personal affection for the men whom he politically followed. Even of Hamilton, the most supercilious and least loveable of mankind, Burke speaks with a tenderness absolutely ridiculous amongst politicians. Of Lord Rockingham he seldom speaks but in a tone of romance, singularly inapplicable to that formal and frigid figure of aristocracy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him, talking calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if he tried to take her hand or clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts of her father's homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to him with a supercilious, affronted air. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... but the principal speaker was evidently the superior of his companion, and although their attitude to each other was equal and familiar, it could be easily seen that he was the leader. He had a smooth, beardless face, with a critical expression of eye and mouth that might have been fastidious and supercilious but for the kindly, humorous perception that tempered it. His quick eye swept the apartment and then fixed itself upon the accordion, but a smile lit up his face ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... you to demand an account of us?" asked Tom Brixton, recklessly, in a supercilious tone that was ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... move, glanced at the butt of the automatic where it protruded from its holster, and smiled. Then he turned and raising his great bow, fitted an arrow and drew the shaft far back. His warriors, supercilious smiles upon their faces, stood silently watching him. His bow was the longest and the heaviest among them all. A mighty man indeed must he be to bend it; yet Al-tan drew the shaft back until the stone point ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... conduct must be carried on so secretly as to elude the college authorities. Those disposed to do evil represent only a very small proportion of the great body of students, but these give occasion for some supercilious and conceited correspondent of the public press severely to criticise the college government, and to give gross caricatures and exaggerated statements of the mischief done by this small percentage of students, and then include the entire academic body in ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... that he was addressed, but found that the summons was meant for a boy, rather good-looking but very slender, whose self-important attitude and supercilious look betrayed no slight amount of vanity, and who, to the apparent astonishment of the rest, was surveying the room and its appurtenances with a look ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Hugo decided; that's what she wanted to bring her to heel. And before very long he'd see that she got it. She shouldn't shelter herself for ever behind that supercilious beast, Ledgard. Hugo was quite ready to have been pleasant to Jan and to have met her more than half-way if she was reasonable, but since she had chosen to bring Ledgard into it, she should pay. After all, she was only a woman, and ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... silence, and a haughty scornful demeanour; which was so much the more disagreeable because there was nothing in his behaviour I could actually take hold of to find fault with: although his whole conduct was insolent and supercilious to the highest degree. His mother was very much agitated at receiving him on his arrival; if he felt any such agitation he certainly did not show it. He made her a very low and formal bow when he kissed ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indifference would have been beautiful in a gentleman who counted his fortune by millions; in a dollarless beggar who lived off alms it was detestable. Wherefore, the town, so far as Richard encountered it, left our silent, supercilious one to himself, which neglect dove-tailed with his humor and was the precise lonely thing he sought. This gave still further edge to the public's disregard; no one likes you to accept with grace what ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Though—he says—he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone, 'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But—'I would ask of these supercilious politics, what nation, society, or general order of state I have provoked? ... What public person? Whether I have not, in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ... Where have I been ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... invisible belt stuffed to its capacity with banknotes and gold. Chilean ladies and Chilean gentlemen, dazzling Brazilian ladies and pompous Brazilian gentlemen, smug Argentinians, lordly Castilians, garrulous Portuguese, lofty English gentlemen and supercilious English ladies, friendly and irrepressible Americans,—all of them swinging their sea-legs with new-found abandon—clattered solidly around the wind-swept circuit. New faces appeared in the procession, new voices were raised with energy, new figures sprang into ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... no reply. And Soames gave him askance a look of dogged dislike—for in spite of his fastidious air and that supercilious, dandified taciturnity, Soames, with his set lips and squared chin, was not unlike ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Charles reformed the internal administration of his kingdom, and at length felt himself ready to begin again the conflict with England. Edward III. was old. The Black Prince was ill and gloomy, and his Aquitanian subjects disliked the supercilious ways of the English. Charles declared war (1369). The English landed at Calais. But the cities were defended by their strong walls; and the French army, under the Duke of Burgundy, in pursuance of the settled ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... with rather supercilious indifference. "I've always known the name, and I dare say I knew the man by sight, apart from his name. I know half the names and faces in the neighborhood in that ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) 105 than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I happened to hear of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... nothing, and Brooks was quite sure then that she was different. He realized too that her teeth were perfect, and her complexion, notwithstanding its pallor, was faultless. She would have been strikingly good-looking but for her mouth, and that—was it a discontented or a supercilious curl? At any rate it disappeared when ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... deeper things than his years warranted: "You certainly don't know what you are talking about," was her habitual snub. And, when Honore, not daring to argue further, took refuge in his sly, not to say supercilious, smile, she taxed him with overweeningness—an accusation that had some truth in it. She might well be excused for her scepticism, for the youth had also large ignorance in some of the commoner things of life, and, moreover, allowed himself to be taken in easily. Laure seems to have ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... before her; and she, bending herself towards him, let her lips touch his forehead. He threw his arms round her, and held her for one moment bent towards him. A supercilious, scornful expression, unobserved by her, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Greek idioms which abound in that masterpiece of the Roman stage with contempt, as beneath his notice; and disregard the names which betray a Grecian origin, the allusions to the habits of Grecian women, to the state of popular feeling at Athens, and the administration of Athenian law, with supercilious indifference. All this such a reasoner might do, and all this M. Neufchateau has done. But would such a tissue of cobweb fallacies disguise the truth from any man of ordinary taste and understanding? Such a man would appeal to the whole history of Terence; he would show that he was a diligent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... materially in their opinion of England and its institutions. Mr. Slick evidently viewed them with prejudice. Whether this arose from the supercilious manner of English tourists in America, or from the ridicule they have thrown upon Republican society, in the books of travels they have published, after their return to Europe, I could not discover; but it soon became manifest to me, that ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three kingdoms. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... aristocratic hauteur, until he suddenly recollects that his humble countryman has a vote at the elections; then he stops, enters into a brief conversation, examines the kitful of fruit through his glasses with supercilious disdain, but eventually purchases a chunk of melon, and goes on his ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... dismounts from Billy the pig, and, insolent brat, screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner, struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... audibly. Carmichael was playing the spoiled child—not being at all a mature or perfect character, then or now—and was ready to hit out at anybody. His bearing was for the first and only time in his life supercilious, and his sermons were a vicious attack on the doctrines most dear to the best of his people. His elders knew not what had come over him, although Elspeth Macfadyen was mysteriously apologetic, and in moments of sanity he despised himself. One day he came to a good resolution suddenly, and went ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious and smiling, all with the curved lips and the raised eyebrows of Experience. For, in their time, all these ladies, and all their lovers with them, have tried to catch this same Blue Bird, and have been full of hope that it would come fluttering down to them ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... recognize the State as a multiplication of their own families, and patriotism as the broadening of their love of home; to make them see that that mother will be most respected whose son does not, when a downy beard is grown, suddenly tower above her in the supercilious enjoyment of an artificial superiority—a superiority which consists simply, as Figaro says, in his having taken the trouble to be born; to make them see, finally, that in the highest exercise of all the powers with which God has endowed her, woman can no ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... apply the tenet; try if you can even attach any sense or semblance of meaning to the speeches which you are reading. What! were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, the false assumptions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended the truth:- were the impressive facts, the piercing outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and powerful reasoning with which the poor sufferer—smarting at once from his ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Laudersdale, without knowing how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every such rencontre;—and that it could not endure forever, another gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated himself,—Mr. Frederic Heath, the confidential clerk of Day, Knight, and Company,—a rather supercilious specimen, quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her from New York at her father's request, and who already betrayed every symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs. McLean's little women clamorously demanded and obtained a share ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... epidemic of murder which seems to have girdled the globe, the spirit of petty jealousy and assumed superiority with which Americans are treated in many European countries, has imbued this people with the idea that the quickest way to win the respect of their supercilious neighbors is to slaughter them. Uncle Sam is in an ugly humor and will suffer no legitimate casus belli to be side-tracked by arbitration. He is "dead tired" of having the European ants get on him—of being harried by petty powers whom he knows full ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it would—well it would deprive me of your company. I'm a sociable animal, Payne. I crave company; I like to have all sorts of people about me. Take Ramos, for instance; did you ever see a more supercilious, sneaky, disagreeable specimen of the half-breed Mexican? Neither have I. You, I suppose, wouldn't have him ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... bind that which God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam. In the Gospel we shall read a supercilious crew of Masters, whose holiness, or rather whose evil eye, grieving that God should be so facile to man, was to set straiter limits to obedience than God had set, to enslave the dignity of Man, to put a garrison upon his neck of empty ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Chesterton's sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not a brother; he is a supercilious aunt." ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming dawn it will be on the march for the Black Hills of Dakota, and the colonel has summoned the officers to his tent for some final instructions. It must ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Piccadilly. The horses paw the ground, and are impatient to be gone, as if conscious of the precious burden they convey. There is a peculiar secresy and despatch, significant and full of meaning, in all the proceedings concerning them. Even the outside passengers have an erect and supercilious air, as if proof against the accidents of the journey. In fact, it seems indifferent whether they are to encounter the summer's heat or winter's cold, since they are borne through the air in a winged chariot. The Mail-Carts drive up; the transfer of packages is made; and, at a signal given, they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... regard to scenery what Lessing says of pictures, we only see in both what we bring with us to the view. More disconcerting than the importunities of beggars and donkey-drivers are the supercilious remarks of tourists. To most, of course, the whole thing is "a sad disappointment." Everything must necessarily be a disappointment to some beholders; and with critics of a certain order, the mere fact of not being pleased implies superiority. The hour's walk from the village to the Cirque is ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... that this seeming tenderness for her reputation might be but wanton cruelty on her ladyship's part; a gratifying of her spleen against the girl by setting her in the pillory of public sight to the end that she should experience the insult of supercilious glances and lips that smile with an ostentation of furtiveness; a desire to put down her pride and break the spirit which my lady ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... places, our city clergymen merit arraignment at the bar of civilization for burying their talents, for trifling away the power which has been given them as standard bearers of the cause of human brotherhood and universal justice; for truckling to wealth and cringing before a cynical and supercilious element who, by an unhappy chance, wield some influence and succeed in making the superficial imagine they represent popular sentiment and culture. It is a crying shame to-day, that with the magnificent intellectual power ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Worse and worse. He had been fortified by the thought of the butler and footman. An hour under their supercilious eyes would mean the most impersonal kind of small talk. But they'd hardly stand ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... languid gaze of her dark, full eyes, a little supercilious, a little amused, faintly curious, and his own fell at once before their calm insolence. She was handsomely dressed. The delicate, white hand which held her novel was ablaze with many and wonderful rings. She was evidently tall, without doubt stately. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim |
