"Conceit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... task of checking these, so that in addition to loving my parents I was soon taught to honour and obey them. Then, when I was five years old, I was sent to school, where, mixing with other boys, any especial conceit of myself that I might have had was quickly nipped in the bud. At school, in addition to a fair, useful education, I was taught to reverence and respect my seniors and superiors, to be obedient, to submit to discipline, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... right—I may come to worse. I've been an awful ass. You know how lucky I was while at the Conservatoire—no, you don't. How should you? Well, I carried off some distinctions and a lot of conceit, and came over here thinking Europe would be at my feet in a month. I was only sorry my father died before I could twit him with my triumph. That's candid, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... difficulties of noble living are very great,—never so great, perhaps, as now and here,—and these people assemble every week to converse upon them. What more rational thing could they do? If they came together to snivel and cant, and to support one another in a miserable conceit of being the elect of the human species, we might object. But no description can show how far from that, how opposite to that, is the tone, the spirit, the object, of the Friday-evening ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... your own obstinacy and conceit," said Lord Marney. "I took you to Mowbray Castle, and the cards were in your own hands if you chose ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... circumstance, may happen to take the lead; you will not suffer even the consciousness and the certainty of your own superior talents to urge you to do any thing which might by possibility be injurious to your country's cause; you will be forbearing under the aggressions of ignorance, conceit, arrogance, and even the blackest of ingratitude superadded, if by resenting these you endanger the general good; and, above all things, you will have the justice to bear in mind, that that country which gave you birth, is, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... oblivious of her own conceit. In a voice and manner that had undergone a complete and sudden ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... any rate, there is quite enough to make her a great prize, and an object of admiration and attention to all the little men—not to the old hands, like White and Sumner; they are built up in their own conceit, and wouldn't marry Sam Weller's 'female marchioness,' unless she made love to them first, like one of Knowles's heroines. But the juveniles are crazy about her. Robinson went off more ostentatiously love-sick than a man of his size I ever saw; and Sedley ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rejoined the other, with adorable conceit. "You aren't used to it yet, but one soon gets into it, you know! See how perfectly at my ease I am after only ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... to Montreal, mixing his metaphors as topers mix drinks. But I had long since learned not to remonstrate against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—not though all the canons of Laval literati should be outraged. "What, Sir?" he had roared out when I, in full conceit of new knowledge, had audaciously ventured to pull him up, once in my student days. "What, Sir? Don't talk to me of your book-fangled balderdash! Is language for the use of man, or man for the use of language?" and he quoted from Hamlet's soliloquy ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... and sin both," said Peter, a good natured Fleming, notwithstanding all his self conceit, and as he spoke he wiped his eyes with ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the taste and temper of the person you would wish to influence. And moreover, I had a view in it, to make this little sketch the introduction to some future observations on the stiff and affected style of romances, which might put Miss Stapylton out of conceit with them, and make her turn the course of her studies another way, as I shall mention in ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... disadvantage, with a blue eyed lad who had stirred something in the girl before him that he himself could never have roused in a thousand years. But he did know he was being snubbed and the knowledge disturbed his fond conceit of self. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... Jerseymen, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and men from the Carolinas will bear me out in saying these things about the New England soldiery. I speak not in blame or bitterness. The truth is that they were too much akin in blood and conceit to the English not to have in themselves many of the disagreeable qualities which had impelled us all to revolt against ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... enough, just like them, fighting and dying for they know not what, and fancying that posterity will take the trouble to put laurel wreaths on their rusty and battered helmets. Could you help smiling, Prince Jason, to see the self-conceit of that last fellow, just as he ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of mine—Haven't I behaved beautifully? I've accepted your dismissal, and you managed it as cruelly as you could, and I have made you respect my sex, haven't I? (Arranging gloves and fan.) I only pray that she'll know you some day as I know you now. I wouldn't be you then, for I think even your conceit will be hurt. I hope she'll pay you back the humiliation you've brought on me. I hope—No. I don't! I can't give you up! I must have something to look forward to or I shall go crazy. When it's all over, come back to me, come back ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with what in one of our race would have been tenderness. Cheschapah ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... cip, cap(t)> (take): (1) receive, deceive, perceive, deceit, conceit, receipt, reception, perception, inception, conception, interception, accept, except, precept, municipal, participate, anticipate, capable, capture, captivate, case (chest, covering), casement, incase, cash, cashier, chase, catch, prince, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... me. How could a child like you read the Bible? It is a book for bishops and archbishops, and the Immaculate Father himself. What an arrogance? What an insolence of self-conceit must possess so young a heart? Saints of ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... slave for Dreda Saxon," grumbled Norah of the spectacles one day when she and Susan walked together in the "crocodile" along a dull country lane. "A regular black, cringing slave—and what thanks do you get for it, I'd like to know? None! Not one little scrap. She's such a bat of self-conceit that she doesn't even know that she is helped. If you did a hundredth part as much for other people they'd go off their ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I, "with a proper reverence for your age and our common blood, I do not value your favour at a boddle's purchase. I was brought up to have a good conceit of myself; and if you were all the uncle, and all the family, I had in the world ten times over, I wouldn't buy your ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... history, clever in reciting stories and poetry, but is a bold and skilful rider, a good archer and swordsman. There is scarcely anything that a young man should know, with which he is not familiar; and, with all this, he is free from conceit, good-tempered, gentle, and kind; in short, he seems to me almost perfect, and more fit to marry a princess than the daughter of such a man as I am. When I have seen my child happily married to him, I shall not trouble ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... those?" he inquired, handing the glasses, and blandly ignoring Miss Deane's petulance. Her brain was busy with other things while she twisted the binoculars to suit her vision. Rainbow Island—Iris—it was a nice conceit. But "menial" struck a discordant note. This man was no menial in appearance or speech. Why was ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... to his Sister about his good looks: she, on her part, was ready to cry with vexation when she was aware of her plainness, and took his remarks as an insult to herself. Running to her father, she told him of her Brother's conceit, and accused him of meddling with his mother's things. He laughed and kissed them both, and said, "My children, learn from now onwards to make a good use of the glass. You, my boy, strive to be as good as it shows you to be handsome; and you, my girl, resolve to make up for the plainness ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... death's-head that from a mural slab Within the chancel leers through sermon-time, Making a mock of poor mortality. The fancy touched him, and he laughed a laugh That from his noonday slumber roused an owl Snug in his oaken hermitage hard by. A very rare conceit—the ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... before he came. Not to such a man, however clever he may be, will an explanation be vouchsafed. I would rather trust an innocent child to discover these things than such a person. He is lost in his own conceit and ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... knew where he lived and what he was doing well enough." She bridled with conscious conceit; "I read the papers and I had it all written down. So when I got out and stole the money, I knew just where to go. But he's foxy, too. I knew I'd have to make him see me. So I stole some of the doctor's letterhead paper, and I wrote on it, 'Important ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... fault than her exaggerated tenderness for her boy,—the bete-noire of his step-father. Oscar was, unfortunately, endowed by nature with a foolishness his mother did not perceive, in spite of the step-father's sarcasms. This foolishness—or, to speak more specifically, this overweening conceit—so troubled Monsieur Moreau that he begged Madame Clapart to send the boy down to him for a month that he might study his character, and find out what career he was fit for. Moreau was really thinking of some day proposing Oscar to the count as ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... boy," whispered the old man proudly—"if only I can lick his infernal conceit out of him!" He gripped her hand. ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... filled with his mother's strong coffee in easy defiance of consequences. As he took it back from her he said, "I should like to see you and Mrs. Breen together. You would make a strong team." He buttered his bread, with another laugh in appreciation of his conceit. "If you happened to pull the same way. If you did n't, something would break. Mrs. Breen is a lady of powerful convictions. She thinks you ought to be good, and you ought to be very sorry for it, but not so sorry as you ought to be for being happy. I don't think she has given her daughter any ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sophistry here is plain enough, although it is not always detected. Great genius and force of character undoubtedly make their own career. But because Walter Scott was dull at school, is a parent to see with joy that his son is a dunce? Because Lord Chatham was of a towering conceit, must we infer that pompous vanity portends a comprehensive statesmanship that will fill the world with the splendor of its triumphs? Because Sir Robert Walpole gambled and swore and boozed at Houghton, are we to suppose that gross sensuality and coarse contempt of human nature ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... this labor would not monopolize all my time, and deprive me of those intellectual pursuits which I love, to which I am accustomed, and which, in my moments of self-conceit, I regard as not useless to others? I received a most unexpected reply. The energy of my intellectual activity increased, and increased in exact proportion with bodily application, while freeing itself from every thing superfluous. It ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... effeminate and unmanly in England, and Britons were, every day, called upon by the patriotic prints to sneer at the frivolous accomplishments of your Squallinis, Monsieurs, and the like. Nobody in Britain is proud of his ignorance now. There is no conceit left among us. There is no such thing as dulness. Arrogance is entirely unknown... Well, at any rate, Art has obtained her letters of naturalisation, and lives here on terms of almost equality. If Mrs. Thrale chose to marry a music-master now, I don't think ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unlike, both in appearance and character. Fred, the elder of the two, was a large, muscular, ruddy-faced boy, not much in love with books. He was of an over-bearing disposition, and had a great deal of conceit. ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... creation! I am no Moses; I am only a poor patient artist; but it would be a fine thing if I were to cause some slender stream of beauty to flow in our thirsty land! Don't think me a monster of conceit," he went on, as he saw me smile at the avidity with which he adopted my illustration; "I confess that I am in one of those moods when great things seem possible! This is one of my nervous nights—I dream waking! When the south wind ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... is not, is most certainly true. The scholar may once in a way reflect glory on the school by success in an examination, but generally he is regarded as a self-regarding person, who is not likely to help to win the matches of the year. But the hero-worship is not undiscriminating; conceit, selfishness, surliness will go far to nullify the influence of physical strength and skill. Boys' admiration for physical prowess is natural and not unhealthy. The harm is done by the advertisement given to such prowess by foolish elders. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... best," the Doctor said grimly; "but the British subaltern is pretty well impervious to snubs; he belongs to the pachydermatous family of animals; his armor of self conceit renders him invulnerable against the milder forms of raillery. However, I think you can be trusted to hold your own with him, Miss Hannay, without much assistance from the Major or myself. Your real difficulty will lie rather in your struggle against the united female ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... that Houston was harsh in his treatment of his wife, and offended her by his untaught manners and extreme self-conceit. But it is not likely that she objected to his manners, since she had become familiar with them before she gave him her hand; and as to his conceit, there is no evidence that it was as yet unduly developed. After his Texan campaign he sometimes ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... knighthood. In the swan there is such purity, such coldness is there in the element he inhabiteth, such solitude of station, that verily he doth remind me of the Virgin Queen herself. Of the heron I have less to say, not having him about me; but I never heard his lordly croak without the conceit that it resembled a chancellor's ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... little more peculiar to our fathers than it is peculiar to their successors, our worthy selves. In addition to the entrance tower, or porch, on its northern front, John Effingham had also placed a prettily devised conceit on the southern, by means of which the abrupt transition from an inner room to the open air was adroitly avoided. He had, moreover, removed the "firstly" of the edifice, and supplied its place with a more suitable addition that contained some of the offices, while it did not disfigure the building, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... pockets, to serve to regale him at some future moment. I have said that Marten could not have been aware of this foolish weakness of Mary Roscoe, but Marten was not free of blame in the affair, for he had started wrongly as regarded Reuben, and in his self conceit he had placed himself in circumstances where the temptations that surrounded him were more than his nature unaided could resist. Marten would not listen to those who would have taught him that our blessed Saviour verily took not on him the nature of angels, but he took ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... little contemptible creatures I had ever beheld." For indeed, while I was in that prince's country, I could never endure to look in a glass, after mine eyes had been accustomed to such prodigious objects, because the comparison gave me so despicable a conceit of myself. The captain said, "that while we were at supper, he observed me to look at every thing with a sort of wonder, and that I often seemed hardly able to contain my laughter, which he knew not well how to take, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... would do," she thought, without the slightest trace of conceit, "if she didn't have me to anchor her down ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... off. So I sat down and watched the scorner of girls disappear eagerly around a bend in the road. At the end of a half hour of waiting I began to speculate. Had Dickie's courage failed him, had he taken to the woods, or was he upbraiding her of the gatepost for the sin of conceit? I would go ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... yet on occasion of this opinion of Paracelsus, perhaps it will not be impertinent if, before I proceed, I acquaint your Lordship with a conceit of that deservedly famous mechanician and Chymist, Cornelius Drebel, who, among other strange things that he perform'd, is affirm'd, by more than a few credible persons, to have contrived for the late learned King James, a vessel to go under water; of which, trial was made ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... laughed Armadas, "I think we have stumbled upon a pretty conceit intended to do honor to our master. Methinks His Royal Highness here has the right on't—the man who made that costume ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... was spoken as we rode back to his home," the young man wrote. "We knew the die had been cast. We had seen it fall carelessly out of the hand of Ignorance, obeying intellects swelled with hereditary passion and conceit. I now had something ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... morall phylosophy are studied in China, and that they haue Vniuersities there, wherein such ingenuous artes are deliuered and taught, yet, for the most part this opinion is to be esteemed more popular then true; but I will declare, vpon what occasion this conceit first grew. The people of China doe, aboue all things, professe the arte of literature; and learning it most diligently, they imploy themselues a long time and the better part of their age therein. For this cause, in all cities and townes, yea, and in pety villages also, there ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there never ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... sober he would have taken the conceit out of that pony in chunks, and as it was he experienced no great difficulty in holding his seat; but in his addled state of mind he grasped the end of the cinch strap in such a way that when the ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... very singular good lord," the letter began—the only one, so far as I know, written by the Empress Bianca Maria to England; certainly the only one she ever wrote to Wapping. The conceit of it was as follows: That the lovely Lady Molly was at Nona on the confines of Emilia and Romagna, wife of a man who would shortly be murdered in order that she might become the mate of the assassin; that a very great lord, son of the Holy Father, was intending for those parts, and would probably ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... mich conceit on himsen as would lift a balloon, an' he wor so pleeased wi' his sham Rip he wor for tekking him to Mrs. DeSussa before she went away. But Mulvaney an' me stopped thot, knowin' Orth'ris's work, though niver so ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Mademoiselle's powers so highly that I hoped she would never become a stage-singer and actress. But this M. Rameau? You say he is a rising man. It struck me when at Paris that he was one of those charlatans with a great deal of conceit and very little information, who are always found in scores on the ultra-Liberal side of politics;-possibly I ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Arabs, "Above all their qualities, personal conceit is remarkable; they show it in their strut, in their looks, and almost in every word. 'I am such a one, the son of such a one,' is a common expletive, especially in times of danger; and this spirit is not wholly to be condemned, as it certainly ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... but surely it is none of God's planting, neither of the Son of God: yet it grows in all lands and in all climes, and sends its hidden suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your hearts and mine. And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death. It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and makes them call wrong, right; ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... careless of the sound produced, and merely for the pleasure of feeling themselves alive, just as we rub our hands in a moment of satisfaction, I should not be particularly shocked. That there is a secondary object in their conceit, in which the silent sex is interested, is very possible and very natural, but it is ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... delights to which the mere approaches were so paved with shillings. She quivered on occasion into the perception of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just simply liked to be. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits they ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... that I may have written from the recollection of this passage. The conceit is the same, and I willingly attribute it to Chamberlayne, a Poet to whom I am indebted for many hours of delight, and whom I one day hope to rescue from ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... rejection ought not to be extended too far. They are wrong in their theory; but their practice so admirably accords with it, that it must be allowed, were it possible for a people so enchanted by self-conceit to discover that the true subjects of Art exist only in Nature, they evince a capacity sufficient to enable them to acquire the pre-eminence which they unfortunately believe they have already attained. But these opinions, with respect to the peculiarities of the French taste, though ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... man grunted amiably. "My faith, the very name begets a towering conceit wherever it goes," he answered, and he brought his stick down on the floor with such vehemence that the emerald and ruby rings rattled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... terror of this conceit, everything tended to confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him as it were the visible object of the Almighty's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Nor, as it happened, was I when all was done. This confidence was partly owing to full feeding on fine porridge and braxy, but more to that inbred belief of Galloway in itself which the ill-affected and envious nominate its conceit. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... leave. She looked earnest and troubled. I could vow she was about to burst into tears. Her face was very expressive. No one who shows such sudden changes can help being a person of rare sensibility. I am almost out of conceit of making her the heroine of my story, though, to be sure, I am not likely to interfere with her personal rights, so long as I do not know either her name ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... broke up into groups and expressed their amazement. Of course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was "just a little off, on the subject of her niece," and agreed that it would be as well not ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... But such is not the case. He has to work amid paste, wax, oil, and blacking, and contracts a smell of leather. He cannot keep himself particularly clean; and although a nicely-finished shoe be all well enough in its way, there is not much about it on which conceit can build. No man can set up as a beau on the strength of a prettily-shaped shoe; and so a beau the shoemaker is not, but, on the contrary, a careless, manly fellow, who, when not overmuch devoted to Saint Monday, gains usually, in his course through life, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... into the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... symbolism of the groups at either end seems rather gratuitous. They might be many other things besides true hope and false hope and abundance standing beside the family. But the girl chasing the bubble blown out by false hope makes a quaint conceit to express adventure, though perhaps only one out of a million would see the point if ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... Mountains in Emmanuel's own land. There it might be thought the danger would be over, but it is not so. Even in Emmanuel's Land there is a door in the side of a hill which is a byeway to hell, and beyond Emmanuel's Land is the country of conceit, a new and special temptation for those who think that they are near salvation. Here they encounter 'a brisk lad of the neighbourhood,' needed soon after for a particular purpose, who is a good liver, prays devoutly, fasts regularly, pays tithes punctually, and hopes that everyone will get ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... St. Ambrose's life was the conversion of Augustine. This youth was the son of a good and holy mother, St. Monica; but he had not been baptized, and he grew up wise in his own conceit, and loving idle follies and vicious pleasures. For many years he was led astray by heretical and heathenish fancies; but his faithful mother prayed for him all the time, and at last had the joy of seeing him repent with all his heart. He was baptized at Milan; and it is said that the ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... detective. Nevertheless, I hope in the near future to see you behind the bars and to help put you there. It may interest you to know that my opinion of your intellect is no higher than my opinion of your character. You seem to me to have a vast conceit of your own cleverness, which is not justified by the facts. You are a very stupid fellow; a—a—what is the ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... you, Merytra. Being a mass of self-conceit, he thought that you ran away because he had banished you from his royal presence and ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... by petting in England—let them be told (perhaps it may be said plainest by their best friends) that there are just as many proud exclusives among them as in any other stratum of society, and that they have at least a full share too of conceit, foppery, and affectation. ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... remained unmoved. It was de Barral himself. He preserved his serene, gentle, expression, I am told (for I have not witnessed those scenes myself), and looked around at the people with an air of placid sufficiency which was the first hint to the world of the man's overweening, immeasurable conceit, hidden hitherto under a diffident manner. It could be seen too in his dogged assertion that if he had been given enough time and a lot more money everything would have come right. And there were some people (yes, amongst his very victims) who more ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... himself and in life, easily depressed, but quickly reasserting itself; and in which the eagerness for new experiences had freed itself from the rebellious impatience of boyish days. The self-confidence had its touches of flippancy and conceit; but on this side it must have been constantly counteracted by his gratitude for kindness, and by his enthusiastic appreciation of the merits of other men. His powers of feeling, indeed, greatly expended themselves in this way. He was very attractive ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... had always something the matter with his throat, in which irritation was set up by his perpetual habit of smoking: he was always feverishly active and had the consumptive temperament. He was a mixture of conceit, irony, and bitterness, cloaking a mind that was enthusiastic, bombastic, and naive, while it was always being taken in by life. He was the bastard of some burgess whom he had never known, and was brought up by a mother whom it was impossible ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... make up for the disgust I felt at the way in which all that was so appropriate and characteristic in so historic a place as Windsor Castle should have been tampered with and rubbed out by the wretched conceit of the worst architects of our ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... furlough in England from which he had returned the previous day he had remained heart-whole; although several charming girls had been ready to share his lot and more than one pretty pirate had sought to make him her prize. But he had been blind to them all; for he was too free from conceit to believe that any woman would concern herself with him unasked. He had dined and danced with maid and young matron in London, ridden with them in the Row and Richmond Park, punted them down backwaters by Goring, Pangbourne and the Cleveden Woods, and flirted harmlessly ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... excuse of duty!" said Zenobia, in a whisper so full of scorn that it penetrated me like the hiss of a serpent. "I have often heard it before, from those who sought to interfere with me, and I know precisely what it signifies. Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... topics which have dwindled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated just because they have often been repeated before; a sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up wells. There is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as discarding the greatest number of topics and arguments as obsolete or impertinent. It is to be reckoned on that some of these, on hearing again the old maxims, that a people ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... is death, for your religion, compared to living within its commands? Death is easy; life it is that is difficult. Men have died for many things: love and hate, and religion and science, for patriotism and avarice, for self-conceit and sheer vanity, for all sorts of things, of value and of no value. Death proves nothing. Even a coward can die well. But a pure life is the outcome only of the purest religion, of the greatest belief, of the most magnificent courage. Those who can live like this ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... her Adam, he little thought of bright girls in the nineteenth century, well versed in science, philosophy, and the languages, sitting in the senior class of a college of the American republic, laughing his male conceit to scorn. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I was old? Ah woeful Ere, Which tells me, Youth's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet 'Tis known that Thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit— It cannot be, that Thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd:— And thou wert aye a masker bold! What strange disguise hast now put on To make believe that thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this alter'd ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... not seem able to play when people are looking on. The shots he misses when people are looking on would give you a wrong idea of him. When nobody is about, a prettier game you do not often see. If some folks who fancy themselves could see me when there is nobody about, it might take the conceit out of them. Only once I played up to what I feel is my real form, and then it led to argument. I was staying at an hotel in Switzerland, and the second evening a pleasant-spoken young fellow, who said he had read all my books—later, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... has often been insisted upon. Success did not spoil him. In a letter of 1799 he asks that a certain statement in his favour should not be mentioned, lest he "be accused of conceit and arrogance, from which my Heavenly Father has preserved me all my life long." Here he spoke the simple truth. At the same time, while entirely free from presumption and vanity, he was perfectly alive to his own merits, and liked to have them acknowledged. When visitors came to see ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... to a great degree of accuracy, were equipped with cavalry forces, with infantry and elephants, ruled the Libyans, and held possession of both Sardinia and the greater part of Sicily: as a result they had cherished hopes of subjugating Italy. Various factors contributed to increase their self-conceit. They were especially delighted with their position of independence: their king they elected under the title of a yearly office and not for permanent sovereignty. Animated by these considerations they were at the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... protested, in wifely fashion. "I'm sure, Van Riper," she began, "you've no need to fly in such a huff if I so much as speak of folks who have some conceit of being genteel. It's only proper pride of Mr. Dolph to have a country house, and—" (her voice faltering a little, timorously) "ride in ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... "My conceit of his person was never increased towards him by his place or honours; but I have and do reverence him for his greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages. In his ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... but he was not a fool. He was modest and diffident, but, as is generally the case with modest and diffident persons, there existed, somewhere within the recesses of his consciousness, a very good conceit of himself. He had already learnt, the trout, to look up through the water from his hole and compare the skill of the various anglers on the bank who were fishing for the rise. And he decided that morning, finally: 'Snyder shall catch me.' His previous decision to the same effect, made under ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... nature of it. General applause, or indiscriminate abuse, is the sign of a vulgar understanding. There are certain blemishes which the judicious and good-natured reader will candidly overlook. But the false sublime, the tumour which is intended for greatness, the distorted figure, the puerile conceit, and the incongruous metaphor, these are defects for which scarcely any other kind of merit can atone. And yet there may be more hope of a writer (especially if he be a a young one), who is now and then guilty of some of these faults, than ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... guilty of a breach of confidence in sending the enclosed, which I have just received from my sister-in-law that is to be. It will tell you some causes of your success of which you, with a man's conceit, haven't imagined for a minute, and it will tell you, too, of a maiden's first and natural fear under such circumstances,—a fear which I know that you, with your honest, generous heart, will hasten to dispel. As you're a ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human race. The immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his special conceit in believing that he was the Creator's pet—the particular form of life for which all the universe was created. Clemens allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to the possibility of print or public offense. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... business of one who studies philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for any one to begin to learn what he ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... delayed epistle. I know nothing of this aspirant to the dignity of brotherhood with myself, saving the facts that he is tolerably good looking, claims to be the scion of an old Maryland family, and that self-conceit is ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity; amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit; and happily thinking themselves the objects of general admiration—a wise and merciful dispensation which no good ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... down and see him if only for a moment. He had gained his object in being kept back at the post, that he might pursue his wooing. Satisfied of the wealth and social standing of the lady, he felt no doubt whatever that if given a fair field he could win her, and win her he would. If unlimited conceit has not yet been mentioned or indicated as one of Mr. Gleason's prominent traits, the omission is indeed important. He felt that up to the time of Truscott's coming his progress had been satisfactory. Officers and ladies ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... absent; he does not write his letters, as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance, in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong desire to take the conceit out of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and knowing nothing, Like elephant infatuate with passion, I thought within myself, I all things knew; But when by slow degrees I somewhat learnt By aid of wise preceptors, my conceit, Like some disease, passed off; and now I live In the plain sense of what a ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... His self-love and self-conceit had received a pretty deep wound, his eyes were opened to the fact that Elsie avoided being alone with him, never appearing on deck without her brother, and he did not trouble her much during the remainder of the voyage, did not make ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... right, Pothinus: you will come to the shore with much conceit washed out of you. (The ladies laugh. Cleopatra rises impatiently.) Begone, all of you. I will speak with Pothinus alone. Drive them out, Ftatateeta. (They run out laughing. Ftatateeta shuts the door on them.) What are ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... me from my bed, Mrs. Lorraine, merely to lecture my conceit by proving that there are in this world wiser heads than that of Vivian Grey, on my honour you are giving yourself a ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... "Such insufferable conceit," said Helen. "Everyone knows that it keeps all the other members of the family taking ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... Lady Allonby accorded this conceit the tribute of a sigh; then glanced, in the direction of four impassive footmen to make sure ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... think that the French are right to fight on rather than submit to the dismemberment of their country; and because I prefer a Republic to a Monarchy where a King reigns by right divine. But when I read the bombastic articles in the newspapers—when I see the insane conceit and the utter ignorance of those with whom I am thrown—when I find them really believing that they are heroes because they are going, they say, to win battles, it is difficult to entertain any great sympathy for them. How utterly must poor old Badinguet, before whom ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... rather than rush to the front, unless, indeed, forced forward by duty, when I can be bold enough, if need be; and that one defect in me all know to be a dislike to any assumption of dignity—surely a feeling the opposite to self-conceit; whilst, if I am not true, simple, and sincere, I am worse than I hope I am, and all my friends are deceived in their kind ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... parody upon the reigning fashion of mistress-sonneting and upon the sonneteers of the day, especially Davies and Drayton; that they also contain much which is valuable in the way of autobiography, and that "the key to the whole mystery lies in Shakespeare's conceit (i. e., Mr. Browne's conceit) of the union of his friend and his Muse by marriage of verse and mind; by which means, and for which favor, his youth and beauty are immortalized, but which theme does not fully commence till the friend had declined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... and he had filled that leisure, for years past, to overflowing, with the various kinds of public work that fall to the country gentleman with a conscience. He was never idle; his work interested him, and there was no conceit in his quiet knowledge that he had many friends and much influence. Since the death of the girl to whom he had been engaged for six short months, fifteen years before this date, he had never thought of marriage. ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thus expected to be on hand to welcome and arrest him at his journey's end, and by so doing relieve you of all suspicion of being anything but the honest plucky lad you have proved yourself. At the same time I looked forward to taking some of the conceit out of that young sprig of a secretary. That all my calculations were not upset by last night's accident was largely owing to you, for I must confess that, but for the shame of being outdone in bravery by a mere slip of a boy, I should ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... absolute mistress of eight thousand pounds. Lemuel[1] had carefully foreseen this windfall, and wished to use the money in enterprises of the earthenware trade. Mrs. Malpas, pretty and vivacious, with a self-conceit hardened by the adulation of saloon-bars, very decidedly thought otherwise. Her motto was, 'What's yours is mine, but what's mine's my own.' The difference was accentuated. Long mutual resistances were followed by reconciliations, which grew more and more transitory, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... footing. The statistician collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of crime. The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives the coup de grace to the uncompromising distinction drawn by human conceit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... Fantee was robbed of his effects, and stabbed by an assassin below the ribs, so that his life was despaired of. The most unlucky part, however, of this tragical affair to Richard Lander, was, that the natives, from some cause, which he could not divine, had imbibed the conceit that he was skilled in surgery. In vain, he protested that he knew nothing of the anatomy of the human frame—there were many present, who knew far better than he did himself, and therefore, nolens volens, he was obliged to visit the patient. It was certainly the first time ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections. He was altogether too good-looking, and, what is more, he had none of that consciousness and conceit about him which usually afflicts handsome men, and makes them deservedly disliked ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... commonly effectual. Jack, however, was evidently a large gentle swain of the dumb-suffering type—one of those unresisting leviathans of good-humour, upon whom a woman loves to vent that passion of the illogical which an antipathetic sex has vainly tried to laugh her out of conceit with. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... God's bounty, engendering those spiritual tastes in men, philosophers and learned men, wise in their own conceit, obstinately shut their eyes to it, and look afar off for what is really close to them, so that they incur the penalty of being "branded on the nostrils" [Kuran, lxviii. 16], adjudged against unbelievers. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... meaning of others' words and actions as related to ourselves (forming the natural disposition to enjoy flattery), and finally into our wild dreams as to our future achievements. It is thus the principal root of that gigantic illusion of self-conceit, which has long been recognized by practical sense as one of the greatest obstacles to social action; and by art as one of the most ludicrous manifestations ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... their influence. The Mississippi scheme of John Law, which so dazzled and captivated the French people, inspired them with an idea that they could carry on the same game in England. The anticipated failure of his plans did not divert them from their intention. Wise in their own conceit, they imagined they could avoid his faults, carry on their schemes forever, and stretch the cord of credit to its extremest tension without causing it to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... has been, and still continues for the season, severer than ever was recollected by the oldest stagers, and has rather put our Halifax friends out of conceit with the fine climate of Canada, particularly as Lady Prevost's health is delicate, and she is very sensible of cold. Mrs. Cator and Mrs. Baynes beg to be most kindly remembered to you. General Bowes accompanied Kempt to Portugal in the end ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a lie. You know that it is to gratify your personal spite, and not to help the general public, that you have engaged in your frenzied writings. The public is wiser than you think, although your conceit has blinded you to ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... "shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... is, in short, a manner of speaking out of the simple and plain way, (such as Reason teacheth and proveth things by,) which by a pretty surprizing uncouthness in conceit of expression doth affect and amuse the fancy, stirring in it some wonder, and breeding ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... itself, I had a longer scrutiny of him. He was dandiacally dressed, seemed to tell something under twenty years and had a handsome wistful face atop of a heavy, lumbering, almost corpulent figure, which however did not betoken inactivity; for David's purple hat (a conceit of his mother's of which we were both heartily ashamed) blowing off as we neared him he leapt the railings without touching them and was back with it in three seconds; only instead of delivering it straightway he seemed to expect David to ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... and will be followed by 1200 more. That they pretend they are to come to Dover; and that thereupon the Governor of Dover Castle is getting the victuallers' provision out of the town into the Castle to secure it. But I do think this is a ridiculous conceit; but ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... comment is rescued from any tinge of conceit or egotism by its absolute simplicity and truth. The imitation referred to is of the moral "Tales" for popular reading of the lower classes, which my cabman had studied. The pity of it is, when so many of the contemporary ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... to the circumstance of his back being toward the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax—believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book—she will do better to stay. Doubtless the conceit of it will console her—that the God who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... not been for the tutors who came to give me lessons, as well as for St. Jerome (who at intervals, and very grudgingly, applied a spur to my self-conceit) and, most of all, for the desire to figure as "clever" in the eyes of my friend Nechludoff (who looked upon distinctions in University examinations as a matter of first-rate importance)—had it not been for all these things, I say, the spring and my new freedom would ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the very quality instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and you will get but the same report, that for thorough incompetency and inordinate conceit there is nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil Service examination. Take my word for it, you could not find a worse pointer than the poodle which would pick you out all ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... he possessed he'd sold and put it on this venture; all but his saddle and bridle and gun, and Girl o' Mine. He played stud-poker well; better than most men he knew; and that was no empty conceit, either. He just did. Some men's judgment was quicker, surer than ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... own pretensions, unqualified belief, all critique of the understanding is entirely lost; and, as there is no want of bold pretensions, which the common belief (though for the philosopher this is no credential) does not reject, the understanding lies exposed to every delusion and conceit, without the power of refusing its assent to those assertions, which, though illegitimate, demand acceptance as veritable axioms. When, therefore, to the conception of a thing an a priori determination is synthetically added, such a proposition must obtain, if not ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... approaching death, in lady Ware, his mother-in-law's family. The chaplain had dreamed that such a day he should die; but being by all the family laughed out of the belief of it, he had almost forgot it, till the evening before at supper; there being thirteen at table, according to an old conceit that one of the family must soon die; one of the young ladies pointed to him, that he was the person. Upon this the chaplain recalling to mind his dream, fell into some disorder, and the lady Ware reproving him for his superstition, he said, he ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... it is not wrong to dream. My father was so modest as well as ambitious, so good as well as so gallant, that I would rather die than disgrace him by empty conceit and unprofitable hopes. ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... were not so well acquainted with your innumerable triumphs, I should be obliged to tax you with conceit," said Vidalinc, "but as it is I must admit that you are justified in what you say. But perhaps your wish may be gratified this time, for the young beauty certainly did seem to be very modest and retiring, as well as positively cold ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... mediocrity. At last he made a start, and took his place on the first line of his class, in virtue of a few masterpieces, scanty diamonds glittering in a cinder-heap. Over-production, the crying vice of the literature of the day, and an over-weening conceit, prevented Honore de Balzac from maintaining the position he might and ought to have occupied. Such gems as the "Pere Goriot" and "Eugenie Grandet" were buried and lost sight of under mountains of rubbish. True that he now denied a number of books published under supposititious names, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... The man's self-conceit was unlimited; his sense of humour nil; and in less than a month he had been unanimously voted a "pukka[12] bounder" by that isolated community of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Sidney's Arcadia is aromatic in the imagination, and its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy and appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine a moral atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... covetousness, gentleness, modesty, absence of restlessness, vigour, forgiveness, firmness, cleanliness, absence of quarrelsomeness, freedom from vanity,—these become his, O Bharata, who is born to godlike possessions. Hypocrisy, pride, conceit, wrath, rudeness and ignorance, are, O son of Pritha, his who is born to demoniac possessions. God-like possessions are deemed to be for deliverance; the demoniac for bondage. Grieve not, O son of Pandu, for thou art born to god-like ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... confident of his position. It is not vanity which upholds a man working silently year after year at a task ridiculed by his neighbors and denounced by his enemies. Webster had something better to sustain him than an idle self-conceit. He had the reserve of a high purpose, and an aim which had been growing more clearly understood by himself, so that he could afford to disregard the judgments of others. There was in the outward circumstance of his life something which testifies ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder |
