"Sophistication" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a higher sophistication and a greater worldliness may smile at the artlessness, and, if one will, naivete of a man like Jammes. It is true that his art is limited, and that if one reads too much at one time there is a note of monotony and a certain paucity of phrase, but who is the writer of whom ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... argue merely for arguing's sake. It was said of the great Lord Holland that he always put his opponent's case better than the opponent put it for himself. No one ever said this of Mr. Balfour; and his tendency to sophistication led Mr. Humphrey Paul to predict that his name "would always be had in honour wherever hairs were split." His manner and address (except when he was debating) were always courteous and conciliatory; those who were brought into close contact ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... badness over all our variegated moments. The good moments are their own excuse for being, a part of the brightness and worth of life. They need nothing ulterior to justify them. The bad moments feel bad, and that is the end of it; they are bad-feeling moments, and no sophistication can deny it. Conscious life looked at from this point of view, and abstracted from all its other aspects, is a flux of plus and minus values. Certain of its moments have a greater felt worth than others; some experiences are intrinsically undesirable, the shadows of life; others, intrinsically ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... his manners sprightly, his observations correct.—Alonzo was, in some degree, aroused from his abstractedness;—the manners of the stranger pleased him. His frankness, his ease, his understanding, his urbanity, void of vanity or sophistication, sympathetically caught the feelings of Alonzo, and he even felt a sort of solemn regret when the stranger departed. He soon retired to bed, determining to proceed early ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations burst forth in volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely excited. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... du menuisier, a part of Duhamel's Descriptions des arts et metiers. Diderot, for example, illustrates 14 bench planes alone, generally used by the joiner (fig. 5), while Roubo suggests the steady sophistication of the art in a plate showing the special planes and irons required for fine molding ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... all the sad sophistication of the lowly-born, yet with it an invincible sense of purity, a delicate horror of the physical phases of love. She was a finely motived creature with impossible ideals, but out of her stark knowledge of life she ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... possession of the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whose clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes the poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater sophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages. But each stage leaves its sign ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... and Delilah danced, a dance which they had practiced together. It had in it just a hint of wildness, and just a hint of sophistication, and Delilah in her dress of sapphire chiffon, with its flaring tunic of silver net, seemed in the nebulous light like some ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... personality. She was the magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in, glazing her over and her speech, which carried the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the footlights. It is the look of those who must make believe as a business, and are a-weary. You see it developed into its highest degree in the face ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... reply to make. His thought was busy with the phenomenon before him: a child of man, but one who, like Israel of old, saw God and heard His voice at every turn of her daily walk. Untutored in the ways of men, without trace of sophistication or cant, unblemished as she moved among the soiled vessels about her, shining with celestial radiance in this unknown, moldering town so far from the world's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... individuals, seemingly neither at work nor at play, who were to visit the courts, the police, the wrecks, the criminals, conventions, politicians, reformers, lovers, and haters, and bring back the news of the city's day. A common almost racial sophistication stamped their expression. They pawed over telephone books, argued with indifferent, emotionless profanity among themselves on items of amazing import; pounded nonchalantly upon typewriters, lolled with ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... not alive. They do not, at least, possess the properties of life as it is known throughout the galaxy. They are—as nearly as a poor analogy can suggest—Machines! Machines cannot live, yet here on Earth machinery has reached a level of sophistication—and autonomy—quite unprecedented. Every spark of Terran life has become victim and bondslave of the incredible mechanisms. The noblest enterprises of the race are tarnished by ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch
... one of the major difficulties is not the software. Rather, in creating a product that will be used by scholars representing a broad spectrum of computer sophistication, user documentation proves to be the most ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... almost all mediaeval poetry are no doubt discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... more lonely and primitive than Looe, for it is not touched by the railway, and its site offers little temptation to expansion. But it is becoming more and more sought after; artists have learned to love it and have introduced it to the art galleries; the inevitable sophistication must follow, just as Clovelly and Robin Hood's Bay have become sophisticated. But nothing can take from Polperro the loveliness of its position at the mouth of this seaward gorge, the beauty of the hills that surround ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... contemporary science. Everybody discovers a new or forgotten disease, and trumpets a forgotten or a new remedy, and nobody knows a thing! And then, too, what good does it do one not to be hopelessly ignorant since there is so much sophistication going on in pharmacy that no physician can be sure of having his prescriptions filled to the letter? One example among many: at present, sirup of white poppy, the diacodia of the old Codex, does not exist. It is manufactured ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... comes from America is equally efficacious with what is brought from the East Indies. Some years ago a friend of mine paid sixteen guineas for two ounces of it; and, in six months after, it was sold in the same shop for five shillings the pound. In short, we live in a vile world of fraud and sophistication; so that I know nothing of equal value with the genuine friendship of a sensible man; a rare jewel! which I cannot help thinking myself in possession of, while I repeat the old declaration, that I ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... gay as a lark. She chattered with the childish artlessness that at times veiled her sophistication. Jack was given to understand that she loved to be natural and simple, that she detested the shams of social convention to which she was made to conform. Her big lovely eyes were wistful in their earnestness as they met his. It was not wholly a pose with her. For the moment she meant ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... is the centre of a region of novelty and charm for the visitor from the North and East. The intimate communion of prairie and rich forested valley, the sophistication of the bustling little city in contrast with the rough life of the outlying ranches, the mingling in common intercourse of such differing human elements as the Eastern tourist, the free and easy Western townsman, the cowboy and the Indian, give rare spice to a visit long enough to impart the spirit ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... inability to feel without analyzing the feeling "Ah, for a single passion that might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet paper against a window pane." This is the eternal tragedy of sophistication,—that there results an anhedonia in large part manifested by a restless introspection. The mind is drawn away from the outside world, and everything ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... The required trust and confidence for sharing sensitive information and support between these agencies and the military needs to be developed further. Interagency coordination and cooperation must be raised to a new level of sophistication. Some laws may need to be changed. War in Cyberspace does not recognize domestic or foreign boundaries. In this environment the subjects of Information Warfare and Information In Warfare take on new meaning and require focused development. We must ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... worth while to remark and proclaim such a conviction as this only because mankind has so treacherous a memory, and so fatuous a habit of disowning its most precious and dearly won possessions. Cardinal truths are periodically overlaid with sophistication, blended with tentative opinion, and identified with the instruments of the day. There results a confusion of mind that fails to distinguish the essence from the accident, and aims to destroy where there is need to rectify. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... action; and a sophisticated, practical people, such as the Jews, surrounded by an equally sophisticated world, have not marched upon Jerusalem with the flag-flying alacrity of the Crusaders. However, their sophistication has substituted for speed a broad measure of surety; and a summary of the organization of the movement and the work accomplished within and without Palestine gives promise that, if the will behind Zionism be sustained, the Jews who wail at the Wall may ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... much sophistication, not to say conventionalised affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication. Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice, the concrete incidence, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... If they had told the precise truth they would have said that they wanted office, and if they could not get it from one party they would try another. When a man is conscious of a strong desire and of great ability to serve the public, this kind of sophistication is easy. That which should make a generous man suspicious under such circumstances is that he confounds official position with public service. The latter, indeed, is in a sense a technical phrase; but a man may equally serve ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... be laughed at by an attractive young lady is disturbing and unpleasant. It is particularly so when the laughter is from the provinces and the laughee—so to speak—a dignified and sophisticated city man. Albert summoned the said dignity and sophistication to his rescue, knocked the ashes from his ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... had an instinct for the truth in its purest sense, the innate impulse toward the verities unspoiled by the taint of sophistication. Perhaps in the restricted conditions of her life she had never before had adequate temptation to a subterfuge. Even now, consciously reddening, her eyes drooping before the combined gaze of her little world, she had an inward protest of the literal exactness of her phrase. "Naw sir—I never ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree) |
