"Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that Lady Hester, with her quick insight into character, an insight sharpened by long and varied experience, took "the measure" of her visitor very accurately, and lightly estimated the vanity, self-consciousness, and inflated sentimentality which weakened the genius of Lamartine and marred his career, both for his ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... letters, all of them—your mother's, mine, everyone's. There is nothing more dreadful, when one is growing old, than to look back to one's youth." But Jeanne also kept her letters, was preparing a chest of "relics" in obedience to a sort of hereditary instinct of dreamy sentimentality, although she differed from her mother ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... beside it, the pretty parasol, and the other habits in which she had arrived because she had none else, that her first indignation at the effrontery of tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary sentimentality over this genteel elopement, as it seemed. She closed the door, and withdrew as softly as she had come, to go and consult with her neighbours on ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... originally and artistically—his invariable wear being light, loose-fitting suits, very fine shirts, and large collars and cuffs. Everything seemed to suit his upright figure and quiet, assured air. He was sensitive to the pitch of sentimentality, and, when reading a pathetic passage, his voice would begin to tremble and the tears to come into his eyes, until he had to lay the book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... feel any fondness for such wisps of sentimentality and greediness as that?" Imogen asked, as the tiny griffon darted into the room and ran about, sniffing ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... loving appreciation of the intrinsically "true, good, and beautiful" was part of the homage that his nature rendered to its Creator, and instead of flowering into a morbid and maudlin sentimentality which craves low-browed, long straight-nosed, undraped statuettes in every nook and corner,—or dwarfs the soul and pins it to the surplice of some theologic dogmata claiming infallibility—or coffins the intellect in cramped, shallow, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... importation, and a rice-plantation overseer, down with the fever in his third season—and dodged submission to unmitigated calls on his time, the prevailing character of the poor fellow's physiognomy was that of a dolorous sentimentality He believed himself to be materially refined by having had so much intimate communication with gentlemen and ladies, suffering under sea-sickness, and he knew that no man in the ship could use language like that ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... inadequate to the service of strong passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was graceful and elegant—too elegant, perhaps; and in his modesty he attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of Englishmen that an American could ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... years, under social pressure, for the sake of the work which was given him to do, to fortify himself with a mail of reserve. And this, indeed, contrasted strangely with his former abandon, and with the customary gush of German sentimentality. It was common then for Germans who had known each other by report, and were mutually attracted, when first they met, to fall on each other's necks and kiss and weep. Goethe, as a young man, had indulged such fervors; but in old age he had lost this ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... high, which stood upon an acre of ground in the centre of an artificial lake. The two inscriptions that the prince chose for his sepulchre illustrate, appropriately enough, the sharply contrasting qualities of his strange individuality—his romantic sentimentality, and his callous cynicism. The first inscription was ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... natural right and heritage, and he ate and drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... thought. Self-complacency. Puerility. Sentimentality. Affectations of scholarly learning. Lust after eloquent and flowery expression. Repetition of pet poetic picturesquenesses. Confused and wandering statement. Metaphor gone insane. Meaningless words, used because they are pretty, or showy, or unusual. Sorrowful attempts ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that I talk and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... warnings nearly always are. Faith is at a discount. And the qualities which go with faith are at a discount; such as enthusiasm, spontaneity, ebullition, lyricism, and self-expression in general. Sentimentality is held in such horror that people are afraid even of sentiment. Their secret cry is: "Give us something ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... under heaven why you should not marry her, if you like. Convict's daughter? Bah! I snap my fingers in their faces. My girl shall be happy yet. I swear it! But we'll stop all this sickly sentimentality ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... screech than ever, and flung back on the sofa; and one of my sisters went and tumbled into her arms, and t'other went round, and the kissing and slobbering scene went on again, only I was left out, thank goodness. I hate such sentimentality. ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... His playful manner entirely disappeared. "No, not wasted. You have enjoyed them, you say. Splendid justification. You will continue to enjoy them as the years grow between you and your college days. All men are sentimental about college, and in that sentimentality there ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... your account of your fellow-guests at the Moorhead Inn. No, I do not misunderstand your letter; nor do I credit you with any foolish sentimentality, or Susie-like flutterings. Jim Airth stands to you for an abstract thing—uncompromising manhood, in its strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Ronquerolles, considered that he had strong reasons to complain of Monsieur de Maulincour, who had given some ground for it during his former intimacy with Monsieur de Ronquerolles' sister, the Comtesse de Serizy. That lady, the one who detested German sentimentality, was all the more exacting in the matter of prudery. By one of those inexplicable fatalities, Auguste now uttered a harmless jest which Madame de Serizy took amiss, and her brother resented it. The discussion took place in the corner of a room, in a low voice. In ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just now; what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever. Howard is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality, "abolition of punishment," all-absorbing "prison-discipline," and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred, for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... go to pieces without it, it is a word not to be used too lightly in passing judgment, as if it were an element to be thrown out or treated with small consideration. Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world. Even "sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone, is better than that affectation of superiority to human weakness which is only tolerable as one of the stage properties of full-blown dandyism, and is, at best, but half-blown cynicism; which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... exhortation is past. Temperance education today consists in the presentation of absolute, scientific fact. Sentimentality and the multiplication of words no longer mean anything. In dealing with the teen age boy, spare your words, but pile up the scientific, concrete, "seeing-is-believing" data. By proved experiment let him discover through the ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... Leave out sentimentality, if you will, and Christianity, and our hollow pretence of following Him who called every ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... forenoon these musings prevented the slightest trace of sentimentality from appearing in her face or words. She had to admit mentally that Minturn gave her no occasion for defensive tactics. He attended as strictly to business as did Hiram, and she was allowed to come and go at will. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... considerable time in each other's society. But the closest observer could find no fault with this intimacy. It sprang from the similarity of tastes, and the frank, straightforward manner which marked their intercourse denied the existence of any foolish sentimentality. Though younger than Cora, Lancy seemed by his steady ways and manly behavior to be the eldest of the family. Perhaps the fact that his father talked so much with him, and interested him in matters that ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... of the day's jaunt has been the absence of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested by an intellectual interest. One of her great friends is Willoughby, the economic statistician, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... when there isn't.... I suppose I believe in God.... Never really thought about Him—people don't.. .. I suppose my creed is, 'I believe rather indistinctly in God the Father Almighty, substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein of vague sentimentality that doesn't give a datum for anything at all, in ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... "Rotten sentimentality!" exclaimed Lawrence. "The curse of the age. Oh, there's no doubt she was clever. She played her cards so well that she succeeded in deceiving the principal looker-on as well ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... political novel. It is in characters rather than events that the author interests himself. A highly refined, well-to-do and extremely picturesque Irish revolutionary, whom the author not very happily christens Count Kettle, has a daughter who secretly abhors romance and the high-falutin sentimentality that he and his circle mistake for patriotism. To her father's disgust she marries an apparently staid and practical young Scotch ship-owner, who at heart is a confirmed romantic. The circumstances which lead to their marriage and the subsequent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... presented novel and even bold conceptions, as in The Massacre of the Innocents (1843) and Barabbas released and borne in Triumph (1849). Such designs prove an intellect neither servile nor sterile. Certain other compositions are marred by affectation and sentimentality, traits of morbid moods increasing with years, and which contrast strangely with the healthiness and robustness of the great old masters. Fitly have been chosen to illustrate these pages The Naming of St. John (1843), Christ Healing the Sick (1843), Christ's Entry into ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... without resources or organisation, annihilation was before them. Now the English, for their own security, had the greatest interest in preventing the extermination of white men by natives; and on that ground, apart from all sentimentality, they had never ceased to protest against the methods employed by the Boers, as the surest means of bringing about that result. Theophilus Shepstone, who possessed great influence over the Zulus, was sent to Pretoria. Unable, even with the ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... been carrying on a secret intrigue with that gentleman (she must have got this from her "Christian" mother), and when her father comes to know of it he suddenly exhibits an unsuspected gift of sentimentality ("My baby Con! my baby Con!" he sobs), and, in terror lest his ewe-lamb's name should be tainted by the breath of scandal, he offers his late secretary a heavy sum of money to make an honest woman of her. It sounds a little inconsistent, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... convinced, from very wide knowledge, experience, that the other could not form a permanent attachment to the Manchu; and Nettie's great difference, together with the romance of her unhappy position, must have a potent effect on the fellow's evident sentimentality. A dank air rose from the water, like the smell of death; and, with an uncontrollable shiver, he turned back toward ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... point on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless sentimentality ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... feet; and as they stood thus, side by side, one of them struck its beak several times against the beak of the other, as if in play. I wished them joy of their expected progeny, and was the more ready to believe they would have it for this little display of sportive sentimentality. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... considered him the best of American poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their power. A truly philanthropic sentiment is most potent for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... growing between him and Miriam neither of them would have acknowledged. He thought he was too sane for such sentimentality, and she thought herself too lofty. They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother had always been. The ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Constantinople, where he demanded the total withdrawal of the Turkish forces. This was acceded to, and Turkey thus lost the hold which it had acquired upon the lawless Montenegrins. The idea of Ottoman decay acquired daily fresh strength, and a maudlin sentimentality was excited in behalf of these Christian savages. Taking advantage of this, they made constant forays across the border, stirring up by their example such of the borderers as were disposed to rise, and using force to compel those who ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... they have constructed from the pages of the trashy story paper. It is a sort of voluntary species of sacrifice on their part—a kind of suicidal decking with flowers, and making preparation for immolation. Full of pernicious sentimentality, they are open to the first promising flirtation. They see elegantly-dressed and diamonded ladies, and their imagination is fed from the fountains of vulgar literature until they dream that they, too, are destined to be won by some splendid cavalier of fabulous ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity—even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of life. But, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his colours for the portraits, his portraits are subordinate to the background; and there his eye is true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his colours and brushwork unimpeachable. Whether, like his own Platonov—who may be called to some ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Miss Anne Valery. Agatha was too angry; and the subject seemed painful to Major Harper. Though he did what was not his habit—especially with female friends—he endeavoured, instead of encouraging, to throw off his momentary sentimentality, and become his usual ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... "Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... affairs as this, nor do I now for any higher object than my own gratification. The Daughter of the Sun is no angel, nor ambitious to become one. I have looked on unmoved at the torture of the stake more than once, so 'tis no weak sentimentality that leads me to try to avert your fate. Nor am I sure I can, whatever my motive be. I possess no power to overturn the united vote of these warriors—they are all children of the Sun. I can think of but one method by which I can even hope to encompass your escape from ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to action in the cause of others. I will be delighted to meet an accusation of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a Southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... good humor, are indispensable to the most successful works of fiction. Above all other kinds of writing, fiction must win the heart of the reader. And this requires that the heart of the writer should be tender and sympathetic. Harsh critics call this quality sentiment, and even sentimentality. Dickens had it above all other writers, and it is probable that this popularity has never been surpassed. Scott succeeded by his splendid descriptions, but no one can deny that he was also one of the biggest hearted men in the world. And Thackeray, with all his reserve, had ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... abstaining from theft! In short, the first injustice is practised by literature; it has no interest in esthetics, which is only a higher justice. The romantics will have a fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? it is always the story of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented! To repent is good, but not to do evil is better. The school of rehabilitations ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... you overcome me with your sentimentality. I don't believe in love. That's what I believe in," said he, as he opened his pocket-book and ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... would have scorned the sentimentality of seeing him off from the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the platform—a youth well-groomed and well-supplied, but for once in his ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... 'He did not understand him.' True, it may be, but his unbelief was the cause of his not understanding him. I suppose Thomas meant this as a reproach to Jesus for putting them all in danger by going back to Judaea; if not, it was only a poor piece of sentimentality. So much for Thomas's unbelief. But he had good and true faith notwithstanding; for ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... never degenerated into passion or rashness, his constancy into obstinacy, his benevolence into weakness, nor his tenderness into sentimentality. His unworldliness was free from indifference and unsociability, his dignity from pride and presumption, his affability from undue familiarity, his self-denial from moroseness, his temperance from austerity. He combined child-like innocence with manly strength, all-absorbing devotion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hot brandy-and-water than I ever remember to have seen circulated at the most convivial party. Of course this effected a radical change in the spirits and conversation of the circle. It was again my lot to be placed by the side of the fascinating Selina, whose sentimentality gradually thawed away beneath the influence of sundry sips, which she accepted with a delicate reluctance. This time Dalgleish of Raxmathrapple had not the remotest chance. M'Alcohol got furious, sang Gaelic songs, and even delivered a sermon in genuine Erse, without incurring ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... whom I have already copiously described. Some were Germans, thinned by the climate, and sharpened up to the true Yankee point of competition; very little smack of Fatherland was left about them,—no song, no sentimentality, not much quivering of the heart-strings at remembering the old folks at home, whom some of them have not seen in twenty years, and never will see again. To be sure, in such a hard life as theirs, with no social ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... poor child," she said, when she arrived one day at the Prince's home to talk over her new idea. "You made her smile by your liveliness and fun. For I was there when you little knew it. The girl has been overdosed with sentimentality and doleful strains. I believe we have been on a ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... all sorts and conditions of men, had taken one or two journeys, and was still as far as ever from any trace of his brother. Purvis had ridden over several times from his own estancia, bringing his little boy with him. His treatment of the boy was affectionate to the point of sentimentality. He looked after him with a woman's carefulness, was over-anxious about his health, and treated him as though he were much younger than his ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... pardon, sire," he said with a shrug, "but we know the sentimentality of the Germans. What is it? Sighs and then beer, more sighs and more beer, a deluge of sighs and a deluge of beer. A Frenchman is not like that ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... who much amused the rest of the household. An American lady with a sickly daughter, who would have been pretty but for her affectation and sentimentality. The girl was engaged to a fierce, dissipated little Russian, who presented her with a big bouquet every morning, followed her about all day like a dog, and glared wrathfully at any man who cast an eye upon the languishing damsel in white muslin and flowing curls 'bedropt ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... is more charming than the frank comradeship of girls and boys, and that is why I am so sorry to see them spoil it with sentimentality. They ought to be good friends, helping each other, having jolly good times together, but never in ways that will bring a blush to the cheeks of either, now, or ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... degree had the thunder element in him, so far as we are able to judge by the descriptions given to us of him. He was a dashing, courageous, scientific genius, gifted with natural instincts, disciplinary wisdom, deplorable sentimentality, and an artificial, revengeful spirit of hatred that probably became real under the arbitrary circumstances of war, but, I should say, was rarely prominent. His roaming attacks on the French were probably used more for effect, and had, we hope, only a superficial meaning. But be that as it ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the representative of, or fit to have anything to do with the councils of labour who has not brains, intelligence enough to realise this. These qualities are not synonyms of or in any way related to sentimentality or any weak-kneed ethics. They underlie the soundest business sense. In this day and age they are synonyms of the word practical. There was a time and it was not so many years ago, when heads and executives of large ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... first phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a number of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting corners and relieving the harsh pressure of its injustices by exuberances of humour and sentimentality. Mr. Brumley became charitable and romantic,—orthodox still but charitable and romantic. He was all for smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular instance he was more and more ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... literature; although those productions of Karamzin himself, which first appeared in this journal, evidently bear the stamp of the author's youth. Both in his prose writings and in his scattered lyrical poems, at this period, there is a certain dulcet sentimentality, behind which we look in vain for energetic or true poetic thoughts. He showed more maturity in his second periodical, called the European Messenger; where political and moral subjects occupied his pen. But his principal reputation rests upon his History of the Russian ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... able to gaze upon it callously, without pity and terror. Newspaper life—at least the reportorial side of it—has an odd effect upon men and women; it sharpens their tragical instincts and perceptions and dulls eternally the edge of tenderness and sentimentality. It was natural for Kitty to possess the keenest perceptions of tragedy; but she had been taken out of the reportorial field in time to preserve all her tenderness and romanticism. Otherwise she would have seen in that crumpled ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... start. (He strikes the first chord) Please don't put a lot of sentimentality into the opening words. They ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... he said, gravely, with a silencing wave of his hand; "there is no need to call up the past. I know Kate is like her mother, but she has my blood in her veins also,—enough that when the time comes she'll not let any childish sentimentality stand in the way of what I think is ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... than emotional, and wholly secretive, he had accustomed himself to regard romantic ideality, and susceptibility to sentimentality as a species of intellectual anaemia; holding himself always thoroughly in hand, when subjected to the softening influences that now and then invaded professional existence, and melted the conventional selfish crust over the hearts of his colleagues, as the warm ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... possibility of re-establishing peace instead of everlasting war—is the pernicious sentimentality of phrasemongers. There is a law of evolution by which it follows that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act in an evil way. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... thing. And that, applied in a modern way, is what is happening to England. All classes are forgetting their discipline, and, without fitting themselves for what they aspire to, they are trying to snatch from some other class. And the whole thing is rotten with mawkish sentimentality, and false prudery, and abeyance ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... this sentiment with an icy disdain. Walker had always been a heavy drinker, he was proud of his capacity to see men half his age under the table when he spent a night in Apia, and he had the sentimentality of the toper. He could cry over the stories he read in his magazines and yet would refuse a loan to some trader in difficulties whom he had known for twenty years. He was close with his money. Once Mackintosh said ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... so that every one might regard him as a man of sound dispassionate judgment, and solid, keen understanding. His especial antipathy was for so-called cranks—people who went off at half-cock, who thought nothing out, but were governed by the impulse of the moment, shilly-shally and controlled by sentimentality. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... you so a thousand times—later. But not here. And above all, no sentimentality, or everything will be lost. We must look at the matter in cold blood, like sensible people. [Takes out a cigar, cuts of the point, and lights it] Sit down there now, and I'll sit here, and then we'll talk as if ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... tree, and personally I consider that holly is most suitable and decorative where Nature planted it. Christmas," finished Mr. Sawyer, slightly disconcerted by Jimsy's attentive stare, "Christmas is merely a day and a dinner. Let the frivolous make of it an orgy of sentimentality if ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... the ascendant, for he, too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture—no reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the like, and made ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Minver was usually a censor of our several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind action that ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... back door a moment to make sure no one's out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten's dead, it's dead, that's all. She doesn't mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she's got sense and guts. They're her family. I don't know that I could have put that kitten out of ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... is all owing to his daughter: 'twould be a precious good job if she had never been born, or being born, was dead in earnest, which I hear she is not—He's not the same skipper he was afore he took to land and sentimentality! Confound all she-things, again say I! they are tiresome ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world—such was Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... shanty, they set about their housekeeping at once. The situation might have been delicate in other periods and climes, but here no false sentimentality clouded the grisly facts. Face to face with them stood hunger and cold, two relentless enemies. Hunger, in a land where the temperature burns up the tissues as a freight-engine on a grade eats coal, makes no truces; ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... to care for him and believe in him just as he was: such a love as his wife might, perhaps, have given him in her single month of unconscious happiness. It was a longing fitful, and not defined in words, but a real sentiment all the same, not a sentimentality; and, imperfect as it was in scope and tendency, it expressed the best part of the man's nature. He despised it, and crushed it down; but it lay latent, ready to be kindled ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Burrage turned quite white, I thought, and Curtis, noticing the effect of his words, went up and taking him by the hand, added more kindly, "My poor Burrage, are you quite well? I never saw you in so morbid a state before. All this is mere sentimentality—so different from your usual manly spirit. Go away for a change, to Brighton or Eastbourne, and you must come back with that wholesome contempt for your contemporaries that characterises most of your writings. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the night, perhaps, or some faint aftermath of sentimentality born of Sonia's emotion—tempted him during those few moments to relax. He threw aside his mask and breathed the freer for it. Once more he was a human being, treading the streets of a real city, his feet very much upon the earth, his heart full of ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thoroughly, through reading all the books that have been written about you. He knows your prying nature, your need to be always plotting, your mania for hunting in the dark and unravelling what others have failed to unravel. He also knows that sort of sham kindness of yours, the drivelling sentimentality that makes you shed crocodile tears over the people you victimize; And he planned the whole farce! He invented the story of the two burglars, the second theft of fifty thousand francs! Oh, I swear to you, before Heaven, ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... application of this. Progress in religion is the slowest, because man is kept back by sentimentality, by the efforts of parents, by old associations. A thousand unseen tendrils are twining about him that he must necessarily break if he advances. In other departments of knowledge inducements are held out and rewards are promised to the one who does succeed—to ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... identification of Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he did not sooner or later surrender ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... revise our conceptions as to the love-passions of these southerners; no people are more fundamentally sane in matters of the heart; they have none of our obfuscated sentimentality; they are seldom naively enamoured, save in early stages of life. It is then that small girls of eight or ten may be seen furtively recording their feelings on the white walls of their would-be lovers' houses; these ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... had so long desired—an ideal affection. In the case of Mme. du Deffand, the soul was willing, but the body failed. Her emotion can scarcely be termed love, but is rather to be designated as a mental hallucination, an exaggerated intellectual affection bordering upon sentimentality—the outgrowth of that morbid imagination developed from her long ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Macon, and lived to see the century out, dying in 1805, at the age of seventy-eight. His popularity is nowadays due chiefly to his heads of young girls, which he painted in his later life with admirable skill, but with a sentimentality that almost repels. The famous example in the National Gallery is more free from the sickly sweetness that spoils most of them, and reminds us that he could paint more serious works, and paint them exceedingly well. He first came into notice ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period striving toward a more vigorous type of values—something as beautiful as the machinery of our time—it is not as yet to any great degree cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... understand and to appreciate the absolute sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards indiscriminate amours and connections, poor, stupid, besotted George was simply on a level with the lower ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... is inimitable. The old gentlewomen, or caretakers, dry and twisted, brittle and sharp, repositories of emotion—vanities and malice and self-seeking—like echoes of the past, or fat and loquacious, with alcoholic sentimentality, are wonderfully ingratiating. They gather like shadows, ghosts, about the feet of the young, and provide Mr. Walpole with one of his main resources—the restless turning away of the young from the conventions, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... stronger the impression made by a genius, the farther away is the pendulum of approbation apt to swing. The neoteroi had to face, in addition to this revulsion, the misfortunes of the time. The civil wars which came close upon them had little use for the sentimentality of their romances or the involutions of their manner of composition. And again, Catullus and Calvus had been over-brutal in their attacks upon Julius Caesar, a character lifted to the high heavens by the war and the martyrdom that followed. ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the second, of the happy marriage of the heroine to a man who is not her lover. The visit paid by that lover to his old mistress and her husband in their home at Clarens, with all the trials of virtue which it involves, is a disagreeable piece of sentimentality. The members of the trio fall on each other's necks with unpleasant frequency and fervor. But the picture of that home itself, with its well-ordered housekeeping, its liberality and its plainness, is interesting and attractive. "Since the masters of this house have ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... were abundantly given, both by heart and disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself alike in childlike ways—in a passion for flowers, in that form of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations of the same period seem stilted, jerky, and theatrical. In them, however, there may still be found a sort of interstitial sentimentality, and in an age of romantic devotion to ideals the quality of vague suggestiveness passed for genuine coin. Whatever else was lacking in those compositions, they had the one supreme merit of accomplishing their end, for they roused the French ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... curious. The story developed with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... him, not ideas, nor even characters, and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective. Now cynicism, in France, supplies a sufficient basis for all these requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the admirable story "Boule de Suif," perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote, with a story of somewhat similar motive—Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both stories are pathetic; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes, casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight, and I have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal contest I would interest a certain class ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... said. He didn't like to be thanked, and he avoided even the shadow of sentimentality with Jones. After all, they were two young fellows, playing a big game together, taking big chances; and what was the use of talking about it? "What are you going to tell the Pells?" he suddenly asked, glad to get ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... heart moralists, seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... gloom, strenuously eager by study and by labor to regain the kingdom which belongs alone to inspiration. Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion a la mode, of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... horror of himself. I think it may fairly be said that he had done a brave if foolhardy thing; it was certainly to save the boy that he had jumped, and he had given himself a moment's time in which to draw back if he chose, which vastly enhances the merit of the deed. But sentimentality had been there also, and he was now shivering with a presentiment of the length to which it might ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie |
