"Unrefined" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a French lady would be ashamed not to affect an interest in the great writers by whom her country has been ennobled; and to betray an ignorance of their works, or an indifference to their renown, would be considered a proof not only of the greatest stupidity, but of bad taste and unrefined habits. Here we are distinguished unfavourably from our neighbours—exceptions, of course, there must always be—but in general to betray an acquaintance with any literature beyond the last novel, or the current trash and gossip of the day, might provoke ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... not understand your gibberish, my good man: but that you are unrefined and uneducated I can easily see, and I command you to quit ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... beatings of his heart. Then he rapidly re-climbed the rock, and passed over the ruins again, this time plunging hurriedly through, and kicking aside the charred heaps without a thought of what they had contained. Key was not an unfeeling man, he was not an unrefined one: he was a gentleman by instinct, and had an intuitive sympathy for others; but in that instant his whole mind was concentrated upon the calcined outcrop! And his first impulse was to see if it bore any evidence of previous examination, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... hours and all sorts of things. You're a lick to me—abso-bally-lutely! You ought not to be well like this! Lord, the things I've been told about women having babies! They simply get down to it—all except the unrefined working women." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... of the refineries is very rich in iodic salts, and is supposed to contain much muriate of lime. ("Literary Gazette" 1841 page 475.) In an unrefined specimen brought home by myself, Mr. T. Reeks has ascertained that the muriate of lime is very abundant. With respect to the origin of this saline mass, from the manner in which the gently inclined, compact bed follows for so many miles the sinuous ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... to be only of yesterday?" he said, and laughed—not so very politely. Altogether there was something about him that struck Maya as unrefined. The bees had more culture and better manners. Yet he seemed to be a good-natured fellow, because, seeing Maya's blush of embarrassment, he softened ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... stairs to slide down, and, directly after, a gritty rubbing noise, made metrical to accompany the shrill whistling of a tune, arose, the result of the fact that Bob Hartnup, the doctor's boy, who clung to the house with the fidelity of a cat, was cleaning the knives. Bob's facts were correct, if unrefined in expression, for the two girls flew to each other's arms, and as they kissed affectionately, each displayed tears in her eyes, while without relinquishing hands, they sat ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... his chest, glanced across at Fong Ling, and gave his social circle a rather poor version of the usual white-toothed smile. "Jokes can wait—especially busted ones. On with the dance; let joy be unrefined!" ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... to accept the services of a factor and manager. The factor was the Prussian Junker. He was an alien. For he could hardly be called a German. In blood he was more Slav than Teutonic. He was unrefined, unsympathetic, and overbearing. But as a manager he was splendid. He bought up outlying parts to round off the estate. He paid more attention to the necessaries than to the luxuries and the amenities of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... he fills affection's eye, Obscurely wise and coarsely kind; Nor, lettered arrogance, deny Thy praise to merit unrefined. ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... this, you will remark that gold of an inferior degree of purity cannot mix with that of a superior purity. The one must contract the impurity of the other, or else impart its own purity to it. Put a refined gold with an unrefined one, what can the goldsmith ever do with it? He will have all the impurity taken from the second piece, that it may be able to mix with the first. This is what St Paul tells us, that "the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is;" he adds, that if any ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... few isolated cases, as yet, of the unrefined habits so usually ascribed to them; and those cases decidedly were not among the higher orders of people; for there seems just as much difference in America as any where else in some respects. The superior classes here have almost always excellent manners, and a great deal of real and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... solitude; she could have wept. Was it for this that she had risked the love that had been her own from childhood, and broken with the friend to whom her father had commended her? Was it worth while to defy their censures for this dreary spot, this weak-spirited, exacting, unrefined companion, and the insult of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... commerce there are, of course, many secret rebels—now and then only does one make her exit from society through the courts. The vast majority of Anglo-Saxons in whatever clime or capital, suppress their "unrefined" appetites or vagrant fancies—which are vibrations from the wheel; sometimes hard jerks when the presiding genius is more than commonly out of patience—and rise to serene heights or grow morbid and irritable ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the many, this word is probably more frequently used improperly than properly. As a noun, it means the common people, the lower orders, the multitude, the many; as an adjective, it means coarse, low, unrefined, as "the vulgar people." The sense in which it is misused is that of immodest, indecent. The wearing, for example, of a gown too short at the top may be indecent, but ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... hated all impure suggestiveness, he could be amused by what may be called broad humour. I always felt him to be totally free from prudishness, and it seemed to me that he drew the line in exactly the right place between things that might be funny and unrefined, and things which were merely coarse and gross. The fact was that he had a perfectly simple manliness about him, and an infallible tact, which was wholly unaffected, as to the limits of decorum. The result was that one ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could possibly make upon his attention. She had been presumptuous in pushing herself into his presence. Of course he was safe. Of course nothing could hurt him. The poor Honourable Charles, the erstwhile draper's assistant, with his common, thick-set figure, his hoarse voice, his unrefined accent—it was an offence even to think of him in the same breath with this elegant gentleman. How could this one on his high eminence of aloofness and security be endangered by ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... Court; he was one of the very few who had the opportunity and will to advance the Evangelical clergy; and among others, he had the honour of promoting John Newton to the rectory of S. Mary Woolnoth.[832] He himself was a standing witness that 'Methodism' was not a religion merely for the coarse and unrefined, for he was himself so polished a gentleman that Richardson is reputed to have said that 'he would have realised his own idea of Sir Charles Grandison, if he had not been a Methodist.' It was Lord Dartmouth of whom Cowper ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... scared her governess nearly to death: "My lamb! You'll get overheated, and take cold. When I was a young lady, it was thought unrefined to speak so—emphatically. And your dear uncle didn't mean to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... class pride themselves on their light diet and moderation of appetite, and their neighbors make considerable fun of them for their failure to serve satisfying meals. Certain it is that the typical Athenian would regard a twentieth century "table d'hote" course dinner as heavy and unrefined, if ever it dragged its slow ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... his imprisonment, this unfortunate Harrington, having previously sent to the bishop many letters and petitions for liberty without effect, had the courage to address to him a "Sonnet," which his son has cited as "no ill verse for those unrefined times;" a modest commendation of lines so spirited, which the taste of the more modern reader, however fastidious, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... smock, which the king changed with the Duchess of Buckingham for one of His Majesty's Mantua pieces." It may well have suggested to Rubens, who must have seen it among the King's possessions on the occasion of his visit to London, his superb, yet singularly unrefined, Helene Fourment in a Fur Mantle, now also ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of comprehension of, the Kanaka's reason for exiling himself: he goes away to acquire civilization. Yes, he was naked and not ashamed, now he is clothed and knows how to be ashamed; he was unenlightened; now he has a Waterbury watch; he was unrefined, now he has jewelry, and something to make him smell good; he was a nobody, a provincial, now he has been to far ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... afterward how the rough seamen gazed at us for a while in astonishment, and then, with a delicacy of feeling which even such unrefined natures can sometimes exhibit, moved quietly off and left us unobserved; but I forgot for a while that there was any one else on the ship besides my new-found brother and myself. It was full five minutes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... thinking, perhaps, and their ways of living, are not those which I have been used to," she said; "but how does that affect me? I am myself whatever happens; even if poor dear grandmamma's habits are not refined, which I suppose is what you mean, mamma, that does not make me unrefined. A lady must always be a lady wherever she is—Una," she continued, using strangely enough the same argument which has occurred to her historian, "is not less a princess when she is living among the satyrs. Of course, I am not like Una—and neither are they like the wild ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... The unrefined get everywhere, even into the drawing rooms of royalty, consequently we must expect to meet them in Bohemia. But the true Bohemian has a way of forgetting to meet obnoxious personages and, as a rule, is ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... be raised to any purpose by thorough self-culture, by assimilation, digestion, meditation. The busy bee is a favorite simile with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that the least important part of his example is buzzing around. If the hive simply got together and buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from some cyclopaedia, let us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Deity was blended with all that was ennobling and beautiful. Moved by these glowing fancies, her susceptible spirit, in these tender years, turned away from atheism, from infidelity, from irreligion, as from that which was unrefined, revolting, vulgar. The consciousness of the presence of God, the adoration of his being, became a passion of her soul. This state of mind was poetry, not religion. It involved no sense of the spirituality of the Divine Law, no consciousness ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... writer upon visiting cards says: "To the unrefined or underbred, the visiting card is but a trifling and insignificant bit of paper; but to the cultured disciple of social law, it conveys a subtle and unmistakable intelligence. Its texture, style of engraving, and even the hour of leaving it combine to place ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... in taking her down a peg,' said Miss Cobb, who was short, plump, and ruddy, a picture of rude health and unrefined good looks—a girl who bore 'beer' written in unmistakable characters across her forehead, Miss Rylance had observed to her own particular circle. 'I will say that for the old lady,' added Miss Cobb, 'she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... presence—the man who thinks of the homage due to him, and not of the homage owing by him, is essentially rude. Mammon is slowly stifling and desiccating Rank; both are miserable deities, but the one is yet meaner than the other. Unrefined families with money are received with open arms and honours paid, in circles where a better breeding than theirs has hitherto prevailed: this, working along with the natural law of corruption where is no aspiration, has gradually caused the deterioration ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... He never confessed it, but to his aunt, who understood him, it was plain that he found it a different thing to talk philanthropic socialism, or even to work among the poor, and to live in the society of the unrefined equals. ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... subacid fruits. Prunes, prunus domestica. Cassia sistula. Tamarinds, crystals of tartar, unrefined sugar. Manna. Honey. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... stress cannot be laid on the importance of hearing good music. When it falls on listening ears it removes all desire for anything coarse or unrefined. Constant companionship with it prepares the ear to hear, the inner being to receive, and cannot fail to bring forth fruit. The creations of noble minds form practical working-forces in shaping character, purifying ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... jagged, craggy, rugged, cragged, scraggy; rude, inurbane, burly, unrefined, discourteous, uncivil, blunt, bluff, brusque, austere, abrupt, gruff, boorish, uncourtly; boisterous, tumultuous, tempestuous, stormy; harsh, hard, severe, inclement, drastic, violent; harsh, grating, raucous, discordant, inharmonious; unkempt, disheveled, shaggy; incomplete, superficial, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... there, Heaven, beneath thy dread expanse, One hopeless, dark idolator of chance, Content to feed, with pleasures unrefined The lukewarm passions of a lowly ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... after the subjection of the native language by conquest, and systematically applied in the versification of the great old poet, shows a feeling of language, and an authentic stamp of art, that claim the most genial and sympathizing respect of a refined posterity, to their not wholly unrefined, more heroic ancestors. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... every rhyme she could give me, good, bad, or indifferent, for I wanted to secure all kinds. And I did. Before I was through I had rhymes which ranged from the two extremes of the keenest parental affection to those of unrefined filthiness. The latter class however came not from the nurses but from the ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... could be born we might hope for a musical adaptation of corroborees. Wagner was essentially the exponent of folk-lore music, wherein must be expressed the fundamentals of human passion unrefined. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... and edited by these men, although free from the repulsive vulgarity of the yellow press, were susceptible to influence by the privileged interests, and were almost or quite as hostile to manliness as they were to unrefined vice—and were much more hostile to it than to the typical shortcomings of wealth and refinement. They favored Civil Service Reform; they favored copyright laws, and the removal of the tariff on works of art; they favored all the proper (and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt |
