SHIFTINESS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Shiftiness

"Shiftiness" Quotes from Famous Books

... that he had made his money through a series of commercial speculations distinguished both by shiftiness and daring, and that the man himself had been until the War a wholly negligible "poor white" person,—an overseer, indeed, for "Wild Will" Musgrave, Colonel Musgrave's father, who was of course the same Lieutenant-Colonel William ...

— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... am afraid. I look at the three without—well, with as little prejudice as weak woman may. Mallinson, you know him—always on the artist's see-saw between exaltation and despair. Doesn't that make for shiftiness generally? Clarice I don't understand; but I incline to your idea of her as at the mercy of every momentary emotion, and the more for what has happened this week. Since her engagement she seems to have ...

— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason

... in plain words, without a lie, and without shiftiness. Do you know that Lord Dymchurch has proposed ...

— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... under the misleading notion of adherence to Nature. If the words Nature and Natural could be entirely banished from language about Art there would be some chance of coming to a rational philosophy of the subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias ...

— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness, the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the chapter on "Healing the ...

— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... slay the son of Telamon, thrusting him through with his own sword. Verily if one be of stout heart but without gift of speech, such an one is a prey unto forgetfulness in a bitter strife, and to the shiftiness of lies is proffered the prize of the greatest. For in the secret giving of their votes the Danaoi courted Odysseus, and thus did Aias, robbed of the golden arms, wrestle in the ...

— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar