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More "Scoffer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that I should have my choice between the Church and the Bar. The idea, however, proved—impracticable—which is rather a pity. It has seemed to me that a man who can work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... sound that told her of the hopelessness of love, Aurora dropped the hollow, mocking scoffer, clutched spasmodically at her heart, and, with an agonizing shriek, fell lifeless to ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... provided only you make her dumb, blind, deaf, legless, paralytic, crippled of all her limbs. And I am quite ready to allow that in this state she will escape the delusions that make mock of mankind, and will have no temptations to play the runagate. You are a scoffer, and you have made much mock at ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... "Scoffer!" cried Gordon, and M'Iver said no more, but led us through the dark to the house whose light so cheerfully smiled ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the stars, John Markham? They're a merry congregation. They're laughing at you—as I am. A sermon by moonlight with only the stars and a scoffer to listen!" ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... praise, and finds much poetic merit in Mr. Barlow's "Vision"; but he closes the chapter sadly, with a touch of Johnson's vigor:—"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr. Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the Connecticut men! Morris might understand banking, but in taste he was absurdly deficient. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... climbed the Bellus Mons, to found his castle, to give it his name, and to take his name from it. It is a pleasant process when these small facts come out on the spot with a life that they can never get out of books. A scoffer might ask whether it were worth while to go to Beaumont-le-Roger simply to get a clearer notion of the meaning of the words "Humfredus de Vetulis." But it is clearly worth while to go to Beaumont-le-Roger, both ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... consider this offer: A desperate fellow Is Klimka the peasant, A drunkard, a rover, 380 And not very honest, No lover of work, And acquainted with gipsies; A vagabond, knowing A lot about horses. A scoffer at those Who work hard, he will tell you: 'At work you will never Get rich, my fine fellow; You'll never get rich,— 390 But you're sure to get crippled!' But he, all the same, Is well up in his letters; Has been to St. Petersburg. ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... quarrelsome Scotchman in the front rank, who objected to each statement that fell from his lips, thus interfering seriously with the effect of his peroration. If the Irishman had been more convincing, I suppose the crowd would have silenced the scoffer, for these little matters of discipline are always attended to by the audience; but the Scotchman's points were too well taken; he was so trenchant, in fact, at times, that a voice would cry, 'Coom up, Sandy, an' 'ave it all your own w'y, boy!' The discussion ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... awhile, it often begins with the chue, chue of the House-Sparrow, so exactly imitated in every respect that were it not for what follows, no one would suppose it to be any other bird. It is called a Mocking-Bird here, and it well deserves the name, for it is a real scoffer at the sorrows of other birds, which it laughs to scorn and turns into ridicule by parodying them so exactly. I never heard it attempt to imitate any of the Larks or Thrushes, although I have listened ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... that of other literatures, is singularly unexceptionable; but who is there that holds a place among its writers so historical and important, who is so copious, so versatile, so brilliant, as that Voltaire who is an open scoffer at every thing sacred, venerable, or high-minded? Nor can Rousseau, though he has not the pretensions of Voltaire, be excluded from the classical writers of France. Again, the gifted Pascal, in the work on which his literary ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... teacher and a great philosopher, though none ever placed him among the heroic in action or in character. His cynical contemporary, Voltaire, still has some veil of vague obscurity which hides his brilliance from the world apt to reckon him a mere scoffer and destroyer of beliefs. He has more profound faith perhaps than many who took up the sword to defend religion, but he covered his spirit of tolerance with many cloaks of mockery, ashamed to be a hero in conventional trappings, eager to win recognition for his ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... for evidential purposes even more valuable, manifestations of spirit photography. The fact that the photograph does not correspond in many cases with any which existed in life, must surely silence the scoffer, though there is a class of bigoted sceptic who would still be sneering if an Archangel alighted in Trafalgar Square. Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton, of Crewe, have brought this phase of mediumship to great ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a blasphemous scoffer, even with that which he declares holy. But punishment will overtake him. Already the voice of my exalted nephew, the Emperor of Germany, is to be heard throughout the entire land, commanding the King of Prussia to return at once to his own kingdom, and to make apologies ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... coat and testified and fought the devil only; that Mitchell dropped his mask of cynicism; that Donald Macdonald ate no longer of the tree of knowledge and ceased to worry himself with psychological problems, and was happy; and that Tom Hall was no longer a scoffer. That no one sneaked round through the scrub after dusk to certain necessary establishments in weather-board cottages on the outskirts of the town; and that the broad-minded and obliging ladies thereof became ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... formalism, austerity; sanctimony, sanctimoniousness &c adj.; pharisaism, precisianism^; sabbatism^, sabbatarianism^; odium theologicum [Lat.], sacerdotalism^; bigotry &c (obstinacy) 606, (prejudice) 481; blue laws. hardening, backsliding, declension, perversion, reprobation. sinner &c 949; scoffer, blasphemer; sacrilegist^; sabbath breaker; worldling; hypocrite &c (dissembler) 548; Tartufe^, Mawworm^. bigot; saint [Iron.]; Pharisee; sabbatarian^, formalist, methodist, puritan, pietist^, precisian^, religionist, devotee; ranter, fanatic, juramentado^. the wicked, the evil, the unjust, the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... be classed, as you class it, with the appetites of brutes; much less to be threatened, as you threaten it, with infinite and eternal misery by I know not what necessary laws of Zeus, and to be put off at last with some myth or other about Prometheus. Surely your mother bare you a scoffer and pitiless, Socrates, and not, as you boast, a man-midwife fit for ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... him? For two months I have endured the pains of the lost through him. A wild, untameable savage, subject to no laws, a heathen, a butcher, a scoffer at things holy, an idler, a highwayman, a traitor, a rebel, an Irish Papist wolf-hound! Do I know my own pupil? And—oh my God!—is it he who has the coat? Oh, we are doubly lost! Knaves, fools, ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... being in such a fearful state of mind about it; but as it's only mine, you know, I'm sure it really doesn't matter." And then they'd only go off worse than ever,—mother doing hysterics, and so forth—and say I was a wicked, bad, abominable scoffer, and that it made them horribly frightened even to listen to me. As if I wasn't more likely to know the real value of my own soul than anybody ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... this you add what Solomon says of Scoffers, that they are an abomination to mankind, let him that thinks fit scoff on, and be a Scoffer still; but I account them enemies to me and all ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... infidel and blasphemer. The same beam glitters on the blessed Altar of the faithful, and on the cell of the impenitent murderer. Look at the sunshine and the shower in the country. The fields of the earnest, prayerful man, and those of the unbelieving, prayerless scoffer lie golden under the same sunlight, are watered by the same showers. And why is this so? Surely it is a type of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Surely it teaches us the wondrous height, ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... would not hear of his being put to such a death. On the morrow, as a scoffer and denier of the high gods, he was to be offered up as a sacrifice to them upon the blood stone in the sacred grove. He was to be the first human sacrifice ever offered ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Bible, about Abraham and the stranger, ends against the intolerant spirit of religious persecutions—Thus much for the book Jonah. [The story of Abraham and the Fire-worshipper, ascribed to Franklin, is from Saadi. (See my "Sacred Anthology," p. 61.) Paine has often been called a "mere scoffer," but he seems to have been among the first to treat with dignity the book of Jonah, so especially liable to the ridicule of superficial readers, and discern in it the highest conception of Deity known ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... concluding chapter, that in many of his most startling doctrines he was but half in earnest. Hume's temperament, too cool for fanaticism, had yet in it enough of a certain tepid geniality to save him from becoming a scoffer. The character which he claims for himself, and somewhat ostentatiously parades, is that of a sceptic or general doubter—a character in which, when rightly understood, there is nothing to be ashamed of. To take nothing on trust, to believe nothing without proof, to show no greater respect ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle's earlier writings,—the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the immortal hopes which sustain the soul. He believed in the God of Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher than the earth. He had renounced historical Christianity, but he adhered ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... saved, it is necessary that you should arise, and turn to the right hand, and join the company there who have gladly welcomed the Son of God as their Saviour; but, correspondingly, in order to be lost, it is not necessary that you should arise from your state of indifference, and join the scoffer's ranks. To be saved you must flee to the refuge; but to be lost, it is enough that you remain ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I take this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights,' as the scoffer might imagine, but from that most respectable authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays from two to three million eggs, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... honesty or the chilling environment of disapproval of Guercino's handiwork, was too much for him. He did his best to admire, but the task was beyond his powers, and he raised no protest when some scoffer affirmed that, though Browning might be a great poet, he was a mighty poor judge of painting, when he gave in his beautiful poem immortality to this tawdry theatrical canvas. 'I think,' said Sir ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that Guarinos, lance in rest, against the scoffer rode, Pierced at one thrust his envious breast, and down his turban trode. Now ride, now ride, Guarinos—nor lance nor rowel spare— Slay, slay, and gallop for thy life.—The land of ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities —but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fortunate of the adventurers who swarmed at the court of St. James. By dint of these and kindred qualities he had become an intimate companion of the Prince of Wales. The man had a wide observation of life; indeed, he was an interested and whimsical observer rather than an actor, and a scoffer always. A libertine from the head to the heel of him, yet gossip marked him as the future husband of the beautiful young heiress Antoinette Westerleigh. For the rest, he carried an itching sword and the smoothest tongue that ever graced a villain. I had ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... "Listen, scoffer; if you will behave with a decorum consistent with the gravity of the subject, I will explain how I became the possessor of this wonderful powder. Perhaps in your life of seclusion and deep toil you may not have noticed this advertisement ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... that Don Federico, the young advocate, well known in the coffee-houses as a virulent Exaltado, a determined scoffer, a propagator of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the same tray with the pander and the procuress; where the professional religionist, the learned Koranist, and the strictest moralist consort with the wicked magician, the scoffer, and the debauchee-poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor, and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." The whole is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the captain of the men-at-arms, smiled in derision. A great belief in dreams and omens was abroad in the land: and nowhere had it a more devoted adherent than in Humphrey, the Saxon serving-man, and nowhere a greater scoffer than ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... progress it would make. It comes, too, most triumphant. No faith before it ever took so victorious a stand in its infancy. It has swept like a hurricane of fire through the land, compelling faith from the baffled scoffer ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... and you can't help its bending, if you break your back trying to hold it." So he gave me the twig, and awaited, with a smile which was meant to express withering sarcasm, the discomfiture of the supposed scoffer. But when I proceeded to walk four or five times across the mysterious place, the rod pointing steadfastly toward the zenith all the while, our friend became grave and began to philosophize. "Well," said he, "you see, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... history, than which nothing in our language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be joking: ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... 4. And should the scoffer, in his pride, Laugh that fond faith to scorn, And bid him cast the pledge aside, That he from youth had borne, She bade him pause, and ask his breast If SHE or HE had ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... great, Bearing unmoved the burden of the State,— Alike each duty challenged at man's hand. Life is built up of smallest atomics, Pile upon pile the ramparts still increase, And as those, Roman walls, o'er which in scorn The scoffer leapt, soon held the world at bay, So shall thy deeds of duty, lowly born, Be thy strong tower and glory ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... in holding the language of courtesy and friendship. The same spirit is daily becoming more and more prevalent in good society. There is a growing curiosity concerning my country; a craving desire for correct information, that cannot fail to lead to a favourable understanding. The scoffer, I trust, has had his day; the time of the slanderer is gone by; the ribald jokes, the stale commonplaces, which have so long passed current when America was the theme, are now banished to the ignorant and the vulgar, or only perpetuated by the hireling scribblers and traditional jesters ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... my humiliations!" said Meadows, putting an arm round the scoffer. "I tell you, she proposes to write my next set of lectures for me. She gave me an outline ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... STRANGER.—We urge you, gentle maiden, to beware of the silken enticements of the stranger, until your love is confirmed by protracted acquaintance. Shun the idler, though his coffers overflow with pelf. Avoid the irreverent—the scoffer of hallowed things; and him who "looks upon the wine while it is red;" him too, "who hath a high look and a proud heart," and who "privily slandereth his neighbor." Do not heed the specious prattle about "first love," and so place, irrevocably, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... in his present softened state of feeling, sensitive to everything, this inevitable act of hypocrisy was not merely painful to Levin, it seemed to him utterly impossible. Now, in the heyday of his highest glory, his fullest flower, he would have to be a liar or a scoffer. He felt incapable of being either. But though he repeatedly plied Stepan Arkadyevitch with questions as to the possibility of obtaining a certificate without actually communicating, Stepan Arkadyevitch maintained that it was ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... I've got it yit! That is, I've got the hole whar I s'posed the mine was. Most o' my money went into it an' stayed thar. Then I got a chance to tend light and ketch lobsters, an' hev stuck to it ever since. I take some comfort livin' and try an' pass it along. The widder Leach calls me a scoffer, but she allus comes to me when she's needin', an' don't allus have to cum, either. My life's been like most everybody else's—a streak o' lean an' a streak o' fat, with lean predominatin'. 'Twas a streak o' fat when I found a good woman an' she said ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... roots; all the winds of heaven cannot move it from its place.—There are three crowns: the crown of the Law, the crown of the priesthood, the crown of kingship. But greater than all is the crown of a good name.—Four there are that cannot enter Paradise: the scoffer, the liar, the hypocrite, and the backbiter.—Beat the gods, and the priests will tremble.—Contrition is better than many flagellations.—When the pitcher falls upon the stone, woe unto the pitcher; when the stone falls upon the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... interest his grandfather he could not have hit the mark nearer the center. Cap'n Lote, of course, pretended a certain measure of indifference, but that was for Olive and Rachel's benefit. It would never do for the scoffer to become a convert openly and at once. The feminine members of the household clamored each evening to have the author read aloud his ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... sighting the cold Northern Star and losing the Southern Cross. I lay back and gloated over the starry picture overhead through a crisscross picture-mount of ragged grass. I left the confutation of the scoffer to Miss Moore. There was an edge on many of her remarks that night, and I could trust her to deal with him. But what she said I have forgotten. Only I remember that he gave her best at last. Then, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Featherstone, "you're a volatile youth. You mustn't mind him, doctor. He's a professional cynic, sceptic, and scoffer. Oxenden and I, however, are open to conviction, and want to know more about those birds and beasts. Can you make anything out of ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Ferney with my parents; and I remember we all stopped before a chapel, and I read upon its front, I knew Latin enough to understand it, I am pleased to say,—Deo erexit Voltaire. I never forgot it; and knowing what a sad scoffer he was at most sacred things, I could not but be impressed with the fact that even he was not satisfied with himself, until he had shown his devotion in a public ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of that nonsense." Lord Beaconsfield did not believe in the slap-dash words which he put into the mouth of Mr. Phoebus, nor did he believe that the greatness of the English aristocracy arises from the facts that "they don't read books, and they live in the open air." The great scoffer once read for twelve hours every day during an entire year, and his general knowledge of useful literature was quite remarkable. But, while rejecting epigrammatic fireworks, I am bound to say that the habit of reading has become harmful in many cases; it ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... tracks in forest and prairie; aye, and there are strange creatures that haunt the bush, some tell, in places where no human foot is wont to tread. So that nothing of this sort comes upon me with an air of newness, at least! I mayn't quite trust it, as you do, but I am no scoffer. Look, now, Mr. St. Aubyn, I have a proposal to make. You are alone, and purpose undertaking a bitter and, it may be, a perilous journey in mountain ground at this season. What say you to taking me along with you? May be, I shall ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... young man utter a similar phrase and in such an accent. The image returned to him, by way of contrast, of Dorsenne, alert and foppish, the dandy of literature, so gayly a scoffer and a sophist, to whom antique and venerable Rome was only a city of pleasure, a cosmopolis more paradoxical than Florence, Nice, Biarritz, St. Moritz, than such and such other cities of international winter ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people—he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[2].... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the truth ought ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... building up the Junker dream. A court official—the Oberhofprediger—was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... put spurs to his horse and, kissing his hand to her, dashed away. Barbara, wounded and disappointed, gazed after the pitiless scoffer. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could probably outpoint the Professor if it came to an array of facts concerning the probable uses of the gigantic table, and when I glanced at the Kanaka, as he stopped to listen to the scientist's discourse, I felt inclined to agree with the scoffer. Soma had an intelligence that lifted him above his class, and I was convinced that many of the Professor's surmises caused ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... sent a sergeant to drive them away. The Assembly, having resisted the sergeant, he sent an officer, the temporary commander of the sixth battalion of the Chasseurs de Vincennes. This officer, young, fair-haired, a scoffer, half laughing, half threatening, pointed with his finger to the stairs filled with bayonets, and defied the Assembly. "Who is this young spark?" asked a member of the Right. A National Guard who was there ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Parmiter the scoffer, were listening open mouthed, when a hoarse voice broke the spell, cutting short Bulger's ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... mockingly. "Who will conquer with the spirit! Well, I won't play the scoffer. You are an orator, and that's something. Listen, son of man; I like you. I, too, desire the new kingdom; let ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... incapable of such a villainy. The billiard-room, that darksome cavern, on a heaven-sent day like this? Shucks,' says I. Yet"—his attitude became exhortative—"see how mighty is truth, see how she prevails, see how the scoffer is confounded. To the billiard-room I transport myself, sceptically, on the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... writers of his age, was the incarnation of its critical and skeptical spirit, the highest example of its wit as of its levity, and of the artificial character of its literary ideals. He was play-writer, poet, historian, critic, and brilliant converser, all in one. In religion, a scoffer not only at superstition, but at all beliefs and rites which imply revelation, he still clung to the belief in a personal God. His creed was deism, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was, like Voltaire, a deist in his creed; but in religion, as in all his mental action, there ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "It's all that. But I don't know if you're calling it justice. I'm not myself. It isn't my tally. Blasphemy? I lave it with you. A scoffer, am I? So be it. The Lord's licked me, and I've had enough. But I'm not going down on my knees for it, anyway. The Almighty ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... in some most important points, to promote their own happiness; and, if his school had emulated him as successfully in this respect as in the trick of passing off truisms for discoveries, the name of Benthamite would have been no word for the scoffer. But few of those who consider themselves as in a more especial manner his followers have anything in common with him but his faults. The whole science of Jurisprudence is his. He has done much for political economy; but we are ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the Middle Ages, and the more modern Goethe, saw in metaphysical love the triumph over all things earthly. And far above either of these intellectual heroes looms the awe-inspiring figure of Michelangelo, the scoffer, to whom love came late in life; in his ecstatic adoration of Vittoria Colonna, the enthusiasm of Plato and the passion of Dante are blended in a ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... blasphemies, amid oaths from the vile, and revilings from the scoffer, had the boy first learned that name, and never before had it possessed aught of import for him. But now he knew it was the name of the Great Father that loved him, and again he asked very earnestly, "Where is the way to God in heaven? I ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... little children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... gravely assumed that he would reform that incorrigible tippler into a "teetotal Falstaff," and protested against the enthusiast mixing water so copiously with the milk of his human kindness. So Cruikshank set off in great wrath towards Fleet Street to seek out the scoffer, and, meeting Blanchard Jerrold, sputtered out his purpose and declared that he was on the trail of that scoundrel Punch to "knock his old wooden head about." When he died, Punch announced that "England is the poorer by what she can ill spare—a man of genius. Good, kind, genial, honest, and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... over. He leaned back and went on again, having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... said Manteuffel, laughing, "beware that the color of your hair is not changed by this lovely scoffer—that it does not become a venerable gray. She is sufficiently accomplished in the art of enchantment to do that; I assure you that Madame von Brandt plays a most important role in the history of my ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... interested, and he wants me to ask him questions, but if I ask him any questions that he can't answer, he gets mad. When I asked him about Daniel in the den of lions, and if he didn't think Dan was traveling with a show, and had the lions chloroformed, he said I was a scoffer, and would go to Gehenna. Now I don't want to go to Gehenna just for wanting to get posted in the show business of old times, do you? When Pa said Dan was saved from the jaws of the lions because he prayed three times every ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... him, even after he had removed to Brighton that he might live looking out upon the sea, which appealed to and soothed him. I never met a man who seemed to weigh so carefully every action, every word—even the pettiest—and so completely to find guidance through his own conscience. He was no scoffer in religious matters. In the domain of theology, however, he had little regard for decorum. It was to him a very faulty system hindering true growth, and the idea of rewards and punishments struck him as an appeal to very ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... all seemed locked in a deadly sleep, While treason walked in her halls of state, And good men grieve, but hopeless weep, And the song of the scoffer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... self to humanity—this is the moving thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter will not succeed. God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his own ends. Faust will be led astray—"man errs while he strives"; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Christ should be least understood. It is an exception to all the world has ever seen. 'The world knew Him not.' There is, to be sure, a simple grandeur about the life of Jesus which awes almost every mind. The most hardened scoffer, after he has jested and jeered at everything in the temple of Christianity, stands for a moment uncovered and breathless when he comes to the object of its adoration and feels how awful goodness is, and Virtue in her shape how lovely. Yet, after all, the character of the Christ ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... it. The man who laughs, his notion of the right and the reasonable, his attitude towards the world and life, become manifest through the things which he laughs at. Only a man of a certain kind, with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they portray that we value the work of a Swift, a ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... your desire, and for what is its purpose? An African slave, whom I met in the public walks, and who calls himself Diogenes, tells me that you desired to speak with me; he hath somewhat the humour of the old scoffer, and so he may have lied. If so, I will even forgive him the beating which I owe his assurance, and make my excuse at the same time for having broken in upon your retirement, which I am totally ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... I'm a scoffer, my boy," said Sir Tom. "MTutor's a very decent fellow. Let us go and look him up. He would be better, to my thinking, if he were not quite so fine, you know. But that's a trifle, and I'm an old fogey. You are not going back to Park ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... in my heart to retract, but it is too late; and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some worthy and ingenious persons, that if Lovelace had been drawn an infidel or scoffer, his character, according to the taste of the present worse than sceptical age, would have been more natural. It is, however, too well known, that there are very many persons, of his cast, whose actions discredit their belief. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... rippling like sunshine on the sea of faces spreading away from the shore of the pulpit steps. When he spoke of hell and its terrors, which was frequently and with thrilling descriptive, even so hardened a scoffer as Japheth Pettigrass was wont to declare that you could hear the crackling of the flames and the cries ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... action of the laws by the closed doors of domestic life; but as to which the finger of God, often called chance, supplies the place of human justice, and in which the moral is none the less striking and instructive because it is pointed by a scoffer. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... so long with him, and his art so short, that he shall dawdle by the way and wander from his path, reducing his giant intellect—garrulous upon matters to him unknown, that the scoffer may rejoice and the Philistine be appeased while he takes up the parable of the mob and proclaims himself their spokesman and fellow-sufferer? O Brother! where is thy sting! O Poet! ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... she echoed, firing up at once. "I suppose if a fellow-mortal were on his way to the scaffold, you men would still ask for explanations. Listen to me. You're the only man here Maurice was at all friendly with—I shouldn't turn to you, you scoffer, you may be sure of it, if I knew of anyone else. He liked you; and at one time, what you said had a good deal of influence with him. It might still have. Go to him, Heinz, and talk straight to him. Make him think of his future, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Walpurgis Night, on the Pharsalian Plains, the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes, and boldly questions them, and reads their riddles. The red light of innumerable watch-fires glares all round about, and shines upon the terrible face of the arch-scoffer; while on either side, severe, majestic, solemnly serene, we behold the gigantic forms of the children of Chimera, half buried in the earth, their mild eyes gazing fixedly, as if they heard through ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Dickens was an "Unbeliever," or a "Unitarian," or an "Episcopalian," or whether "he ever went to church in his life," or "used improper language," or "drank enough to hurt him." He was human, very human, but he was no scoffer or doubter. His religion was of the heart, and his faith beyond questioning. He taught the world, said Dean Stanley over his new-made grave in Westminster Abbey, great lessons of "the eternal value of generosity, of purity, of kindness, and of unselfishness," and by his fruits he ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Were all those people on Earth who claimed to feel the presence of dead loved ones near them? Were those people just straining their fancy—just comforting themselves with what they wished to believe? Or was the scoffer himself the fool? And if that could be so, on Earth, why could not this strange realm be of such a quality that an awareness of those who have passed from life would be the normal thing? Who shall say ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... speaking, to draw in my horns a little. I am beginning to go to church again, for instance. You may have taken it for granted that I have been regular in my attendance at the sanctuary. Certainly I have never been a scoffer; but, on the other hand, I must confess that somehow it has come to pass since Josephine and I plighted our troth that our pew has stood empty on the Lord's day oftener than the orthodox consider fitting. And the worst of it is I used to attend service ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... found to be efficacious in his peculiar business. On general subjects he would rub his hands, and bow his head, and agree most humbly with every word that was uttered. In the same day he would be a Radical and a Conservative, devoted to the Church and a scoffer at parsons, animated on behalf of staghounds and a loud censurer of aught in the way of hunting other than the orthodox fox. On all trivial outside subjects he considered it to be his duty as a tradesman simply to ingratiate himself; but in a matter of breeches he gave way to no man, ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... of the woods and stir and push the clouds before her with a broom. For a hundred yards around Witch Rock the ground is still accursed, and any attempt to break it up is unavailing. Nearly a century ago a scoffer named Reynolds declared that he would run his plough through the enchanted boundary, and the neighbors watched the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... breathed internally, "hover around me, shield me from impending dangers, delight me with your presence, and enchant me with your eye; but claim me in the guise of a gentleman and a hero, that no envious tongue may probe the secrets of our love, nor any profane scoffer ridicule those sensitive pleasures that he is too unsentimental to enjoy." With these, and similar thoughts, did Julia occupy herself, until Charles pointed out to her the majestic entrance to the Highlands. Our heroine, ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... Lisa was always resentful of long words. "Be silent, you black scoffer, and do not allude to such disgraceful things in the presence of respectable people! For I am a decent Christian woman, I would have you understand. But everybody knows your reputation! and a very fit companion ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... heathen scoffer Answered: "I disdain thine offer; Neither fear I God nor Devil; Thee and thy Gospel ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... for an orgy of Philistine rancour such as even London had never known before. The puritan middle class, which had always regarded Wilde with dislike as an artist and intellectual scoffer, a mere parasite of the aristocracy, now gave free scope to their disgust and contempt, and everyone tried to outdo his neighbour in expressions of loathing and abhorrence. This middle class condemnation swept the lower class away ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... and the reverend gentleman prayed fervently that "the Liberals might hang a' thegither." He was interrupted by a loud and irreverent "Amen" from the back of the hall. "Not, O Lord," went on the clergyman, "in the sense which that profane scoffer would have ye to understand, but that they may hang thegither in accord and concord." "I dinna care so much what kind of a cord it is," struck in the voice, "sae lang as it is a ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... sinner and a scoffer, and Bill is an earnest, thorough, respectable old freethinker, and consequently they often get a War Cry or a tract sent inside their exchanges—somebody puts it in for ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... But Klok-No-Ton! They shuddered with dire foreboding at thought of him, and each one felt himself the centre of accusing eyes, and looked accusingly upon his fellows—each one and all, save Sime, and Sime was a scoffer whose evil end was destined with a certitude his ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... issue, involving the fundamental principles of Christianity. A brave man, who is not a scoffer, attacks the doctrine of non-resistance, and lays down his life for the faith that is in him. A martyr, then. Martyrdom in itself cannot establish a principle; but we respect martyrdom. Turn the argument around: the martyrdom of Christ did not ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... through. He was red-blooded, but at the same time his heart was clean. Once more he found himself contrasting the honest-eyed, pure-hearted Ruth with this sensual scoffer. There was no denying the physical appeal of the lithe, sinuous Russian; there was no gainsaying the call of the blood. On the other hand, the American girl stood for everything his own mother exemplified in ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Till bleeds the patriot's honest heart, And flames the martyr's pile. Yet not in vain the patriot bleeds; Yet not in vain the martyr dies; From ashes mute, and voiceless blood, What stirring memories rise! The scoffer owns the bigot's creed, Though keen the secret gibe may be; The sceptic seeks the tyrant's dome. And bends the ready knee. But oh! in dark oppression's day. When flares the torch, when flames the sword. Who are the brave in freedom's cause? The ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... suffering, he finds them deserving his support. You are acquainted with your own history. The Almighty, as you know, undoubtedly distinguished the posterity of Abraham, but he was not partial to them alike. Did he not reject Ishmael the scoffer, though he was the eldest son of Abraham, and countenance Isaac, who was the younger? Did he not pass over Esau the eldest son of Isaac, who had sold his birth-right, and prefer Jacob? Did he not set aside Reuben, Simeon, and ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... strange interview of which contemporary historians have left us a curious narrative, exhibited much more of the spirit of the scoffer than of the convert, and evidently had no faith in Abbott Joachim's theories and his mission, it was otherwise with the world at large. At the close of the twelfth century a very general belief, the result of a true instinct, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind! His Candide is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called "the dull product of a scoffer's pen"; it is indeed the "product of a scoffer's pen"; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think it dull. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... accursed, you who thus great Pele do defy, Here, upon her sacred mountain, of a surety you shall die! Pele, mighty Pele, Vengeance! Strike her with thy dreadful doom! So let every scoffer perish!—Pele! Pele! Pele! come!" And Kapiolani answered—"Pele! Pele! ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... brutes; much less to be threatened, as you threaten it, with infinite and eternal misery by I know not what necessary laws of Zeus, and to be put off at last with some myth or other about Prometheus. Surely your mother bare you a scoffer and pitiless, Socrates, and not, as you boast, a ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... many to the stupor which often precedes death. But there were in the palace a few persons who knew better. Charles had never been a sincere member of the Established Church. His mind had long oscillated between Hobbism and Popery. When his health was good and his spirits high he was a scoffer. In his few serious moments he was a Roman Catholic. The Duke of York was aware of this, but was entirely occupied with the care of his own interests. He had ordered the outports to be closed. He had posted detachments of the Guards in different parts of the city. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... they wield, The Bacchant's pointed spear in laughing flowers concealed. And oh, 'twere victory to this heart, as sweet As any thou canst boast—even when the feet Of thy proud war-steed wade thro' Christian blood, To wrap this scoffer in Faith's blinding hood, And bring him tamed and prostrate to implore The vilest gods even Egypt's saints adore. What!—do these sages think, to them alone The key of this world's happiness is known? That none but they ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... further—that such a woman should meet no one who would be capable of appreciating her? No, Marya Alexandrovna, listen to me, if you really believe that I am your friend, and that my advice is of use. But confess, it was agreeable to see the old scoffer at your feet.... If I had been in your place, I'd have kept him singing Beethoven's Adelaida and gazing at the moon ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... more about it, Sam," said he, "but mind my words, and apply your experience to it afterwards in life, and see if I ain't right. Crime has but two travelling companions. It commences its journey with the scoffer, and ends it with the blasphemer: not that talking irreverently ain't very improper in itself, but it destroys the sense of right and wrong, and prepares the way ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... not be doubted, since the spirits named Gresil des Trones, Aman des Puissance, and Asmodeus, had promised to carry off the calotte of Monsieur de Laubardemont. They were preparing for this, when the physician Duncan, a learned and upright man, but somewhat of a scoffer, took it into his head to pull a cord he discovered fastened to a column like a bell-rope, and which hung down just close to the referendary's head; whereupon they called him a Huguenot, and I am satisfied that if Marechal de Breze were not his protector, it would have ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... out of its own right line by the prism through which it flowed. Much was said of the love and tender mercy of God, but the fact that he is also a just God, and will in nowise clear the guilty, was set aside as a hard doctrine. The gay scoffer, the one who despises Christ's tender offers of love and pardon, provided he is amiable and pleasant among his friends and associates, must not be given over to a just retribution. God is too loving ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... undiluted by the laity; to bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... doctrines which they believe to be its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss. He is not with us, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... excellent order to take with the friars, seeing that they were the veriest vagabonds that be; a friar thereupon took the jest in very ill part, and could not refrain himself from calling the fellow ribald, villain, and the son of perdition; whereat the jester became a scoffer indeed, for he could play a part in that play, no man better, making the friar more foolishly wrath ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... their God Founded for men of Faith. Nor churl am I To frown on kind intent, nor child to trust This sceptre of Seven Realms to magic snare That puissance hath—who knows not?—greater thrice In house than open field. I therefore chose For audience hall this precinct.' Muttered low Murdark, the scoffer with the cave-like mouth And sidelong eyes, 'Queen Bertha's voice was that! A woman's man! Since first from Gallic shores That dainty daughter of King Charibert Pressed her small foot on England's honest ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... founded, that the wits and poets who congregated at Will's were a most profane and licentious set; and, being himself a man of orthodox opinions and regular life, he was not disposed to give his confidence to one whom he supposed to be a ribald scoffer. Prior, with much address, and perhaps with the help of a little hypocrisy, completely removed this unfavourable impression. He talked on serious subjects seriously, quoted the New Testament appositely, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... even after he had removed to Brighton that he might live looking out upon the sea, which appealed to and soothed him. I never met a man who seemed to weigh so carefully every action, every word—even the pettiest—and so completely to find guidance through his own conscience. He was no scoffer in religious matters. In the domain of theology, however, he had little regard for decorum. It was to him a very faulty system hindering true growth, and the idea of rewards and punishments struck him as an appeal to very ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... hearing that supernatural sound that told her of the hopelessness of love, Aurora dropped the hollow, mocking scoffer, clutched spasmodically at her heart, and, with an agonizing shriek, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... worship of Bacchus. Sometimes he would continue drinking for several days, until every penny was exhausted. Then he would make demands at home for more money, which if refused, he was sure to abuse his wife and family. He was not only a drunkard; he was a scoffer at religion, and considered it a mark of honor to take the ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants and a scoffer The Loves of the Triangles, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: "Hung ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... only man who had any at all, for that matter," suggested Shem, "and it required all his courage to show it. Everybody was guying him. Sinners stood around the yard all day and every day, criticising the model; one scoffer pretended he thought her a canal-boat, and asked how deep the flood was likely to be on the tow-path, and whether we intended to use mules in shallow water and giraffes in deep; another asked what time ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... years, nor water from a single well; and that the butchery of two hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand Israelites, "exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the scoffer in him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept in touch with the most earnest thought both among European scholars and in the little flock intrusted to his care. He evidently remembered what had resulted from ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... cordial in their greetings one toward the other, and general good-feeling prevailed. Negroes worked, saved, bought lands and built houses. Old wooden meeting houses were torn down, and handsome brick churches went up in their places. Let the prejudiced scoffer say what he will, the Negro has done his full share in making the now illfated city blossom as the rose. We who have for so many years made our abode elsewhere, have made our boast in Wilmington as being ahead of ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... purpose. She was also strong in the wrists. Lorena was of foreign extraction, with far-away eyes and large, earnest red hands. You ought to have saw her preserve order during the hour for morning prayers. I had a hired man there in Utah, in them days, who was inclined to be a scoffer at our plain home-made style of religion. So I told Lorena that I was a little afraid that Orlando Whoopenkaugh would rise up suddenly while I was at prayer and spatter my thinker all over the cook stove, or create some other ruction that would cast ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... not that Don Federico, the young advocate, well known in the coffee-houses as a virulent Exaltado, a determined scoffer, a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Klok-No-Ton! They shuddered with dire foreboding at thought of him, and each one felt himself the centre of accusing eyes, and looked accusingly upon his fellows—each one and all, save Sime, and Sime was a scoffer whose evil end was destined with a certitude his successes could ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... of great men. Me. Tell me now what that same honest ma saynt Iames dothe, and howe he farythe. Ogy. Moche colder tha he was wontyd to do. Me. What is the cause of it? His age? Ogy. Oh you scoffer, yow || A iij.|| know wel enoghe that sayntes wax nat olde. But this new learnynge, whiche runnythe all the world ouer now a dayes, dothe cause hym to be vysytyd moche lesse than he was wontyd to be, for if any doo come thay salute him alonly, but they offre ...
— The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion • Desiderius Erasmus
... says I. 'An optical delusion, my excellent Wick. A Christian man would be incapable of such a villainy. The billiard-room, that darksome cavern, on a heaven-sent day like this? Shucks,' says I. Yet"—his attitude became exhortative—"see how mighty is truth, see how she prevails, see how the scoffer is confounded. To the billiard-room I transport myself, sceptically, on the off-chance, and—here, good-lack, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities —but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... flushed like a beetroot. 'I'll teach you to know your place, sir.' He turned his back on the scoffer, and strode ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... beginning dramatically enough by a burst of tears, and the terrific information that he was damned. But the Carbuccia of old was a riotous, joyful, foul-tongued, pleasure-loving atheist, a typical commercial traveller, with a strain of Alsatia and the mountain-brigand. How came this red-tied scoffer so far on the road of religion as to be damned? Some foolish fancy had made the ribald Gaetano turn a Mason. When one of his boon companions had suggested the evil course, he had refused blankly, apparently because he was asked, rather than because it was evil; but ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... four o'clock in the afternoon, should you visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,—the Aquarius sign of the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, "Why should they bother to dig wells? It's cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats from Scotland to tote ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... odium theologicum[Lat], sacerdotalism[obs3]; bigotry &c. (obstinacy) 606, (prejudice) 481; blue laws. hardening, backsliding, declension, perversion, reprobation. sinner &c. 949; scoffer, blasphemer; sacrilegist[obs3]; sabbath breaker; worldling; hypocrite &c. (dissembler) 548; Tartufe[obs3], Mawworm[obs3]. bigot; saint [ironically]; Pharisee; sabbatarian[obs3], formalist, methodist, puritan, pietist[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that I should have my choice between the Church and the Bar. The idea, however, proved—impracticable—which, in some respects, is rather a pity. It has seemed to me that a man who can work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks with a hide like leather, and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made his mark in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... always something in which the human being is vitally, not merely aesthetically interested. It deals with no shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a part of vital problems—a statement which may provoke the scoffer, but will be found to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... accurate impression of all the sides of Byron's versatile nature, and from its very completeness is the less likely to be injurious. There is no edition of his poems which we could more safely commend to the reader, as it exhibits Byron the poet, Byron the scoffer, Byron the roue, in his true colors and real dimensions; and if, after reading it, a person should adopt the old cant about his brilliant rascalities, and the old drivel about his sentimental misanthropy, the fault is in the reader rather ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... an artful and traitorous idea. A smart notion," vociferated the clerk, "thrown out as an apple of discord. But it is just. You are a scoffer, a man of the world, a cavalry officer, and, though not without brains, you do not realize how profound is your thought, nor how true. Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... merriest of men does not dwell on the innate absurdity of things. Humour was, however, one of the few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... thus sin became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... moral standing-point, one test, as Mr. Leslie Stephen observes, may be supposed to guide our decision. 'Imagine the Tale of a Tub to be read by Bishop Butler and by Voltaire, who called Swift a Rabelais perfectionne. Can anyone doubt that the believer would be scandalized, and the scoffer find himself in a thoroughly congenial element? Would not any believer shrink from the use of such weapons, even though ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... life, and leaves the spot better than it was when he came to it. Magnetic energy slowly disperses, and a sacred object or place becomes gradually demagnetised if put aside or deserted. It becomes more magnetised as it is used or frequented. But the presence of the ignorant scoffer injures such objects and places, by setting up antagonistic vibrations which weaken those already existing there. As a wave of sound may be met by another which extinguishes it, and the result is ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made him a stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory? If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he was cast out from the temple as one who had ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... with blasphemies, amid oaths from the vile, and revilings from the scoffer, had the boy first learned that name, and never before had it possessed aught of import for him. But now he knew it was the name of the Great Father that loved him, and again he asked very earnestly, "Where is the way to God in heaven? I am going to ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... "You are a scoffer, Kaunitz," said the empress. "Your Creator is very merciful to allow you time to utter the unchristian sentiments which are forever falling from your lips. But God sees the heart of man, and He knows that yours is better than your words. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... head mockingly. "Who will conquer with the spirit! Well, I won't play the scoffer. You are an orator, and that's something. Listen, son of man; I like you. I, too, desire the new kingdom; let ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... shocked by this reminiscence. Involuntarily he glanced up and around to see if there were any trace of those opportune levin-flashes and thunderbolts which, in the "Acta Sanctorum," were wont so often to cut short the loose talk of the scoffer. The autumn sun streamed down as brightly as ever, and the peaceful red path still wound in front of them through the rustling, yellow-tinted forest, Nature seemed to be too busy with her own concerns to heed the dignity of an outraged pontiff. Yet he felt a sense of weight and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wheat, barley, oats, lentiles, millet, and a hundred unknown seeds of weeds and collections of filth, which forms the produce of their fields. For poverty, vermin, and disease, Egypt is proverbial. Let us hear a scoffer's testimony, however: "In Egypt there is no middle class, neither nobility, clergy, merchants, nor landholders. A universal air of misery in all the traveler meets points out to him the rapacity of oppression, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... between them had undergone a change; nay, you might have said that their characters were also changed. For Tom found himself pouring out his turbulent heart to Kenelm, confiding to this philosophical scoffer at love all the passionate humanities of love,—its hope, its anguish, its jealousy, its wrath,—the all that links the gentlest of emotions to tragedy and terror. And Kenelm, listening tenderly, with softened eyes, uttered not one cynic word,—nay, not one ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... health?" queried a scoffer, with what he was pleased to consider fine irony. "Undoubtedly," responded the hitherto veracious one, with unabated good humour, "though perhaps one might more truthfully say they were walking less to gain an appetite than to find the means wherewith to ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Plains, the mocking Mephistopheles sits down between the solemn antique Sphinxes, and boldly questions them, and reads their riddles. The red light of innumerable watch-fires glares all round about, and shines upon the terrible face of the arch-scoffer; while on either side, severe, majestic, solemnly serene, we behold the gigantic forms of the children of Chimera, half buried in the earth, their mild eyes gazing fixedly, as if they heard through the midnight, the swift-rushing wings of the ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... If the King was a Lutheran, his people must be Lutheran; if the King was Catholic, his people must be Catholic. But now this principle was suddenly thrown overboard. The new King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, was a scoffer. For religion Frederick the Great cared nothing; for the material welfare of his people he cared a good deal. He had recently conquered Silesia; he desired to see his land well tilled, and his people happy and good; and, therefore, he readily granted the Brethren a "Concession," allowing them ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... less like eyes than holes through which light was pouring, while his fingers opened and shut as though he had forgotten his sword and would leap upon the scoffer with bare hands. Thorkel left off laughing to grasp the Jotun's arm and try to drag ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... was in some trouble, owing to a pig-headed and quarrelsome Scotchman in the front rank, who objected to each statement that fell from his lips, thus interfering seriously with the effect of his peroration. If the Irishman had been more convincing, I suppose the crowd would have silenced the scoffer, for these little matters of discipline are always attended to by the audience; but the Scotchman's points were too well taken; he was so trenchant, in fact, at times, that a voice would cry, 'Coom up, Sandy, an' 'ave it all your own w'y, ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... would be godly, and attend church and approach the altar, he is dubbed a hypocrite, if he abstain from doing so, he becomes at once an antichrist or a heretic; if he is light-hearted, he is called a scoffer, if silent, a morose cur; if he practises honesty, he is but a good-for-nothing fool; if well dressed, he is proud, if not, he is a pig; if gentle of speech, he is double-faced and a rogue, whom none can fathom; if rough, he is an arrogant and froward devil. This is the world you make so ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the world holds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all—the sanity of human reason—has never been more ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... parts of the country on a retainer he takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder that he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman. But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense. Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... seen rippling like sunshine on the sea of faces spreading away from the shore of the pulpit steps. When he spoke of hell and its terrors, which was frequently and with thrilling descriptive, even so hardened a scoffer as Japheth Pettigrass was wont to declare that you could hear the crackling of the flames and the cries ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Europe, and I visited Ferney with my parents; and I remember we all stopped before a chapel, and I read upon its front, I knew Latin enough to understand it, I am pleased to say,—Deo erexit Voltaire. I never forgot it; and knowing what a sad scoffer he was at most sacred things, I could not but be impressed with the fact that even he was not satisfied with himself, until he had shown his devotion in a ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... were the motives that had brought most of the adventurers to the Crystal Hills; but none so vain, so foolish, and so impious too, as that of the scoffer with the prodigious spectacles. He was one of those wretched and evil men whose yearnings are downward to the darkness, instead of heavenward, and who, could they but distinguish the lights which ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people—he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[2].... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be—their every "thou shalt" was ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Lawrence Dalhonde, the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,—all this has been told so well and so often that I spare you its details. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... for any scoffer, qui mockat mockabitur. Let mee tell you, (that you may tell him) what the wittie French-man [the Lord Mountagne in his Apol. for Ra-Se-bond.] sayes in such a Case. When my Cat and I entertaine each other with mutuall apish tricks ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... Bertie was only a lip-deep scoffer. Her heart was open to conviction yet, and, when the time came, I believed that the seed sown in old days would germinate and bear good ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden—a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... blighted by hail and frost; and in stormy weather the old woman was seen to rise out of the woods and stir and push the clouds before her with a broom. For a hundred yards around Witch Rock the ground is still accursed, and any attempt to break it up is unavailing. Nearly a century ago a scoffer named Reynolds declared that he would run his plough through the enchanted boundary, and the neighbors watched the attempt from ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... to his posterity were, in general, quite the reverse of those which he himself had manifested so abundantly in early life. Whereas, he had formerly been atrociously cruel, boastingly impious, and a scoffer at matters religious, his later descendants were generally tender of heart, soft of manner, and of great piety. Whereas, in early manhood he had been fiery and impulsive, quick of decision and immovable of opinion, his progeny were increasingly inclined ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... all external direction, the slave and victim of the moment's impulse, yet full of the energies and visions of genius, this arrogant stripling passes by quick leaps from boyhood into the vices of age, and, after a short experience of the worst side of life, comes out a scoffer and a misanthrope, fills the world with his gospel of desperation and despair, and, after preaching disgust of existence and contempt of mankind as the wisdom gleaned from his excesses, he dies, worn out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... policy with respect to the Catholics of Silesia presented an honourable contrast to the policy which, under very similar circumstances, England long followed with respect to the Catholics of Ireland. Every form of religion and irreligion found an asylum in the States. The scoffer whom the parliaments of France had sentenced to a cruel death, was consoled by a commission in the Prussian service. The Jesuit who could show his face nowhere else, who in Britain was still subject to penal laws, who was proscribed by France, Spain, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and scoffer at all ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... honour of Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... pessimism; their "criticism of life" is gentle and forbearing. Leech is positively optimistic; there is at any rate nothing infinite in his irreverence; it touches bottom as soon as it approaches the pretty woman or the nice girl. It is such an apparition as this that really, in Gavarni, awakes the scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Gavarni, but his sense of beauty conjures away almost everything save our minor vices. It is in the exploration of our major ones that Gavarni makes his principal discoveries of charm or of absurdity of attitude. None the less, of course, the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... progress of his friend's opinions with every mark of regret. He even showed me letters that had passed between them, and in which every horrid and immoral tenet was defended by one and denied by the other. These letters showed Colden as the advocate of suicide; a scoffer at promises; the despiser of revelation, of Providence and a future state; an opponent of marriage, and as one who denied (shocking!) that any thing but mere habit and positive law stood in the way of marriage, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... had been talking, rather bitterly as well as floridly, about sighting the cold Northern Star and losing the Southern Cross. I lay back and gloated over the starry picture overhead through a crisscross picture-mount of ragged grass. I left the confutation of the scoffer to Miss Moore. There was an edge on many of her remarks that night, and I could trust her to deal with him. But what she said I have forgotten. Only I remember that he gave her best at last. Then, and not till then, I broke silence, submitting ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... England are the best known in the world. Any one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of most other countries. Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer. The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world. Despite all this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral superiority, and loses no chance of proclaiming ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... incorrigible tippler into a "teetotal Falstaff," and protested against the enthusiast mixing water so copiously with the milk of his human kindness. So Cruikshank set off in great wrath towards Fleet Street to seek out the scoffer, and, meeting Blanchard Jerrold, sputtered out his purpose and declared that he was on the trail of that scoundrel Punch to "knock his old wooden head about." When he died, Punch announced that ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... months ago a million girls could have laughed at his morning exercises without turning him from his purpose. Today this one scoffer, alone and unaided, was sufficient for his undoing. The depression which exercise had begun to dispel surged back on him. He had no heart to continue. Sadly gathering up his belongings, he returned to his room, and found a cold bath ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... ceremonies. At this moment, in his present softened state of feeling, sensitive to everything, this inevitable act of hypocrisy was not merely painful to Levin, it seemed to him utterly impossible. Now, in the heyday of his highest glory, his fullest flower, he would have to be a liar or a scoffer. He felt incapable of being either. But though he repeatedly plied Stepan Arkadyevitch with questions as to the possibility of obtaining a certificate without actually communicating, Stepan Arkadyevitch maintained that it was out ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... father," Francis, declared, "and I admit that I have, it has been to some extent his own fault. To me he was always the deliberate scoffer against any code of morals, a rebel against the law even if not a criminal in actual deeds. I honestly believed that The Walled House was the scene of disreputable orgies, that your father was behind Fairfax in that cold-blooded murder, and that he was responsible in some sinister way ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lights, and the rarer, but for evidential purposes even more valuable, manifestations of spirit photography. The fact that the photograph does not correspond in many cases with any which existed in life, must surely silence the scoffer, though there is a class of bigoted sceptic who would still be sneering if an Archangel alighted in Trafalgar Square. Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton, of Crewe, have brought this phase of mediumship to great perfection, though others ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said Pentaur, looking kindly at the old man. "But you, you everlasting scoffer—you look pale. How ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... upon him with flashing eye and uplifted bucket, a picture of fiery wrath that was too much for the thoughtless scoffer, who fled in terror amid the laughter of the crowd. The vanquished son of Belial had no sympathy from anybody, and the plucky preacher was none the less esteemed because he was ready to defend his Master's cause with carnal weapons. The early Californians left scarcely any path ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... indeed a great issue, involving the fundamental principles of Christianity. A brave man, who is not a scoffer, attacks the doctrine of non-resistance, and lays down his life for the faith that is in him. A martyr, then. Martyrdom in itself cannot establish a principle; but we respect martyrdom. Turn the argument around: the martyrdom ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... up as he did, without any counteracting influence? why should he not settle down with the conviction that religion is a matter of no moment? nay, why should he not become what he actually did become,—a scoffer and an atheist? Whenever I meet him, I see in his face, not only a reproduction of his mother's features, but that which tells of the reproduction of his mother's character. I pity him that he should have had such ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... the scoffer, these limited editions and so forth foster the vile passions of competition. Well, and if they do? Is it not meet that men should strive together for such possessions? We compete for the allotments of shares in American-meat companies, we outbid each other for tickets 'to view the ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... in building up the Junker dream. A court official—the Oberhofprediger—was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he kept ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the Walloon Church at Rotterdam. His early writings were touchingly beautiful and attractive, for it was in them that he laid open his inner life. But in his later works he assumes the air of the censor and scoffer. He was long the personal friend of La Saussaye, but, owing to doctrinal differences, they have parted and now pursue different paths. He is an orator of the American type. His opinions are elaborated ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Delcher, the little boy presently found himself accepting without demur the old gentleman's unspoken but sufficiently indicated opinion. His father was in everlasting torment—having been not only unbaptised, but godless and a scoffer. With a quickening sense of the majesty of that Spirit infinitely good, a new apprehension of His plan's symmetry, he read the words meant to explain, to comfort him, silently indicated one day by ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Discipline had to be relaxed those first days, for a seasick man is quite willing to be shot and has no interest in the war, and doesn't care which horse wins the boat-race. Seasickness never gets any sympathy from those who are immune, but sometimes just retribution comes on the scoffer, and it is some satisfaction to see a man's face turn green who but a few hours ago had been whistling with a selfish cheerfulness while you were revealing your own sticky ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... of deep thought and great practical wisdom," says Sedgwick,[2] "one whose piety and benevolence have for many years been shining before the world, and of whose sincerity no scoffer (of whatever school) will dare to start a doubt, recorded his opinion in the great assembly of the men of science who during the past year were gathered from every corner of the Empire within the walls of this University, 'that Christianity had everything to hope and nothing ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... heard this, there needed nothing farther; but they pushed forward by main force and fell a-crying out and saying, 'Seize yonder traitor and scoffer at God and His saints, who, being whole of his body, hath come hither, in the guise of a cripple, to make mock of us and of our saint!' So saying, they laid hold of Martellino and pulled him down from the place where he lay. Then, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... radiantly behind him, its beams seeming to gather in a lustrous halo round his tall, majestic figure,—his countenance, fully illumined and clearly visible, was one never to be forgotten for the striking force, sweetness, and dignity expressed in its every feature. The veriest scoffer that ever made mock of fine beliefs and fair virtues must have been momentarily awed and silenced in the presence of such a man as this,—a man upon whom the grace of a perfect life seemed to have fallen like a royal robe, investing even his outward appearance ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... though no scoffer, had small intimacy with ghosts; and Roy's frequented other regions; nor was he in the frame of mind to induce spiritual visitations. Soul and body were enmeshed, as in a network of sunbeams, holding him close ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... of much use talking in this wise to a scoffer. He that maun to Cupar maun to Cupar. We're all in the same express train, plunging towards ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the opportunity; he reeled under his good fortune; and whether he did ill or well, the exposure of these pious 'phantoms' did as a matter of fact silence in all that part of the island the voice of the scoffer. 'Why then,' the word went round, 'why then, the Bible is true!' And on our return afterwards we were told the impression was yet lively, and those who had seen might be heard telling those who had not, 'O yes, it is all true; these things all happened, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... then so long with him, and his art so short, that he shall dawdle by the way and wander from his path, reducing his giant intellect—garrulous upon matters to him unknown, that the scoffer may rejoice and the Philistine be appeased while he takes up the parable of the mob and proclaims himself their spokesman and fellow-sufferer? O Brother! where is thy sting! O ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... was the signal for an orgy of Philistine rancour such as even London had never known before. The puritan middle class, which had always regarded Wilde with dislike as an artist and intellectual scoffer, a mere parasite of the aristocracy, now gave free scope to their disgust and contempt, and everyone tried to outdo his neighbour in expressions of loathing and abhorrence. This middle class condemnation swept the lower class away in its train. To do them justice, the common people, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
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