"Blase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is crumbling when quite impossible people like life guards permit themselves to become blase' over such matters! ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... that blase period when, only upon rare occasions, did he feel disposed to enlarge his acquaintance. But this fresh-skinned young Britisher went to his heart at once, a kindred soul, and he adopted him forthwith. He and Thomas paired off and talked "fight" ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... glad to learn your feelings are hurt," returned the aunt. "I'm sure, Carley, that underneath all this—this blase ultra something you've acquired, there's a real heart. Only you must hurry ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... finally dawned upon the blase young staff officer that he had met Alan Hawke in certain circles where plunging had chased away the tedium of Indian club life with the delightful sensations of raking in ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the little actress's behavior with a good measure of precision. Her restlessness, her chattering, the high, unpleasing pitch of her naturally lovely low voice, her assumption of the manner and speech of the blase young person of the stage, he saw to be primarily the cover of nervousness. He understood that the girl was troubled about something, was perhaps suffering, and tried to conceal it in this way. Moreover, he felt that, whatever it was, she was bearing it altogether alone, hiding ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... Wonderfully powerful!' In that way you can always get along. I know that those two are very blase about everything, but admiration ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in themselves and for themselves; they deliberately view them as sources of a personal pleasurable sensation. I do not mean the crude egoist who asks of anything or anybody, "What good is it (or he) for me?" but I mean that connoisseur in emotions, casually blase and bored, who seeks new sensations. This is an introspective deviation of a serious kind, for the connoisseur in emotions rarely is happy and usually is most deeply miserable. Bourget in his remarkable psychological novel, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Travers, New York." Men were mad to learn more But the women were distant. One can't, at such places, Accept as credentials good figures or faces. There was an unnameable something about Mrs. Travers which filled other women with doubt And all men with interest. Roger, blase, Disillusioned with life as he was, felt the sway Of her strong personality, there as she sat Looking out 'neath the rim of her coquettish hat With dark eyes on the sea. Few people had power To draw his gray thoughts from himself for an hour As this woman had done; she ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... more than nine-and-twenty; but he had all the blase airs of a man of forty. He began to say entreprenant things to Theodora after ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... working class. You may perhaps be a small manufacturer, the agent of a manufacturing firm in the country, a clerk with a moderate salary, or a mechanic in his best clothes. Remember that and do not complain of the music. You do not hear it every day. Let us hear no more blase speeches, if you please.... Good! The dinner arrives. We dine here, my friend, for two francs. You will probably require another meal before the evening is concluded. On the other hand, you may feel that you never require another ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been painfully reminded, by my coolness and indifference, how little he counted for in my life. Petsjorin had done with life; I had not even begun to live. Petsjorin had drained the cup of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjorin was as blase as a splendid Russian Officer of the Guards could be; I, as full of expectation as an insignificant Copenhagen schoolboy could be. Nevertheless, I had the perplexing feeling of having, for the first time in my life, seen my inmost nature, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... was delivered with the blase air of weariness worn out, that should belong with him who has seen and heard and known a world's multitude; which manner is everywhere recognized as the very flower ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the air laden with the perfume of countless cherry blossoms, Paul felt that he had been translated into fairy-land, and he was almost afraid to speak lest he break the spell and suddenly find himself back in blase Western Europe again. ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... 'Shylock,'" he said gravely, and turned to speak to the others. They welcomed him eagerly, and made room for him. He had lost something of the cold, blase air which had ennobled him in the eyes of the young women. He looked around presently, and said ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... shall expect then to be within measurable distance of a marshal's baton and you will be an experienced married woman. You shall look out a nice wife for me. I will be moderately bald by then, and a little blase; I will require a young girl—pretty, of course, and with a large fortune, you know, to help me close my glorious career with the splendour befitting my exalted rank." He ended with the information that he had just given a lesson to a worrying, quarrelsome fellow, who imagined ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... operations, and as the authors of these outrages remained undiscovered, they credited them all to Mme. de Combray's inspiration, and this accusation without proof is none too bold. The theft of state funds was a bagatelle to people whom ten years of implacable warfare had rendered blase about all brigandage. Moreover, it was easily conceivable that the snare laid by Bonaparte for Frotte, who was so popular in Normandy, the summary execution of the General and his six officers, the assassination ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... bataile and al the forme, Which as he scholde finde there, Whan he to thyle come were. Sche seide, at entre of the pas Hou Mars, which god of Armes was, Hath set tuo Oxen sterne and stoute, That caste fyr and flamme aboute Bothe at the mouth and ate nase, So that thei setten al on blase 3510 What thing that passeth hem betwene: And forthermore upon the grene Ther goth the flees of gold to kepe A Serpent, which mai nevere slepe. Thus who that evere scholde it winne, The fyr to stoppe he mot beginne, Which that the fierce bestes caste, And daunte he ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... plundering the pockets of drunken laborers. We may pass by the opium joints where women of all ages and classes lie for hours, stupid with filthy fumes, at the mercy of bestial orientals and drunken negroes; also those dives devoted to forms of debauchery so debased that many a blase man of the world does not believe their existence more than a demoniacal dream. These are vortices of vice too fearfully foul for eyes of aught but fiends; the air too putrid for lungs that inhale that of pure and happy homes. We ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the comedy before we are introduced to this paragon, who enters just after Lady Easy and the maid, Edging, have discovered fresh proofs of his flirtation with Lady Graveairs. Charles is inclined to be philosophical in a blase, tired way, and he says: "How like children do we judge of happiness! When I was stinted in my fortune almost everything was a pleasure to me, because most things then being out of my reach, I had always the pleasure of hoping for 'em; now fortune's in my hand she's as insipid as an old acquaintance. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this glimpse ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... with both hands, but that was not possible in the publicity of a dinner-table. He whispered in my ear, he leant to me, he behaved as an infatuated lover, and presently it seemed to me that my fellow-guests smiled here and there and looked significant. Lady Ardaragh talked more than ever to the blase-looking young lord who was her neighbour and her colour was heightened. Her witticisms came to me across the table, or a portion of them, and I thought she was saying wild, unbecoming things. I was sure I saw Sir Arthur wince when I turned to him. But it was all too much of ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... new face the possibilities of a realization of his ideal. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate thing for the women, particularly as he brought to each trial a surprising freshness, which was very deceptive, and quite distinct from the 'blase' familiarity of the man of gallantry. It was this perennial virginity of the affections that most endeared him to the best women, who were prone to exercise toward him a chivalrous protection,—as of one likely to go astray, unless looked after,—and indulged in the dangerous combination of ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... gathered at the breakfast table could not have been found in New London or anywhere else; certainly not at the Griswold where the majority of them were either satiated society girls whose winters had been spent in a mad social whirl, or the blase city youths who at nineteen had already found ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... more remarkable in Mr Stevenson than his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men affect to be blase and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and, above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... fine, a man with the edge of every desire dulled, the glow of every passion cooled. My answer was simply this: I should try to give him what I constantly and without much effort gave most men—A new sensation. After all it is not such a hard thing to do. Blase men are my especial prey; they can always be reached; their vulnerable points are many, but generally ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... bearing!" echoed the clerk, with the derision of blase youth. "If that's your test, you ought ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... yawning. Are we going to surely catch up with 'em before they get there?" He was encouraging a faint hope that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others there, be found in blase seclusion before the fire and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... dartes, 350 Furor in flame, and Sulphures smothering heate Vpon the wicked and accurs'd armes That cruell Romains 'gainst their Country beare. Rome ware thy fall: those prodigies foretould, When angry heauens did powre downe showers of blood And fatall Comets in the heauens did blase, And all the Statues in the Temple blast, Did weepe the losse of Romaine liberty. Then if the Gods haue destined thine end, Yet as a Mother hauing lost her Sonne, 360 Cato shall waite vpon thy tragick hearse, And neuer leaue thy cold and bloodles corse. Ile tune a sad and dol-full funerall ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... the realm of the impossible, probably would, if a rocket that were shot to the moon, for instance, did arrive, and perhaps return to give proof of its safe arrival on our satellite, accept the phenomenon in a perfectly blase, twentieth century manner. Dr. Smith, that phenomenal writer of classic scientific fiction, seems to have become so thoroughly convinced of the advent of interplanetary travel that it is difficult for the reader to feel, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... no acquaintances likely to be useful in my future career. I wasted my energies in numberless frivolous pursuits, and in the short-lived love intrigues that are the disgrace of salons in Paris, where every one seeks for love, grows blase in the pursuit, falls into the libertinism sanctioned by polite society, and ends by feeling as much astonished at real passion as the world is over a heroic action. I did as others did. Often I dealt to generous and candid souls the deadly wound from which ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... not that—Is it caprice or coquetry? Your mind is too serious and your soul too honest for such an act; and besides, what would be your object? Such feline cruelties may suit blase women of the world who are roused by the sight of moral torture; who give, in the invisible sphere of the passions, feasts of the Roman empresses, where beating hearts are torn by the claws of the wild beasts ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... a few years of Mme. Pompadour and wished that he had not encouraged her to run away from her husband. She, however, retained her hold upon the blase and alcoholic monarch by her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired, ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... which always comes. And when at the Sylvester Arms, on one of those rare occasions when M'Adam was not present, Tammas summed up the little man in that historic phrase of his, "When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't he's wicious," there was an applause to gratify the blase heart ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... gifts on the American stage, counting on the ignorance or inexperience of their audience, make a very unsafe calculation. The taste and critical faculty of that public are in their fulness of vigour. Old Europe is more bound by traditions, more weary, more blase, in her judgment, not always sincere or disinterested. In America the national pride is warmly felt, and the national artists enjoy high honour. The Americans know how to offer an exquisite hospitality, but woe to the man who seeks to impose on them! They profess ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... on her feet as thistledown and as graceful as a swaying rose. Nyoda watched her with keen pleasure, but it was not her twinkling feet, nor the artistic posing of her limbs that held her attention, but the new expression on her face. The old selfish, blase' look was gone, and her features were lit up by an eager smile that sparkled in her eyes and curved up the corners of her pretty mouth. Again the leaven was at work in her, and she was fulfilling the Law of the Camp Fire, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... same kind found in the following sally of Figaro's (though here an attempt is perhaps made to suggest the image of an animal rather than that of a thing): "Quel homme est-ce?—C'est un beau, gros, court, jeune vieillard, gris pommele, ruse, rase, blase, qui guette et furette, et gronde et geint tout a la fois." [Footnote: "What sort of man is here?—He is a handsome, stout, short, youthful old gentleman, iron-grey, an artful knave, clean shaved, clean 'used up,' who spies and pries ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... little milk is sufficient to support life indefinitely. It is one of the foods of which people never seem to tire. Tiring of food is often an indication of excess. It is with food as with amusement, if we get too much we become blase. Those who eat in moderation are content with simple foods, but those who eat too much want a great variety, as a rule. There are beef gluttons, who are satisfied with their flesh and liquor, but this is because ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... that they were blase, or indifferent to novel sights, but travel was now, with them, an old story. They had been out West, to the Pacific Coast, and in far-off jungle lands, to say nothing of their trip to the place of the earthquakes, and the more recent trip ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... Robin," said Randal, laughing. "When you've seen as much as I have you'll be blase. Not that one ought to be, but Germany—well, it hardly lasts, I think. Ruegen—why, it rained and there were mists round the Studenkammer, and how those people eat at the Jagdschloss! Heidelberg! picture postcards and shocking hotels—Oh! ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... until some untoward event should prove him otherwise. He was not married, and I soon perceived he had all a Frenchman's, all a Parisian's notions about matrimony and women. I suspected a degree of laxity in his code of morals, there was something so cold and BLASE in his tone whenever he alluded to what he called "le beau sexe;" but he was too gentlemanlike to intrude topics I did not invite, and as he was really intelligent and really fond of intellectual subjects of discourse, he and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... perceived that Blanche had no real affection for me, even though she dressed me in elegant clothes, and herself tied my tie each day. In short, she utterly despised me. But that caused me no concern. Blase and inert, I spent my evenings generally at the Chateau des Fleurs, where I would get fuddled and then dance the cancan (which, in that establishment, was a very indecent performance) with eclat. At length, the time came when Blanche had drained my purse dry. She had conceived ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... breath'd on mine a warmth Temperate as westerne kisses which the morne Weaps liquid drops to purchase. This confirmes It was no apparition that contemnd My willingnes, but he, his reall selfe, Mockt my integrity: he must not passe soe, To blase abroad my infamy. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... season live on their fat like the ground-hog, and do a little fishing for profitable amusement. It is a thing to see, Scheveningen, but it is no place for a prolonged stay unless you are a gambler or a blase boulevardier who needs bracing up with ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... about a dozen of them. The men ranged in appearance from a girlish-looking youth to a big grizzled man whom everybody addressed as "Judge." None of the women appeared to be under thirty, but each of them struck me as being handsome. I was not long in finding out that they were all decidedly blase. Several of the women smoked cigarettes, and with a careless grace which showed they were used to the habit. Occasionally a "Damn it!" escaped from the lips of some one of them, but in such a charming way as to rob it of all vulgarity. The most notable ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... the end of them unarmed and at the mercy of every adverse blast. The great dangers which seem to be resulting from the system of upbringing in the last fifteen years are that at seventeen or eighteen most young people are satiated with pleasure and blase with life, while they have no definite aim or end of achievement in view, and absolutely no sense of duty or responsibility to ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... believed in. The best and fairest pass the day in the Corso, and gallant young gentlemen think it worth while to dress elaborately for a few hours of harmless and spirituelle intrigue. A society that enjoys a holiday so thoroughly has something in it better than the blase cynicism of more civilized capitals. These young fellows talk like the lovers of the old romances. I have never heard prettier periods of devotion than from some gentle savage, stretched out on the front seat of a landau ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... that she never even imagined such comments, though she passed these rows of critical eyes a hundred times a day, sat at table with people who were keenly observant of her every act and word, and spent some reluctant hours in the society of those who strove to cultivate her for their own blase enjoyment. She only knew that among the company she met a number of interesting men and women, with whom she and her husband were thoroughly congenial, and that it did not matter in the least about the rest. If those whom ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... book has kept your reviewer awake when he reasonably expected to be otherwise engaged. We do not remember coming across a more fascinating volume, even to a somewhat blase reader whose business it is to read all that comes in his way. The marvels miracles they should be called, of the modern workshop are here exploited by Mr. Williams for the benefit of readers who have not the opportunity of seeing these wonders or the necessary ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... Don't pretend you are getting to be a blase man. I know that you are only about ten years older than I am—not more than nine, I think—and you dance very well, and no doubt you ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... was her growing tendency to lapse into troubled thought. "Remember, now, you're the crocus, the first violet, or something like that—not the last rose of summer. Don't think, don't droop! There, that's right! What have you to think or droop about? When you're as old and blase as Humiston there, you'll have a right to ponder the mysteries, but not now. You and I are ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... think you are a genius to think about it," I gasped, as I sat down on a very cruet Killarney branch and just as quickly sat up again, receiving comforting expressions of sympathy from across the bush, to which I paid no heed. "Those blase city men will go crazy about it. We can have the barbecue up on the bluff, where we have always had it for the political rallies, and a fish-fry and the country people in their wagons with children tumbling all over everything and—and you ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a travelling salesman waiting for his samples on the veranda of a country hotel and he had about him a kind of sophisticated look as if he took a sort of blase pleasure in watching the world go round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blase or ennuye. He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view is almost entirely personal. It is not the lacrimae rerum, but ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... wasn't that blase. On the Moon, he had seen some of the old Mars of advanced native technology, now long extinct. But there was also the recent Mars of explorers and then footloose adventurers, wondering what they could find to do with this quiet, pastel-tinted world of tremendous history. Then had come ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... The blase reader may consider that we here manifested the characters of sensitive weaklings. But let him undergo the like! The supernatural, or seemingly so, has always had power to chill the hottest blood. And here was an invisible horror reaching ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... can get all of that stuff I want, on my face, off the girls in the candy dep," he explained with a blase air. "You keep it for you and your friends, and I'll get you more. I'm tired ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... was quite serious, but there was an odd expression in her eye. Mr. Holway, blond, immaculate and blase, bowed. ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... life," returned Fouche, "but a real elegant divorce, followed by an imperial wedding, would rattle the bones of this blase old Paris as they haven't been rattled since ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... Long Ned, rising with that blase air which distinguishes the matured man of the world from the enthusiastic tyro,-"done! and we will adjourn afterwards to ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blase air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with care to play the role of an "unidentified man." No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have claimed him. His clothing, which ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,—the lyrics, Childe Harold and Don Juan—as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's Villanelle of the Poet's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like, and blase, and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very happy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... tendered her hand to Lord de Winter, who, kissing it respectfully, went out and traversed alone and unconducted those large, dark and deserted apartments, brushing away tears which, blase as he was by fifty years spent as a courtier, he could not withhold at the spectacle of royal distress so ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Swiss had any navy—and holding a speaking trumpet in his hand. This person is not excited, for he sends thirty-odd-thousand-ton ships off to Europe at frequent intervals, and so he is impressively and importantly blase about it; but everybody else is excited. You find yourself rather that way. You wave at persons you know and then at persons you do ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... his brother-officers directly he joined. It was his freshness, his overflowing good spirits, his hearty and unmistakable enjoyment of life, that first won their regard. The boy suddenly dropped into their midst was no blase youth, no mere swaggering puppy. He was afire with the joy of existence, radiant with happiness, excited—and not ashamed to show it—by all the newness and fascination of Indian life. The Major screwed his eye-glass into his eye and smiled encouragingly; the Adjutant measured ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... we are all thinking with one mind on what is now going on about us. It is a very grave but a splendid time. Whatever in the last analysis we shall go through, at present there is no longer any one of us who any longer regards life in the role of a blase or critical spectator, but each one of us stands in the very midst of life, and, indeed, in the very midst of a higher life. God has of a sudden brought us out of the wretchedness of the day to a high place to which we have never before spiritually attained. But always where life emerges, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... active mentally as this crowd never grow blase, however they may affect it. But surely you had ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a man," she said, sententiously. "Don't worry for fear the poor dears' hearts will be broken. Now I'll tell you something. Mrs. Jimmie's sincere indifference and my silent eye-homage have stirred these blase officers out of their usual calm. There you have the whole thing. Von Engel thinks Mrs. Jimmie's indifference is assumed, and both Von Engel and Von Furzmann are determined that my silence shall voice itself. I have ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... which is sunning itself on the sands is made up, for the most part, of the usual types of a British watering-place—the pea-jacketed swell with blase manner and one-eyed quizzing-glass; the occasional London cad in clothes of painful newness and exaggeration of style, such as no gentleman by any chance ever wears in Britain; the young sprig of nobility with effeminate face ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... don't mean on that account. I'm rather blase of millionaires lately. But from Mohunsleigh's accounts he must be—well, the sort of ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Mr. A and Miss B, twenty-eight and twenty-five years old respectively, have known one another for several years, and in spite of their occupation, which is supposed to make people blase and cynical—he being a reporter and she a special story writer—are quite in love with each other. But their occupation and income are such that they cannot possibly afford to have and to bring up any children. They would love to get married, but the specter of a child—or rather of children—frightens ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... was loose, and bit his lips, and cursed his embarrassments. 'Come, I mustn't let her think me quite an ass.' He was astonished at himself. That he should still be capable of so strenuous a sensation! 'And I had thought I was blase!' He was intensely conscious of the silence, of the solitude and dimness of the forest, and of their isolation there, so near to each other, that superb pale woman and himself. But his eyes were bent on the misbehaving strap, which he held ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all perhaps, as she had said, that men had made her—a travesty on splendid girlhood. He wept for her friends, embodying in them all of their class—for little Bessy Bell, with her exquisite ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Mikhailov, a cynical and brutal Lovelace who abandons his mistresses when they are with child, is intermingled incessantly with gloomy episodes, such as the agonies of an old man or of a child. It is a book for "blase" people, a book which a reader with moral health will not read without a certain ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... had other uses for the twenty guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!" She had no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blase. ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... continued the bon vivant, with a blase shrug. "She was a good little quail with more heart ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... approve of them, and said she liked under-things that would boil. She has always had very dainty things made by herself; Great-aunt Alison taught her to do beautiful fine sewing.... Jean is a delightful person to do things with; she brings such a freshness to everything is never bored, never blase. I was glad to see her so deeply interested in new clothes. I confess to having a deep distrust of a woman who is above trying to make herself attractive. She ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... decidedly think old SWISHTALE would be better for a week (under supervision) in London. Might take him to the Empire, the Pav., and to see Ruy Blas, or the Blase Roue. If it did him no other good, it would afford him a topic for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... was he that the maids were not allowed to make his bed except in white kid gloves, and his groom of his chambers had orders to fumigate his rooms after liveried servants had been in them. He is described as handsome, witty, and blase, a roue in principles and a Tory in politics. Nothing pleased Lady Morgan better in her old age, we are told, than to have it insinuated that there had been 'something wrong' between herself ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Jim a chance to recover himself, to regain his vanished cuffs, display his heavy watch-chain, curl his mustache, and otherwise reassume his air of blase fastidiousness. But the transfer made, Phoebe, after shaking hands, became speechless under these perfections. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... But, as he was intellectually brilliant and personally attractive, these people were as a rule ready to overlook what they called the Quaker oats. Nan, who overlooked nothing, was frankly at war with him on some points, and he with her. Nan, cynical, clear-eyed, selfish and blase, cared nothing for the salvaging of what remained of the world out of the wreck, nothing for the I.L.P., less than nothing for garden cities, philanthropy, the W.E.A., and God. And committees she detested. Take them all away, and there remained Barry Briscoe, and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... world who, through long custom, can find themselves engaged without any particular whirl of emotion. King Solomon probably belonged to this class; and even Henry the Eighth must have become a trifle blase in time. But to the average man, the novice, the fact of being accepted seems to divide existence into two definite parts, before and after. A sensitive conscience goads some into compiling a full and unexpurgated autobiography, ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... quibbler and bloodthirsty "doctrinaire," Henry VIII., be the means of a brilliant and lasting success to St. Saens, who richly deserves it; but in the matter of serious opera the public has reached that blase point which is explained in the words of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... stern rail had a different and more serious interrogation to make. He appeared rather blase about it as he leaned over the rail and, directing his voice toward a soldier on the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... but he lives on the surface of everything! He is altogether shallow and blase. His good-nature is the fruit of want of feeling; between his gracefulness and his sneering persiflage he is ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... animated faces flashed out in the semi-obscurity; and in their rear stood a crowd of spectators —beautiful young gentlemen with vacant faces and the elevated Oxford shoulders, rosy youth already blase to all this world can offer, and gray-headed men young again in the prospect of a new sensation. So they kneel or stand, worshipers before the shrine, expecting the advent of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of all that is in the heart. She takes one, draws him to her bosom; he dishonors her and returns to the Bourse. She cries all night, but discovers that tears make her eyes red. She takes a consoler, for the loss of whom another consoles her; thus up to the age of thirty or more. Then, blase and corrupted, with no human sentiment, not even disgust, she meets a fine youth with raven locks, ardent eye and hopeful heart; she recalls her own youth, she remembers what she has suffered, and telling him the story of her life, she teaches ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... a group of two or three gentlemen were observing the swirling throng, with its ambitions, its jealousies, its brief flashes of happiness, its numberless and infinitesimal intrigues, its atmosphere of jaded, blase, and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... in the persecution of Licinius, in 316, by the command of Agricolaus, governor of Cappadocia and the lesser Armenia. It is mentioned in the acts of St. Eustratius, who received the crown of martyrdom in the reign of Dioclesian, and is honored on the 13th of December, that St. Blase, the bishop of Sebaste, honorably received his relics, deposited them with those of St. Orestes, and punctually executed every article of the last will and testament of St. Eustratius. His festival is kept a holiday in the Greek church on the 11th of February. He is mentioned in the ancient ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the thought has overtaken me that it will only add to your severity towards me. I fancy myself six months hence almost a stranger to you. Yes, you are too clever, and I too experienced,—too blase, if you like,—for either of us to deceive the other. Your end is attained without its costing you more than a ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... but am not blase, My hair has whitened, but my heart is young, Still thrills my pulse the tomb-girt Appian Way, Still stirs my ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... perhaps because of sated curiosity, perhaps on account of a pin famine, the attendance began to languish. Only four responded to the next call of the band; the four dwindled to three; finally the entertainment was given for one blase auditor, and Schofield and Williams looked depressed. Then followed an interval when the band played ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... and stared, filled with admiration, thrilled with this new experience in his blase existence. Who would have expected to find a beauty like that in a little out of the way place like this? His theory of a great estate and a rich man's daughter with a fad for music instantly came to the front. What a lucky happening that he should have broken down ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... selected, and at this time in Saul's Cardillac seemed to have no rival. He combined, to an admirable degree, the man of the world and the sportsman; he had an air that was beyond rubies. He was elegant without being effeminate, arrogant without being conceited, indifferent without being blase. He had learnt, at Eton, and at the knee of a rich and charming mother, that to be crude was the unforgivable sin. He worshipped the god of good manners and would have made an admirable son of the great Lord Chesterfield. Finally he was the only man in Saul's who ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... incredible. And to whom had he struck the bold corsair flag which had so long been the terror of husbands? To Kaethe von Markwald, in whom nothing piquant could be discovered which would be likely specially to attract a blase man of the world! She was beautiful, certainly, but he had passed by many handsomer women. She was not stupid, but how many cleverer fair ones, with all their craft, had been unable to hold him in their nets! The event was and remained ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... rubs elbows in Washington. Outwardly it is merely a city of evasion, of conventionalities, sated with the commonplace pleasures of life, listless, blase even, and always exquisitely, albeit frigidly, courteous; but beneath the still, suave surface strange currents play at cross purposes, intrigue is endless, and the merciless war of diplomacy goes on unceasingly. Occasionally, only occasionally, a bubble comes to the ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is, in an age when only a small minority disbelieve in social progress, and a large majority believe in an ultimate social perfection, there should be such a tired and blase feeling among numbers of young men. This, we think, is due, not to the want of an ultimate ideal, but to that of any immediate way of making for it: not of something to hope but of something to do. A human being is not satisfied ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... speck the blaze of setting day MS. Letter to Southey: Had cross'd the mighty orb's dilated blase. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with my dylygence All the scrypture I sawe me besyde H[an]ge a fayre swerde & shelde of meruailous excell[en]ce Whiche to beholde I dyde than abyde To blase the armes I dyde well prouyde The felde was syluer / and in it a medowe grene With an olyue tre ...
— The coforte of louers - The Comfort of Lovers • Stephen Hawes
... to-day, mon Dieu!" grumbled a very old man to a very blase porter, who dutifully shot out of the hotel to rescue our luggage, if not us, from possible though improbable danger. We let him haul in our bags, but remained glued to the pavement, utterly absorbed and fascinated, waiting ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... say that it is, is quite another matter. The less our children hear of this, the less they may have to unlearn. Nature studies have long been valued as "a means of grace," because they arouse the enthusiasm, the love of work, which belongs to open-eyed youth. The child blase with moral precepts and irregular conjugations turns with fresh delight to the unrolling of ferns or ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... the vices of both sexes; the unbridled licentiousness of the courtesan coupled with the devotion of a man for horses, wine, and fencing; in short, her eccentric character, as it would now be called, kept a passion alive which would else have quickly died away in his blase heart. Nothing would induce him to follow Jeannin's advice to leave Paris for at least a few weeks, although he shared Jeannin's fear that the statement they had been forced to give the stranger would bring them into trouble. The treasurer, who had no love affair on hand, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... part of the hall the audience could be divided into two species, one less numerous than the other. First, the devotees of music, who went to nearly every concert, extremely knowing, extremely blase, extremely disdainful and fastidious, with precise views about every musical composition, every conductor, and every performer; weary of melodious nights at which the same melodies were ever heard, but addicted to them, as some people are addicted to vices equally ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the man, that for to swale his vlyes [i.e. flies] He stert in-to the bern, and aftir stre he hies, And goith a-bout with a brennyng wase, Tyll it was atte last that the leam and blase Entryd in-to the chynys, wher the whete was, And kissid so the evese, that brent was al ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... the time passing delightfully. There was no one at present to restrain him when he worried Mrs Gummidge. The tabby daily grew thinner and sadder-eyed. The parrot grew daily more blase. He sneered more and more bitterly, and his eyelid, when closed, struck a chill to the soul ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... inconspicuous people—lucidly apprehended him for what he was: that rare phenomenon, the artist (such he was already calling himself)—the artist whose personality, whose opinions and whose work are in exact accord. The reading public—a body rather captious and blase, possibly—overlooked his rugged diction in favour of his novel point of view; and when word was passed around that the new author was actually in town a number of the illuminati expressed their gracious desire to ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was blase, but he had a heart; his sympathies were slow, but he was not insensible to misfortune. Accordingly he responded with a cry of pity, running his eye over his friend to estimate the ravages of Temperance. Midway in its course ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Even the blase bell-captain, by virtue of his calling a person of few enthusiasms and no illusions, edged up to the desk and inquired the name of the distinguished stranger ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... and that voice is very often out, you know," Pen said, bitterly. "I have heard a great deal of music, in London," he continued. "I'm tired of those professional people—they sing too loud—or I have grown too old or too blase. One grows old very soon, in London, Miss Amory. And like all old fellows, I only care for the songs I heard ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for him; he could do as he liked, lacking nothing and bound by nothing. Neither relatives, nor fatherland, nor religion, nor wants, existed for him. He believed in nothing and admitted nothing. But although he believed in nothing he was not a morose or blase young man, nor self-opinionated, but on the contrary continually let himself be carried away. He had come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as love, yet his heart always overflowed in the presence of any young and attractive woman. He had long been aware that honours ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... by thousands, suffocated by that dense air of human crowdedness, that miasma of brain emanations, and still remain in splendid isolation, as had he worn the magic ring of Gyges. Here is every species of visitor: the money-burdened who "stop" here and cultivate an air of being blase to the wealth of polished splendours; and the less opulent who "stop" cheaply elsewhere and venture in to tread the corridors timidly, to stare with honest, drooping-jawed wonder at its marvels of architecture and decoration, and to gaze with becoming reverence at those persons whom they shrewdly ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... with a passion for adventure. But invariable success in his flirtations had made him blase, and now it was only the absolutely novel that could appeal to him. And there could certainly be no question about the woman who had sent him the present invitation being anything but a commonplace one! Moreover, it ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... faint! (He touches her hands) She's so cold! Quick, Steen, build up the fire! (STEEN goes to the fire and puts on another log, the flames blase up. HOLGER busies himself chafing the woman's hands and covering her with the old cloak that has dropped back from her shoulders) She must have lost her ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... been so often misled by promises that it was only his wholesome Celtic faith and prompt capacity to rebound which kept him from becoming entirely blase. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... savages trying to decide how to play chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradise theme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on the World screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest accommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen too there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to take in old ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... blundering Puritan morality, laughed at country manners, and were whiffed away because the ideals they laughed at were better than their own. Idealism is not funny, however censurable its excesses. As a race we have too much sentiment to be frightened out of the sentimental by a blase cynicism. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... head remained in the clouds. In common with most men whose lot is cast in climes far removed from civilization, Curtis worshiped an ideal of womanhood which was rather that of a poet than of the blase, cynical town-dweller. He had seen death too often to be shocked by its harsh visage, and, perhaps in protest against the idle belief that the crime was preventable, his sympathies were absorbed now by the vision of some fair girl waiting vainly for the bridegroom who would never come. His ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... of Spirit, one smiling and dimpling, the other with her usual air of blase superiority. Here was Blanche Haight, the leader among the sophomores; here were six or eight girls, in fact, chosen from the two classes for the same characteristics, lawlessness and love of fun; last but not least, here was Grace ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... blase Samuel was the embarrassed party. He looked and stammered. Mrs. Wyeth was surprised ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with avidity bred of hope long deferred. The scourge of years of fruitless social striving had rendered her desperate, and she would have staged a ballet on her dining table, with her own ample self as premiere danseuse, did the attraction but promise recognition from the blase members of fashionable New York's ultra-conservative set. From childhood she had looked eagerly forward through the years with an eye single to such recognition as life's desideratum. To this end she had bartered both youth and beauty with ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen. He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a thousand follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man—the most abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his head, suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,—to set fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means of action; the fighting ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... his desk below, was utterly love-bemired, his, the cub's, liking for her was solely for her countless questions, of which he said that "you never could tell where the next one would hit." No singed moth he! To prove it he offered Hugh a very blase query: "What do women ever do with all the answers we ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... perceptible droop of pathos at the other, lent an indescribable piquance to her dimpled smile. The blue orbs which raised to his own with a Sphinxian laugh in their azure depths thrilled him—Holloway, the blase, the hardened theatrical manager, flattered and cajoled by hundreds of beautiful women on the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... this morning I have stated that I am not particularly afraid of anything. Strange as it may seem, this statement still applies. Or put it this way,—I have grown blase. People have threatened me too often. No, gentlemen, you are going to lose your trading privileges, I think. And I am going to remain in my house quite as long ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... Juan was no casuist, nor had ponder'd Upon the moral lessons of mankind: Besides, he had not seen of several hundred A lady altogether to his mind. A little 'blase'—'t is not to be wonder'd At, that his heart had got a tougher rind: And though not vainer from his past success, No doubt ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron |
