"Conceited" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abject Pumblechook, who, being behind me, persisted all the way as a delicate attention in arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing my cloak. My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in being members of ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... she doubted not but she should be able to withstand any of Brunetta's temptations. Her mother interrupting her, cried out, 'Oh, my dear child, though you are endowed with wisdom enough to direct you in the way to virtue, yet if you grow conceited and proud of that wisdom, and fancy yourself above temptation, it will lead you into the worst of all evils.' Here the fairy interposed, and told the Princess Hebe, that if she would always carefully observe ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... worth more than my complexion?" A wattle-bark layman might have expressed himself in stronger language, none the less to the point. But my priest seemed unconscious of what was going on. Besides, the publican was a great and important pillar of the church. He couldn't, as an ignorant and conceited ass, lose such a good opportunity of asserting his faithfulness and importance to ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... cabinet-maker when he went to London. His great genius for furniture design was combined with a love of writing tracts and sermons. Unfortunately for his success in life, he had a most disagreeable personality, being conceited, jealous, and perfectly willing to pour scorn on his brother cabinet-makers. This impression he quite frankly gives about himself in his books. The name of Robert Adam is not mentioned, and this seems particularly unpleasant when one thinks of the latter's undoubted influence on Sheraton's work. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... in Esme's address the face of the national schoolmaster, a grey person, rather conceited in his own wisdom than wise in his own conceit, began to present—as a magic lantern presents pictures upon a sheet—various expressions, all of which partook of uneasiness and indignation. He glanced furtively ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... That was my rather conceited way of looking upon matters then, and there was some ground for my assumption of manliness; but if excuse be needed let me say in my defence that I was suddenly cast into this career of dangerous adventure, and I ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... in the fellow's attitude. I don't imagine there will be until the last moment. He is just a pig-headed, insufferably conceited Englishman, full of class prejudices to his ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... station I will go on ahead," he had said, to her immense relief. "Then, when I have told uncle you are coming, and I have gotten him into his good clothes—uncle is very vain when there are ladies around—then I shall return for you," and he had waved himself like a tall young sapling, in that conceited self-conscious pose peculiar to the stage and to—but Tavia was not sure. Perhaps, after all, he ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... squandered. There was a constant want of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but I had no pattern, and consequently never ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... laughable result. Such is the well-known saying, also attributed to M. Prudhomme, "Tous les arts (masculine) sont soeurs (feminine)." "He is always running after a joke," was said in Boufflers' presence regarding a very conceited fellow. Had Boufflers replied, "He won't catch it," that would have been the beginning of a witty saying, though nothing more than the beginning, for the word "catch" is interpreted figuratively almost as often as the word ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... creature could lead in the people's cause. There were grievous wrongs to be righted, but he held the advocacy of the changes called for by such men as Mackenzie was a hindrance instead of a help to their being secured. Brodie's oldest son was somewhat conceited, and had come to believe he was born to be something else than a farmer. I think the isolation of farm life conduces to develop that notion. The boy brought little in contact with his fellows, does not ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... which I edited some months ago, entitled "Newgate Lives and Trials," {27} but without the slightest idea that it was the name of him who was sitting with us; he, however, thought that I was aware of his name. Belle! Belle! for a long time I doubted in the truth of Scripture, owing to certain conceited discourses which I had heard from certain conceited individuals, but now I begin to believe firmly; what wonderful texts there are in Scripture, Belle! "The ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... give me any of your fine phrases!" he said brutally. "I see what it is—I've made a mistake. You're a stuck-up, conceited little thing. You think because you live in a grand house nobody is good enough for you. But what are you after all? a Schnorrer—that's all. A Schnorrer living on the charity of strangers. If I mix with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... conviction it carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little, an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... voice. "He is like some cunning wild animal. Look at Professor Fortescue! his opposite pole—why it is all clearer, at this distance, than if we were under the confusing influence of their speech. See the contrast between that quiet, firm walk, and the insinuating, conceited tread of the other man. Joseph Fleming comes out well too, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... hastened and read over every line several times. He sat on a stool sprawling his broad feet under the table, well-fed, bursting with health, with a coarse animal face and a red bull neck. He was vulgarity itself: coarse, conceited, invincible, proud of having been born and bred in a pot-house; and Vasilisa quite understood the vulgarity, but could not express it in words, and could only look angrily and suspiciously at Yegor. Her ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... little face entire. And then there grew to be a knuckled knot— An aching kind of core within his throat— An ache, all dry and swallowless, which seemed To ache on just as bad when he'd pretend He didn't notice it as when he did. It was a kind of a conceited pain— An overbearing, self-assertive and Barbaric sort of pain that clean outhurt A boy's capacity for suffering— So, many times, the little martyr needs Must turn himself all suddenly and dive From sight ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... there was less tenderness in his looks, that there was something harsh in his laughter, and a wild madness in his joy. He seemed at the same time to be sure of pleasing, and less ambitious to succeed therein. He had grown reckless, hardened and conceited. Strangely enough he no ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... seen the greenhouses?" demanded Tempest presently. "No? Oh, you must. We're rather conceited over our ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... behind the waves; and the rich red tints he sends out upon the rocks before he sets, are beyond measure beautiful and attractive. Especially, I believe, the Fairies enjoy this time of day, for they are odd little creatures, rather conceited, and fond of everything pretty; consequently they like to be floating about the rocks in their white dresses when the crimson and golden hues of sunset shine on them, knowing very well they look like so many bright ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... sit quiet like dear children and hear me do justice. The way I do it has always been admired. I oughtn't to say that ought I? Sounds so conceited. But I don't mind with you, dears. Somehow I feel as though I'd known you ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... was beginning; but Sydney, quickening his steps, heard no more. He was now in a rage, and disposed to vote Miss Pynsent the most unpleasant, conceited young person of his acquaintance. That anybody should doubt his "gentilhood" was an offence not to be lightly borne. He was glad to remember that he was leaving Culverley next day, and he determined that he would rather avoid the female Pynsents than otherwise when they came to town. He could not ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... give us an unpatriotic feeling to acknowledge the imperfections of our nation or of our government; for communities GROW, not only in size, but also in ability to perform their proper work, just as individuals do. We call a person conceited who thinks that he is perfect, especially if he boasts of it. But his conceit is itself an imperfection and a hindrance to growth. So the patriotic citizen is not one who is unable to see defects in his community, or who refuses to acknowledge ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... true understanding of the feebleness of our nature and our capacities. We do not overload an animal, merely because it evinces a willingness to make an effort. We therefore must not overweight our soul with sorrow. We must not nurse our woe. We must not have that grand, conceited idea of our nobility which demands of us a great long future of melancholy; but rather must we nurse our bodies, suspecting our liver if our soul be heavy, and blaming our chamber if our brow be clouded. Then, if a high intelligence wait at the couch of our sick soul, as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... bed last night, and pop woke up, and seen my candle-light, and he conceited he'd look once and see what it was, and then he seen me, and he don't uphold to ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... me," she said. "But I've had it in my coat pocket for two days...." She pushed her dark hair back from her forehead tragically. "Lydia gave it to me for you the day I went out in my best hat to meet George, and I was such a selfish, conceited pig that he put everything else out of my head, and I forgot all about it till just now, when I was lying awake thinking ... and then ... ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... and it seems almost incomprehensible that in such long colonial experience as ours we have not yet been able to grasp so simple a fact. But here, again, comes in my contention that our failing is absolute lack of observation; unless it be indeed our conceited notion that other people must rise up to our standard. Anyhow, we have lost and are losing heavily ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... didn't seem too conceited to think that all this fuss was being made on our account," growled the captain, as he picked up his spade. "I'd surely make up my mind that something was trying to shoo us away ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... acts were as graciously rewarded. I shall be insufferably conceited for the rest of my life—only it is doubtful if I shall be seen at all. Shall ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a little taken aback, but he looked so conceited, as he stood there coiling and uncoiling his watch-spring tongue, that she suddenly ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... risk of being called conceited I will also state that we boys consider that the stage management was a triumph of inventive art; we worked like beavers for two days, and the results were marvellous, 'if I do ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mightinesses could think of them. The truth is, no such thing was imagined—the whole had its root in causes which more deeply concern the public than Mr. Wood or Mr. Cone. A set of ignorant self-conceited young despots have erected themselves into a body of riot, for the purpose of controling the theatre, and bullying, not only the actors but the audience. Mr. Cone has really no more to do with ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... his teeth!" he muttered. "A little more, and he would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As it is"—he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy—"he is merely one of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and stretching ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... 'intellectual,' which is what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing. It's all the fashion now. If you're clever it's always taken for granted that you're completely without sympathy, understanding, affection—all the things that really matter. Oh, you Christians! You're the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom! Of course," he continued, "I'm the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one thing, they're probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not. My father, who is a clergyman ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... unloved, not forgotten. The will of others, not his own, kept her lover from her side. His weaknesses were of a nature that awakened her pity rather than contempt. If he had been a Hercules physically and a Bacon intellectually, but conceited, domineering, untruthful, and of the male flirt genus—from such weaknesses she would have shrunk with intense repugnance. Her friends thought her peculiarly gentle in disposition. They did not know—and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... a pity," said the boy, with a sigh. "I like Andrew Forbes, though he is a bit conceited and a dandy; but it seems as if I ought to speak to somebody about what I know. My father—my mother? There is no one else I should like to trust with such a secret. But he has left it to my honour, and I feel pulled both ways. What ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too: ... First, a very excellent good-conceited thing; after, a wonderful sweet air, with admirable rich words to it,—and then ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... you wrote, "I am afraid that you are on the way to become conceited." I am afraid myself I am, still I cannot resist telling you, this once, that my audience was very enthusiastic and Mr. Costa said —well, I won't tell you what he said; it might sound conceited. The last thing I sang was ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... doubting only his powers of compression. Possibly work at a drama might have been of advantage to the genius of Scott. He was unskilled in selection and rejection, which the drama especially demands. But he detested the idea of writing for actors, whom he regarded as ignorant, dull, and conceited. "I shall not fine and renew a lease of popularity upon the theatre. To write for low, ill-informed, and conceited actors, whom you must please, for your success is necessarily at their mercy, I cannot away with," he wrote to ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... institutions will necessitate the African having a summit to himself. Only—alas! for the energetic reformer—the African is not keen on mountaineering in the civilisation range. He prefers remaining down below and being comfortable. He is not conceited about this; he admires the higher culture very much, and the people who inconvenience themselves by going in for it—but do it himself? NO. And if he is dragged up into the higher regions of a self-abnegatory religion, six times in ten he falls back damaged, a morally ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... is too true. God has given us a most excellent physic for the soul in all its diseases, but bad and interested physicians, or ignorant and conceited quacks, administer it so ill to the rest of mankind that much of the benefit of ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... our congressional halls, rending and tearing this poor "body politic" of ours till, like the raving demoniacs of old, it is now foaming and wandering crazily around its own preconstructed tomb! while at the head of the Government we have only a surly, self-conceited despot in embryo! "The nation needs (as you say) at this hour the highest thought and inspiration of a true womanhood infused into every vein and artery of its life." There is no gainsaying your arguments on that head, for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it to despise French novels, and that sugared slough of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales and ballads were manful and rational; how to counteract the tendency to shallowed and conceited sciolism, engendered by hearing popular lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only be really learnt by stern methodic study; how to give habits of enterprise, patience, accurate observation, which the counting-house or the library ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... between private notes and formal history. Cicero says that while their author "desired to give others the material out of which to create a history, he may perhaps have done a kindness to conceited writers who wish to trick them out with meretricious graces" (to "crimp with curling-irons"), "but he has deterred all men of sound taste from ever touching them. For in history a pure and brilliant conciseness of style is the highest attainable beauty." "They are worthy of all praise, for they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... as he spoke. Even Gorman does not like to stand self-convicted of being a selfish conceited swine. Ascher laid his hand on my arm as we went ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... same thing happens frequently in the commerce of this world, which has in this instance misled you. When we see a child badly clothed, and of an unpleasing external appearance, we are too apt to despise him, and grow conceited on comparing ourselves with him; and sometimes even go so far as cruelly to address him in haughty and insulting language. But beware, my dear boy, how you run into errors by forming a too hasty judgment. It is possible that in a person so little favoured by nature may dwell an exalted soul, ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... in our naval service to feel conceited about it," Darry smiled, "and you are considerably older than I. Any difference there may be in comfort is your due. Will ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... have to find something better than 'glass eyes' to guide them with; in which it will be no longer competent for those to whom mankind entrusts its dearest interests to go on in their old stupid, conceited, heady courses, their old, blind, ignorant courses,—stumbling, and staggering, and groping about, and smelling their way with their own narrow and selfish instincts, when it is the common-weal they have taken on their shoulders;—running foul of the nature of things—quarrelling ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... much," replied the trapper, "I conceited as much. Yis, I knowed 'twould be a close shave ef ye got 'em, and I feared ye would run a resk that ye oughtn't to run, in ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... book, by a young American, but one in which we take no pleasure. In the first place, it is written in a most execrable style,—all affectation, and verbal wriggling and twisting for the sake of originality. The veriest sophomore ought to be "rusticated" for such conceited phrases as "beautiful budburstiness of bosom,"—"her twin eyes shone forth liquidly lustrous"—and innumerable expressions in the same namby-pamby dialect. But dellacruscan folly is but a trifle compared with the immoral tendency of the descriptions of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... best man at the friend's wedding. Such friendships will work great good so long as they are on the give and take principle, and that nothing is given or taken of the bad qualities which may be in each. A boy without a chum is very likely to grow either conceited or selfish, or both. A good-natured chum is a very useful check. He does not mind chaffing him out of any little absurdities, and rubbing against one another they manage to knock off many odd corners and polish ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... of the year remained, yet the affairs of Lee Sing were in no more prosperous a condition than before, nor had he found an opportunity to set aside any store of taels. Each day the unsupportable Pe-tsing became more and more obtrusive and self-conceited, even to the extent of throwing far into the air coins of insignificant value whenever he chanced to pass Lee in the street, at the same time urging him to leap after them and thereby secure at least one or two pieces of money against the day of calculating. In a similar but ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... rose a little before seven. Breakfast at 8 on tea and toast with some good veal cutlets. Read a Canada paper containing rather more Bristol news than the American papers, also a conceited account of the Falls. A very pleasant breeze. An intelligent gentleman from New York explained the reason for such excessive labour in this country, that a man was better rewarded, and after getting a few dollars he was stimulated to further exertion, and again he was able to make more ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... the scythe and the ax as much as I have without getting some gristle, and the schoolmaster taught me how to use it," I answered. "But there's one thing that no man ought to be conceited about." ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... "institution" with the principles of a republican government giving full play to his powers of sarcasm. On one occasion, when introduced to a slaveholder, he put his hands behind his back, refusing to recognize a man who bought and sold his fellow-beings. The Rev. John Scoble was one of the most conceited men I ever met. His narrow ideas in regard to woman, and the superiority of the royal and noble classes in his own country, were to me so exasperating that I grew more and more bellicose every day we traveled in ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... low-looking little chap, was Dodgy, very fly-looking and very conceited. I didn't like the look of 'im at all, and unbearable as Joe was, it didn't seem to be quite the sort o' thing to get a chap aboard to 'ammer a shipmate you ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... a very wicked state. You are under the dominion of some of the worst of feelings; you are self-conceited, ungrateful, undutiful, unjust, selfish, and," he added in a lower and more ...
— Rollo at Play - Safe Amusements • Jacob Abbott
... the college very popular and taught the boys and girls of Oz their lessons in the easiest possible way. In spite of this, Professor Wogglebug was not a favorite outside his college, for he was very conceited and admired himself so much and displayed his cleverness and learning so constantly, that no one cared to associate with him. Ozma found him of value in ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... does not remember me," said Dan, good-humouredly. "That is not remarkable, but I was conceited enough to think it ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... for sport. The weather was cold and the snow deep, so the meat was good. I also got permission to gather in some vegetables, and from that time, while we remained prisoners, the men had plenty to eat, yet often it was of a poor quality. While a prisoner I learned that the loud and self- conceited men were of little account when danger stared them ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... will ask her here—you see? And you must be as nice as you can. Say pretty things to her—that pleases her more than anything: and make yourself useful, if you get the chance. She's not half a bad little woman; and if you help me, Linda, I shall get in with her yet in spite of her conceited prig ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... signs admonished that we were floating eastward. A shabbily-dressed phrenologist laid his hand on every head which would bend, with half-conceited, half-sheepish expression, to the trial of his skill. Knots of people gathered here and there to discuss points of theology. A bereaved lover was seeking religious consolation in—Butler's Analogy, which he had ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... instruction of your only daughter, Rosalie, to pay me a visit, and I will give him particular directions for a gradual development in piano-playing, up to Beethoven's op. 109 or Chopin's F minor concerto. But I shall find him too fixed in his own theories, too much of a composer, too conceited and dogmatic, and not sufficiently practical, to be a good teacher, or to exert much influence; and, indeed, he has himself a stiff, restless, clumsy touch, that expends half its efforts in the air. He talks bravely of etudes, scales, &c.; but the question with ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited, egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not. Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself. He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... clergyman should be in character, and nothing can be more despicable than conceited attempts at avoiding the appearance of the clerical order; attempts, which are as ineffectual as they are pitiful. Dr. Porteus, now Bishop of London, in his excellent charge when presiding over the diocese of Chester, justly animadverts upon this subject; and observes of a reverend ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... once taken root grew up and flourished. She fancied sailors were not well bred; that they thought too much of themselves or their ships; and, in short, that they were as rough and unpolished as they were conceited. ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... dark-skinned keepers with the slanting, suspicious, unfriendly eyes, with tongues that spoke the one thing and meant the other. All the memories of those six months of deceit, of broken pledges, of unnecessary humiliations, of petty unpoliteness from a half-educated, half-bred, conceited, and arrogant people fell from us like a heavy knapsack. We were again at home. Again with our own people. Out of the happy confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. "Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan." Even the Japanese ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... and subsequently I had a number of Alis. Mahomet was a regular Cairo dragoman, a native of Dongola, almost black, but exceedingly tenacious regarding his shade of colour, which he declared to be light brown. He spoke very bad English, was excessively conceited, and irascible to a degree. No pasha was so bumptious or overbearing to his inferiors, but to me and to his mistress while in Cairo he had the gentleness of the dove, and I had engaged him at 5l. per month to accompany me to the White Nile. Men change ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social status, if it is not already: "That tells the whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only it don't; simply because "that" does not usually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of his preaching, he took us who were his clergy—young, inexperienced and conceited—and made us over. He took us, to whom religion was a profession, and made of it a passion. He was ever patient with us, giving us his best; day after day walking with us around Stuyvesant Square in the morning, sometimes for hours, and then pouring ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... that way of mending a fault," replied her mother; "but I'm not sure that it won't do you more good than a milder method. You are getting to be altogether too conceited and important, my dear, and it is about time you set about correcting it. You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... means and ways of gratifying his senses to a degree impossible to the animals. Some men make a religion of the gratification of their sensuality—their appetites—and become beasts magnified by the power of Intellect. Others become vain, conceited and puffed up with a sense of the importance of their Personality (the false "I"). Others become morbidly introspective, and spend their time analyzing and dissecting their moods, motives, feelings, etc. Others exhaust their capacity for pleasure and happiness, but looking outside ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Sickness may come, they will be the better prepared. Losses will be more easily met and discharged. No man ever succeeded by waiting for something to turn up. The object of this work is not to make people delude themselves by any conceited ideas, but to encourage, to inspire, to enkindle anew the fires of energy laying dormant. The point is, it is not a 'slumbering genius' within people that it is our desire to stimulate, but a 'slumbering energy.' We are content that others should take care of the 'genius'; we are ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in peace and unity. We had all sorts of pastimes; sometimes we mounted up high into the air, and peeped at the stars; then we sank plump down deep below, and looked how the coral builders work till they are tired, that they may reach the light of day at last. But I was conceited, and thought myself much better than my sisters. And so one day, when the sun rose out of the sea, I clung fast to one of his hot beams, and thought that now I should reach the stars, and become one of them. But I had not ascended far, when the ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... Washington described his overseers to Pearce, who was just taking charge, in great detail. Stuart is competent, sober and industrious, but talkative and conceited. "If he stirs early and works late ... his talkativeness and vanity may be humored." Crow is active and possessed of good judgment, but overly fond of "visiting and receiving visits." McKoy is a "sickly, slothful and stupid fellow." Butler, the gardener, may mean well, but ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... conceited, boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and listened unsympathetically when she told me her father ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... and earnest application will do it, with the opening I have. I suppose it sounds conceited, but I have unbounded confidence in myself. What man has done man can do, you know; and why am ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... grief, not apparently because of any faults of Chum's but because, if you will believe it, of my own shortcomings. At least, I can suppose nothing else. For this man had been enthusiastic about him. He had revelled in the tale of Chum's wickedness; he had adored him for being so conceited. He had practically said ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... these two youths?" "O king," she replied, "the youths whom you gave to help the merchant have most carefully tried to carry out your wishes. But the night before last I heard their conversation. The elder was telling the younger a tale, from his own experience, he said. It was a story of a conceited king who had been defeated by another more powerful than he, and obliged to fly with his wife and two children to the sea. There, through the vile trickery of the master of a vessel, the wife was stolen and taken away to far ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Lilly's "Pleasant conceited Comedy," called "Mother Bombie," appeared in 1594, his "Midas" in 1592, and his "Most Excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes" in 1584. "Mother Bombie" represents four servants, treated partly as English, partly as Roman slaves, who ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... was so far the creature of circumstances, that a dry day covered him with dust, and a misty day peppered him with little bits of soot, and a wet day brightened up his tarnished uniform for the moment, and a very hot day blistered him; but otherwise he was a callous, obdurate, conceited Midshipman, intent on his own discoveries, and caring as little for what went on about him, terrestrially, as Archimedes at the taking ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... conceited dawdler in his duties. Shakspeare ridicules Simple as a Bohemian Tartar; both of which terms were ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... holy man that he should be made the companion of the wicked:—What sin have I committed that my stars in retribution of it have linked me in the chain of companionship, and immured me in the dungeon of calamity, with a conceited blockhead, and good-for-nothing babbler:—Nobody will approach the foot of a wall on which they have painted thy portrait; wert thou to get a residence in paradise, others would go ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... this Parthian shot, yet feeling, even in her triumph, that the conceited fool seemed actually relieved at her departure! And for the first time she now thought that she had seen something in his face that she did not like! But her lazy independence reasserted itself soon, and half an hour later, when she had left Aunt Chloe's cabin, she had regained her self-esteem. ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... centaur or of gnome; The gorgon and the labyrinthodon; The clumsy mammoth and the dinosaur; Or all gigantic and unwieldy shapes Which earth has seen in the mysterious past, Would seem in more accord and harmony With such surroundings than the puny form Of insignificant, conceited man. ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... you,' &c.).—I mention this because it is one of the lines for which Mr. Gifford (whose in the Quarterly Rev. drove M. L. mad with a severer fit than she had ever had before) declared me at Murray's shop fit to be whipt as an idle Schoolboy—and, alas, I had conceited it to be a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... To a coarse, conceited chap, like our lieutenant, Marion gave no quarter, but checked him at once, but still in a way that was quite gentlemanly, and calculated to overawe. He kept him at arms' length — took no freedoms with ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... dismissed with an allowance: but the children of these marriages are never admitted to table with company, and are universally treated by the English as an inferior species of beings. Hence they are often shame-faced yet proud and conceited, and endeavour to assume that honour to themselves which is denied them by others. This class may be regarded as forming a connecting link between Europeans and natives. The Armenians are few in number, but chiefly rich. I have several times ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... mind, the various psychical phenomena evinced by the lower animals are not regarded as being either wonderful or extraordinary. Man is a conceited, arrogant individual, and his place in nature has done much toward fostering and enlarging this self-conceit and arrogance. Even in the time of Moses this self-glorification was en evidence. The genesis of the world, as related by this famous historiographer, ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... mother know you're out?" was the provoking query addressed to young men of more than reasonable swagger, who smoked cigars in the streets, and wore false whiskers to look irresistible. We have seen many a conceited fellow who could not suffer a woman to pass him without staring her out of countenance, reduced at once into his natural insignificance by the mere utterance of this phrase. Apprentice lads and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... an opinion out of a mummy! Stove with a candle in it and a transparent door—that's it—it has been the salvation of this family. Don't you fail to write your father about it, Washington. And tell him the idea is mine—I'm no more conceited than most people, I reckon, but you know it is human nature for a man to want credit for a ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... sergeants-at-law. This gentleman stated the case to the jury in a speech partly political and partly theological. Treason was the subject, but, said he, "of such horror, and monstrous nature, that before now, the tongue of man never delivered, the ear of man never heard, the heart of man never conceited, nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practised." In the course of his speech he further stated, that the object of the traitors was "to deprive the king of his crown; to murder the king, the queen, and the prince; to stir up rebellion ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... and Scott could have given us medicines to make us like this cowardly, conceited "jimp honest" fellow, Andrew Fairservice, who just escapes being a hypocrite by dint of some sincere old Covenanting leaven in his veins. We make bold to say that the creator of Parolles and Lucie, and many another ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... replied Conyers, "and I really am a little low about to-morrow. The best race of the day is a quarter-mile race for the 'All Army Cup.' There is a horribly conceited young Engineer of the name of Montague who already regards it as his own property; and saddest of all remains the fact that, notwithstanding his crowing, he can run above a bit; we have nobody in the camp with a chance ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... "How conceited you are!" exclaimed the stag-beetle. "Fly about as a butterfly, indeed! I've come out of the stable of the emperor, and no one there, not even the emperor's favourite horse—that by the way wears my cast-off golden shoes—has any such idea. To have wings to fly! why, we can fly now;" ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the stupid, strutting representatives of littleness! The more insignificant the petty masters, the more conceited are the petty ambassadors. I have no time to see them to-day. We are at peace with the whole world, and our only diplomacy regards marrying and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... told that these lectures are criticised as tending to make you conceited: to encourage in you a belief that you can do things, when it were better that you merely admired. Well I would not dishearten you by telling to what a shred of conceit, even of hope, a man can be reduced ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... thought I was pretty, when I saw myself in the glass," said Robin, with unexcited interest. "It seemed to me that I LOOKED pretty. But, at the same time, I couldn't help knowing that everything is a matter of taste and that it might be because I was conceited." ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... became an object of much attention. I will not say that her peculiar position did not produce something of an independent manner which some called hauteur, and others exclusiveness. Part of this was owing to her education, part to the necessity of repelling sometimes the advances of conceited coxcombs. But she was really a most interesting girl, with much of her father's spirit, resolution, and ability. Her affection for him was only exceeded by his for her. True, their lives were centred in each other too much. But it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for Mr. Francis Osborne's works, and asked him what he thought of that writer. He answered, 'A conceited fellow. Were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him.' He, however, did not alter my opinion of a favourite authour, to whom I was first directed by his being quoted in The Spectator[566], and in whom I have found much shrewd and lively sense, expressed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... neighbour next door, Annora Goldhue: she had three daughters. No, none of them would do. Joan was idle, and Amy was conceited, and Frethesancia had a temper. Little Roese might have done, who lived with old Serena at the mill end; but old Serena could not spare her. At last, as Avice broke her thread for the fourth time, she pushed back the stool on ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... kindness and loyalty in family life as a beautiful and praiseworthy thing. Take the story of Joseph. It begins indeed with an unpleasant picture of an unhappy and unloving family of shepherd brothers. We read of a father's partiality toward the petted favorite, of a spoiled and conceited boy, of the bitter jealousy of the other brothers, and finally of a crime in which they showed no mercy when they sold their hated rival to a caravan of traders to be taken away, it might be, forever. But the story goes on to ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... latter, who know much more than the young novelist does, but have never been able to do anything with their knowledge, hold up their shrivelled, or podgy, or gouty old hands in sorrow, declaring that the success of a boy who was such a dolt, such a good-for-nothing, such a conceited jackanapes at school, only shows what the judgment of the public is worth, and how very low its standard has fallen. But the great public does not think much of decayed schoolmasters at best, and is never surprised ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... conceited, or carried away with any nouelty or strange practise, vnusually practised in this kingdome, or that I will ascribe vnto my selfe to giue any iudiciall approbation or allowance to things mearely vnfrequented, doe I publish, within my booke, this relation of the setting ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... preparation of hog's-wash. But are you sure that he IS a pig? If by any chance he be not?—then, Madam, you are making a grievous mistake. My dear Lady, you are too modest. If I may say so without making you unduly conceited, even at the dinner-table itself, you are of much more importance than the mutton. Courage, Madam, be not afraid to tilt a lance even with your own cook. You can be more piquant than the sauce a la Tartare, more soothing surely than the melted ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... hours to catch by fair means or foul; but he merely waved his tail slowly, as if to say, "One wedding present you don't get!" We slept that night on some hay left in an old barn—lots of mice and gnawy things about; but I could not get nearly as angry at a gnawy mouse as at a fat conceited trout who refused to ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... proud. Her eyes sparkle with disdain and scorn. She is too conceited to love. I should not like to see her making game of poor Benedick's love. I would rather see Benedick waste ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... you never scold at all, even if I'm ever so long in writing. And as for you, you rascal, you write less and less, and shorter and shorter. If I didn't know for certain—but then, of course, you love me? Don't you, you dearest boy? Of course you do, and who wouldn't? Now don't think I'm really so conceited as that, for I only mean it in joke, but in earnest, I might think it if I let myself, for they make such a fuss over me here—you never saw anything like it! The Prince von H—— told Mamma yesterday ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... them of our strength and ability to punish breach of treaty, and, therefore, that a peace made now, before they had been thoroughly beaten, would not be a lasting one, and would only end in worse trouble in the near future. The Afghans are an essentially arrogant and conceited people; they had not forgotten our disastrous retreat from Kabul, nor the annihilation of our array in the Khurd Kabul and Jagdalak Passes in 1842, and believed themselves to be quite capable of resisting our advance on Kabul. No great battle had ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... met with the objection, "Your religion is good for you, ours for us." "You will be rewarded for your good deeds in your way, we in our way." They found they had to deal with one of the proudest and most conceited races on earth. Their very religion, as we have before said, encourages this conceit, by leading them constantly to make "a merit" of their good actions, or what they suppose such; while it inculcates neither contrition nor penitence. The peculiar ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... fleet at its coming again: and so do endeavour to bring disgrace upon my Lord. But I hope all that will not do, for the King loves him. Hence by water to the Wardrobe, and dined with my Lady, my Lady Wright being there too, whom I find to be a witty but very conceited woman and proud. And after dinner Mr. Moore and I to the Temple, and there he read my bill and likes it well enough, and so we came back again, he with me as far as the lower end of Cheapside, and there I gave him a pint of sack ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... eyes, said, suddenly: "Athalia, don't be foolish and conceited. You go right along to your bed; Jane and Mary'll ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland |
