"Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cannot be doubted in the main. Surveying them as a whole, we recognize the law of a far-advanced agricultural and mercantile city, marked alike by its liberality and its consistency. In its case the conventional language of symbols, such as e. g. the Germanic laws exhibit, has already quite disappeared. There is no doubt that such a symbolic language must have existed at one time among the Italians. Remarkable instances of it are to be ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... fact; but far more amusing is the man who voluntarily closes himself to truth because, forsooth, it does not come through conventional, or orthodox, or heretofore accepted channels; or because it may not be in full accord with, or possibly may be opposed to, established usages or beliefs. ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... a conventional and unpromising opening into a vivid realistic story of an ambitious youth's perilous journey to the Klondike. Author writes from personal experience of the overland route, and principal characters reveal qualities ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... the coinage of King Edward III show in conventional fashion the King standing in the waist of a ship with a high bow and poop, the red-cross banner of St. George at the stern and the lions of England and the lilies of France emblazoned on his shield. The device typifies his claim to the sovereignty of the narrow seas ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... observer, with a keen sense of humor and unfailing tact, fond of personal anecdote, and with a mind stored with recollections from association with every grade of society, he was a most engaging companion. The charm of his manner was not conventional, nor due to intercourse with refined society, but came from a sense of delicacy and a refinement of feeling which was innate, and which showed itself in him under all circumstances. He was in the widest and best sense of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... Blount, the conventional Blount, would have been self-conscious and embarrassed, as any human being is when he is caught talking to himself. But with the transformation had come a battering down of doors in the house of the broader ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... as governed by the invariable laws of nature, and as depending on the conventional ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... occurred. Against all conventional rules and all accepted traditions of fiction, I am obliged to state that Mrs. Pottinger did NOT rise up and order the trembling Prosper to leave the house! She only gripped the arm of her chair a little tighter, leaned forward, and disdaining ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... had meant to say. He had meant to say, "We shall see each other." Perhaps she guessed. Her hand rested on his, warm and strong and kind, as though nothing had changed at all. Because they were grown up she did not hold back in a conventional reserve. If only he could have cried she would have sat down on the steps beside him, and put her arm ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... implementation of human rights, fundamental freedoms, democracy, and the rule of law; to act as an instrument of early warning, conflict prevention, and crisis management; and to serve as a framework for conventional arms ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... despatched Lieutenant Colonel Laurens, one of his aids de camp, with all the information relative to the enemy, as well as to his own army, which might be useful to D'Estaing. Lieutenant Colonel Laurens was authorized to consult on future conjoint operations, and to establish conventional signals for the purpose of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... theoretical value as a memoria technica, which, by substituting letters for figures, helps us to retain the latter in our minds. This does not mean that figures are, in fact, letters, but it is a conventional substitution which has a practical advantage. What memoria technica is to the ordinary memory, the theory of mechanics should be ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... will. That man back there, Denslow—he's the sort who would kiss a girl and then crawl about it afterwards. I won't. I'm not sorry. A strong man can digest his own sins. I kissed you because I wanted to. It wasn't an impulse. I meant to when we started. And you're only doing the conventional thing and pretending to be angry. You're not angry. Good God, girl, be yourself once ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the results in forming for themselves any of the larger conclusions about organisms. Seeing and knowing—without the ability and habit of thinking—is not an uncommon or surprising result of our conventional laboratory work. There is only one way to get the habit of right "following through" in reasoning; this is, always to do the thing. When data are observed or are furnished it is a pedagogical sin ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... this speech from any that I looked for—so different from what the usage of our conventional world would have seemed to justify—so strange for one so timid, so silent usually on the subject of her own griefs, as Julia Clifford—that I was absolutely confounded. Where had she got this courage? By what strong feeling had it been stimulated? Had I been at that ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... communication then adds in proof of his position, the names of several distinguished jurists who postponed the beginning of their legal studies, or at least their legal practice, to a time of life quite beyond the conventional student period. Mr. Otis then declares his conviction that a young man may well procrastinate his legal studies until he shall have attained the age of thirty or even of forty years. He declares his belief that such postponement will as a rule lead to better result than can be attained ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... the classic poets, and of checking the outbursts of imagination by the rules of common sense, simply incapacitated the poets of the period from producing works of the highest order. And its insistence upon man as he appeared in the conventional, urban society of the day as the one true theme of poetry, its belief that the end of poetry was to instruct and improve either by positive teaching or by negative satire, still further limited its field. One must remember ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... only got to apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits really are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was astonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of the philosophical language of his ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... wickedness as I had formerly been of my charms, I steered my friends to the Point by the conventional means of the rudder. Captain Pharo, who had been so congenially occupied that he had not even missed me, heaped encomiums upon me, and receiving Uncle Coffin almost with tears of joy in his eyes, led him ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... illustrates some moral lesson with the triteness and crudity of a Sunday-school book, and of such is the career of Lady Hester Stanhope, a Pitt on the mother's side, and more of a Pitt in temper and disposition than her grandfather, the great Commoner himself. Her story contains the useful but conventional lesson that pride goeth before a fall, and that all earthly glory is but vanity, together with a warning against the ambition that o'erleaps itself, and ends in failure and humiliation. That humanity will profit by such a lesson, whether true or invented for didactic purposes, is doubtful, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... she sits, a high priest of Heliopolis. She is dressed in a long, white smock, in which there is no indication of folds. On her head is a wig, from under which, in front, her own hair shows. Her flesh is yellow, the conventional tint for women, as brownish red was for men. Her eyes are made ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... return your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said untruthfully. "Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I do keep count ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... help to correct a prevailing misconception as to the morals and mind of the typical English peasantry. It is certain that the conventional peasant of literature, the broad-mouthed rustic in a smock-frock, dull-eyed, mulish, beetle-headed, doddering, too vacant to be vicious, too doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... step forward. No conventional word would rise to her lips. They only stiffly uttered the ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... not worthy of her love—no, not yet. He must prove himself a man first. He must redeem the homestead, and then he would speak. Sharp and fierce was the struggle raging in his breast. He had thought it would be a simple matter to come and talk to her on this night. He would bid her a conventional good-bye, and go back to his work, cheered and strengthened. But he little realized how his heart would be stirred by her presence as she sat there ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... painted the Judgment of the Soul, the scene which is usually represented in such cases. The soul of the dead woman, led by two funeral genii, the one hostile, the other favourable, was bowing before Osiris, the great judge of the dead, seated on his throne, wearing the pschent, the conventional beard on the chin, and a whip in his hand. Farther on, the dead woman's actions, good or bad, represented by a pot of flowers and a rough piece of stone, were being weighed in scales. A long line of judges, with heads of lions, hawks, or jackals, were awaiting in hieratic attitudes the result ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... merely performed the routine duties of the secretary, but he has studied the case, and has presented in an analytical and striking form a good many facts not apparent on the surface, had he only given us the stereotyped matter in the conventional way; and it seems to me that this augurs well for the future of the Secretary's office. I trust he can ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... scattered red berries showed even as they rode quickly over the grass. In the center of things were the two cabins Francis had spoken of; one quite large—Francis seemed given to understatement—and the other of the conventional cabin size. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... 4th instant came to hand the day before yesterday. I have turned to the Conventional history, and enclose you an exact copy of what is there on the subject you mentioned. I have also turned to my own papers, and send you some things extracted from them, which show that the recollection of the President has not been accurate, when he ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... searching for new regions in the Art to which I am a servant, it seemed to me that they might be found lying far, and rarely trodden, beyond that range of conventional morality in which Novelist after Novelist had entrenched himself—amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tortures of Tantalus until in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire. Then he is free to go on so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged from that evil without intervention of an angry deity or a conventional devil with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer punishment, but under the immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered exactly according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would scarcely ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... keen sportsman, and dearly loved a day with his gun. As a boy, on his own Highland hills, he had been addicted to sporting a good deal without the formality of a licence, and the absolute freedom from conventional trammels in the wild North was a source of much gratulation to him. Perhaps he enjoyed his outings all the more that he was a stern disciplinarian—so deeply impressed with a sense of duty that he would neither allow ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... consists of the larger whole into which he weaves them. Of course, even in the case of ordinary verbal expression, the thought often comes first before its clothing in words, when there is a certain process of choice and fitting; and in painting there is always the possibility of varying conventional forms; yet even so, in large measure, the elements of the arts are themselves expressions, in which a unity of form ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... pure accident. Elaine had no intentions whatever of following the man who had left Arles with such boorish brusqueness, without even the conventional good-bye at the breakfast-table. She had come to Nimes because she was a worker, because this town contained special ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... say something purely conventional but it popped out when he opened his mouth—the ugly thought that was gnawing at ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... each one as they came on board, happy and smiling at the idea of a breakfast on the deck of a steamer, a novel amusement which made these insatiable pleasure-seekers forget the fashionable restaurants and the conventional receptions ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... columns of a print intended for young and old about the evening lamp would swiftly delete from this invocation, if not the name of Deity itself, at least the greater number of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady overbore by sheer mass of tone production the strident soprano of Lew Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... pools are marked by Arthur Putnam's beautiful Mermaid Fountain, in duplicate. The crowning figure is by no means the conventional mermaid. She is free, full of grace, charmingly poised. The bifurcated tail is original and gives sculptural distinction as well as greater human appeal. The figure is instinct with a spirit of play but is not boisterous. Arthur Putnam is a Californian who has greatly influenced the development ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... and action by a remarkable intuition of right and wrong, and it was interesting to see how surely and smoothly she cut sophistry straight through to the truth which it muffled and distorted. Men and women she valued solely for their intrinsic worth, and never by conventional standards. A fugitive slave and the Prince of Wales would have been treated by her in a way which would have assured them both that the different circumstances of their condition did not obscure their ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... most striking trait in the Russian character is his lack of practical force—the paralysis of his power of will. The national character among the educated classes is personified in fiction, in a type peculiarly Russian; and that may be best defined by calling it the conventional Hamlet. I say the conventional Hamlet, for I believe Shakespeare's Hamlet is a man of immense resolution and self-control. The Hamlet of the commentators is as unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet as systematic theology ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... "'Tis no conventional speech when I say I am glad to see you alive and well, Mr. Burke," said Clive. "Have you come ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon the church steps, and with the old conventional wave-border that is called Etruscan in our modern jargon. From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean mild faces of saints and Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists with half-human, half-animal eyes and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... vol. vi. p. 7. The only lie which degrades a man in his own estimation and in that of others, is that told for fear of telling the truth. Au reste, human society and civilised intercourse are built upon a system of conventional lying. and many droll stories illustrate the consequences of disregarding the dictum, la verit n'est pas tonjours ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Supreme Council, in which capacity he is even more important than as Ambassador, represents a new strain in American politics. His mental habits bewilder the President, shock the proper and somewhat conventional Secretary of State, and throw such repositories of national divinity as Senators Lodge and Knox into ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... conventional standards, have no respectability; and who, having no conventional consciences, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... and the evident fact that, as regards station, it can scarcely have reached mediocrity. He is one of those who appear to live for the most vulgar motives that are admissible among men of any culture, and whose refinement, such as it is, is purely of the conventional class of habits. Ignorant, beyond the current opinions of a set; prejudiced in all that relates to nations, religions, and characters; wily, with an air of blustering honesty; credulous and intolerant; bold in denunciations ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... rushing down long, stony ravines, plunging over respectable, well-to-do masonry dams, skirting once costly villas, whispering between dark defiles of rock, and otherwise disporting itself as becomes a well-ordered, conventional, self-respecting mountain stream, uncontaminated by the encroachments and frivolities ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... from the time when left an orphan; in the year of her majority she had become her own mistress and the mistress of the Searight estate. But even at that time she had long since broken away from the conventional world she had known. Lloyd was a nurse in the great St Luke's Hospital even then, had been a probationer there at the time of her mother's death, six months before. She had always been ambitious, but vaguely so, having no determined ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... General opinion of a man is during his lifetime often wrong, for some time after his death almost always so: and the absolute balance is very seldom reached till a full generation—something more than the conventional thirty years—has passed. Meanwhile, though all readers who have anything critical in them will be constantly revising their impressions, it is well not to put one's own out as more than impressions. It is only a very few years since I myself came to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine, his success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come down and redeem us from virtue," ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... without the aureole of Divinity, as he appeared to those who knew him from his boyhood, and who said, "Are not his brethren still with us?" It is true that it is still not real enough. The dresses are too beautiful—everything is conventional. We have here not the real Christ, the Jew, the outcast and the vagabond. For him we must wait till Vereschagin or some other realist painter may bring us reality. But even behind all the despisers of conventional Christian art, we have at least a sufficiently human ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... taken one hasty step backward, impelled to it by the fierce anger blazing from those stern gray eyes. But now he paused, and, for the only time on record, discovered the conventional language of polite society inadequate to express ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... tenderness will be evident in this, as in preceding poems, especially in the choice of adjectives. But indeed the combination of certain words had become conventional; as "The hard tree," "The nails great and strong," and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... though retained among algae, the Cryptomonadaceae and Peridiniaceae, like Euglena and other Chlorophyceae, may be excluded from Thallophyta and ranged among the flagellate Protozoa. It is doubtful, however, whether the conventional distinction between plants and animals will continue to be urged; and the suggestion of Haeckel that a class Protista should be established to receive the forms exhibiting both animal and plant affinities ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... training and natural inclination is conventional and conservative. I am not. To walk in beaten tracks is not easy for me. I want to explore for myself. He thinks a woman has no business in by-paths. Our opposing beliefs do ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... the day. It also happened that although the days were growing colder she arrayed herself fastidiously in a long, light skirt, which she had not worn since she left Cedar, and which with the white hat that matched it became her better than the conventional riding attire. ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... to me, lad?" shouted he to a gruff Fleming, as he passed to and fro before the entrance to his prison-house; but the guard heeded him not. Dick listened; then, repeating his demand, muttered certain conventional expressions, not over-nice either in their form or application. He then began to sing, performing a series of cantabile movements in the most ludicrous manner possible; sometimes chanting a Miserere or an Ave, then breaking into some wild northern ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... yet; but he set himself resolutely to his writing-table, and did not rise until he had written two letters. The first was carefully written in a large round hand, such as is used by copyists in Italy, resembling the Gothic. It was impossible to connect the laboriously formed and conventional letters with any particular person. It was ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... noise, they followed the Frenchman, who was dressed in the conventional garb of the hunters of the Great Lakes. The newcomer moved forward swiftly, and they had all they could do to keep ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... simple politeness, since it was the custom here, to have gone up to receive the elder's blessing, even if he did not kiss his hand. But when he saw all this bowing and kissing on the part of the monks he instantly changed his mind. With dignified gravity he made a rather deep, conventional bow, and moved away to a chair. Fyodor Pavlovitch did the same, mimicking Miuesov like an ape. Ivan bowed with great dignity and courtesy, but he too kept his hands at his sides, while Kalganov was so confused that he did not bow at all. The elder let fall the hand raised to bless them, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... what an interest our neighbours take in our affairs,' he observed. 'They say "those old folk ought to marry; better late than never." That's how people are—wanting to round off other people's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner.' ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... conventional attempts at conversation, and for a time they walked in silence through those fairy aisles where the light fell golden-green and the sun only filtered in tiny broken disks through the delicate lace of the mesquite ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... which moral freedom can be understood. (See ETHICS; KANT.) Though the term "autonomy" in its fullest sense implies entire freedom from causal necessity, it can also be used even in determinist theories for relative independence of particular conditions, theological or conventional. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... ago outstayed an ordinary conventional visit; but Marcus had sent her for a purpose: she was to try and cheer, and, if possible, comfort, this poor girl, so, when Greta rang for tea, she simply stayed on, and towards the end of her visit she thought her young hostess ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... CONVENTIONAL TOUR is taken, the husband should remember that his bride cannot stand the same amount of tramping around and sight-seeing that he can. The female organs of generation are so easily affected by excessive exercise ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... not, however, been satisfactorily explained. Either the obvious meaning of the description and figures there given has been ignored, or the measurements have been applied to a central structure placed upon a hull, much on the lines of a modern "house-boat" or the conventional Noah's ark.(1) For the latter interpretation the text itself affords no justification. The statement is definitely made that the length and breadth of the vessel itself are to be the same;(2) and a later passage gives ten gar for the height of its sides and ten ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... Probably Evan was already offended, or he held to Jack, as a comrade should, or else it was that Tailordom and the pride of his accepted humiliation bellowed in his ears, every fresh minute: 'Nothing assume!' I incline to think that the more ale he drank the fiercer rebel he grew against conventional ideas of rank, and those class-barriers which we scorn so vehemently when we find ourselves kicking at them. Whatsoever the reason that prompted him, he did not respond to Laxley's advances; and Laxley, disregarding him, dealt ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ones are everywhere broad, acute, tender, and religious. They uniformly see what is natural and what is morbid, what is fact and what is fancy, what is cutaneous and what is vital, in men and women. They stand on unreal, conventional terms with nothing. They know healthy from inflamed tissues, and run down, grab, and give one dexterous fatal shake to a tissue of lies. One of Dr. Brown's terriers is not more swift, exact, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... do, sir," cried Beauclerc; the natural vivacity of the young man breaking through the conventional manner. Next moment, with a humble look, he hoped that the general would accompany him, and the look of proud humility vanished from his countenance the next instant, because the general demurred, and Beauclerc added, "Will not you ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... some beehives; the S—— house, where we boarded, and I fell down and broke a bone; the L—— house, where also we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an angel,—a person about eight feet long, flying along past the second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry on the end. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... appropriate, meet, suitable, seemly, condign, appertinent, conformable, consistent, apposite; decorous, conventional, formal, sedate, demure. Antonyms: improper, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... "I am not conventional. I should not dream of marrying unless I found a young lady who possessed everything that I ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... nothing, and just then her father came into the room, and after a few minutes' conventional chat ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... faith, for holiness itself is in love and faith, because the Divine of the Lord is in them. He also said that he did not know what outward holiness is apart from love and faith; and when he thought about it he said that perhaps it is something counterfeiting holiness in outward appearance, either conventional or hypocritical; and that such holiness is kindled and sustained by spurious fire from the love ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... rather shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By "eloquence" I naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the dressing-up of conventional sentiment, eloquence the fearless expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression of emotion—fearless, that is, of ridicule, or of indifference in the hearer—has been an inestimable strength to France. It ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... to extend the boundaries of free discussion is made in the two dramas, "Leonarda" (1879) and "A Glove" (1883), which both deal with interesting phases of the woman question, and both wage war against conventional notions of right and wrong. The former elucidates the attitude of society toward the woman who has been compromised (whether justly or not), and the latter its attitude toward the man. I confess there is something a trifle hazy in his exposition of the problem in "Leonarda;" and I am unable to ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... presents a central rosette, which passes over by light conventional floral forms into the general pattern of the ceiling. The frieze also, which is made of the same material, presents a similar but somewhat more compact floral pattern as its chief motive. Neither of these, though they belong to an old and never extinct species, has as yet attained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Party," when the reins of government were taken from the discredited Cabal, is not matter for these pages, neither are we much concerned to know that he was greedy of wealth and honours, corrupt himself, and a corrupter of others. This is the conventional character of all statesmen of all dates and in all ages, reflected in the mirror of envious opposition; no one believes the description to be true. Judged by the moral standard of his contemporaries, ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... It was the conventional hotel bedroom. A dressing-table stood in the window; the bed, curtained and draped, looked inviting in its corner. A lamp stood on a small table littered with books and papers; an array of pipes and cigar-holders were strewn carelessly on the marble ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... at Thebes and other places, may not be of a Pharaonic period, but, from the simplicity of their form, we may suppose them similar to those of the earliest age, in which, too, the conventional number of six sides had probably always been adopted. They were marked with small circles, representing units, generally with a dot in the centre; and were of bone or ivory, varying ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... small ability. Even without practice, she could sometimes restore dramatic situations she had witnessed by re-creating, before her mirror, the expressions of the various faces taking part in the scene. She loved to modulate her voice after the conventional manner of the distressed heroine, and repeat such pathetic fragments as appealed most to her sympathies. Of late, seeing the airy grace of the ingenue in several well-constructed plays, she had been moved to secretly imitate it, and many were the little movements and expressions ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge. Upon Damaris, however, perambulation of those paths palled too soon. Her intellect and heart alike demanded wider fields of drama, of religion and of science, above all wider and less conventional converse with average human nature, than this triumvirate of Victorian sibyls was willing or capable to supply. It is undeniable that, although words and phrases, whole episodes indeed, were obscure even unintelligible to her, she found the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini and Saint Simon more ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... conception in order to approach the perfect face—so the poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal manhood, divide the kingdom of character. "The true man cannot be a fragmentary man," said Plato. Is he not one-sided who masters the conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in drunkenness and gluttony? "Pleasure must not be his sole aim," said the accomplished Chesterfield. "I have enjoyed all the pleasures of the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret their loss. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... march on them; nor did it seem at all odd to people naturally so hospitable as the denizens of Brookfield, that the stranger of yesterday should be the guest of to-day. Kindness of heart, combined with a great scheme in the brain, easily put aside conventional rules. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... has been lately discovered[132] seems to prove beyond a doubt that Boethius was a Christian, and wrote orthodox treatises on disputed points of theology; but for some reason or other he fell back on his early philosophical studies, rather than on his formal and conventional Christianity, when he found himself in the deep waters of adversity and imminent death. He represents himself in the "Consolation" as lying on his dungeon-couch, sick in body and sad at heart, and courting the Muses ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... wintry sun, bright without warmth, anxious without thought, distrustful without conscious cause. His mouth was violent and domineering, his chin flat and long. Thin and very tall, he had the bearing of a gentleman who relies upon the conventional value of his caste, who knows himself above others by right, and beneath them in fact. The carelessness of country life had made him neglect his external appearance. His dress was that of a country-man whom peasants ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen —that bubbling from .. the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes. Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours —watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... not disposed to act in a hasty way. Only I don't mean to let conventional notions about an English clergyman hinder my providing Melanesian islands with a Melanesian ministry. These scholars of ours know very much more, and I imagine possess qualifications of all kinds for their work in Melanesia, greater than ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... So they concluded to be frightened themselves, and ran back to their comfortable apron-strings of opinion held by their grandmothers. Strange as it seems, many of these are persons of piety, taste, and culture. Yet their culture is retrospective, their taste mere dillettanteism, and their piety conventional: to whatever is new in theology, or vital in literature, (at least until the cobwebs of age begin to gather upon it,) and especially to whatever tends to overthrow or greatly modify the ancient order of things, they are unalterably opposed. If occasionally one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... guns. The terms in use for these decks are, assuming the largest ship of the line:—Poop, the deck which includes from the mizen-mast to the taffrail. The upper or spar-deck, from stem to stern, having conventional divisions; as, quarter-deck, which is, when clear for action, the space abaft the main-mast, including the cabin; next, the waist, between the fore and main masts, on which the spars and booms are secured. In some ships ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... her. It was his night of surprises. He failed to recognize the conventional teacher he knew in this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman who fronted him so sure of herself. She seemed to him to swim brilliantly in a tide of flushed beauty, in spite of the dust and the stains of travel. ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... only a plain, outdoors Westerner. He did not know the conventional method of procedure. It did not even occur to him at first that Apartment 12 might still have secrets to tell him after the police and the reporters had pawed over it for several days. But his steps turned back several times to the Paradox ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other devils entered to take its place, and that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... shortcoming of the gentleman who happens at any moment to be acting as Censor. Replace him to-morrow by an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Dramatic Poetry, and the new and enlarged filter will still exclude original and epoch-making work, whilst passing conventional, old-fashioned, and vulgar work without question. The conclave which compiles the index of the Roman Catholic Church is the most august, ancient, learned, famous, and authoritative censorship in Europe. Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that the comparatively ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... from the world apt to reckon him a mere scoffer and destroyer of beliefs. He has more profound faith perhaps than many who took up the sword to defend religion, but he covered his spirit of tolerance with many cloaks of mockery, ashamed to be a hero in conventional trappings, eager to win recognition for his wit rather than immortality for the courage of the convictions he ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... difficult to get on with, and their antiquated notions are perpetually contrasting and conflicting with the established prejudices of polite and well-organized society—sometimes even checking the same for an instant in its easy, conventional flow. They won't see that of all ways of spending time and thought, the most absurdly unprofitable is to waste them on a memory. Yet—O mine excellent friend and cynical preceptor! to whom, for sage instruction, I owe a debt of gratitude that I never mean to ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... reality. And thus he realises the loftiest ambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature. Others, again, retire within themselves. Beneath the thousand rudimentary actions which are the outward and visible signs of an emotion, behind the commonplace, conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain in its undefiled essence. And then, to induce us to make the same effort ourselves, they contrive to make us see ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... scrupulous to a fault. He was an elder of the Kirk, a non-smoker, an abstemious drinker (to be an out and out teetotaler would have been a little too remarkable in those regions for a man of Mr. Rattar's conventional tastes), and indeed in all respects he trod that sober path that leads to a semi-public funeral and a vast block of granite ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... of the big Exchange the uproar was something astonishing. The confusion outside had given me a suggestion that the business of buying and selling stocks was carried on in a somewhat less conventional manner than the trade in groceries. But it had not quite prepared me for ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... The truth, however, is, that from the first he wished to be a lay missionary, not under any Society, and it was only at the instigation of his friends that he accepted ordination. He had an intense dislike of what was merely professional and conventional, and he thought that as a free-lance he would have more influence. Whether in this he sufficiently appreciated the position and office of one set aside by the Church for the service of the gospel may be a question: ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Beaumont and Fletcher, of Massinger and Ben Jonson, poetry and romance were for the most part kept in the background. Such elements lay there behind a substantial barrier of conventional stage machinery and elocutionary scaffolding. In Shakespeare, poetry and romance usually eluded the mechanical restrictions of the theatre. The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys only found poetry ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... The Court of the Universe will never be the resting place of the masses of the people, in spite of the recently added attraction of the band stand, a mixture of Roman and Arabic architecture out of keeping with the surroundings. The conventional architectural motives of this great court do not help very much in tempting one to stay, and if it were not for the great arches on the east and west and the very fine view toward the Column of Progress, I would feel tempted to classify ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... it sounded! Such a host of voices were singing! Far up in front, on a platform, surrounded by several preachers, gray-haired and young, in varied attire, from the conventional black suit and white tie to a farmer's outfit, was a little organ, and a familiar form was sitting back of it and getting its old bellows to roll out the hymn. The organist was no other than Jane, and her face flushed as ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... architectural fashion; but they are as distinctly survivals from a dead past as is the wooden shanty which occupies one of the best sites on Fifth Avenue, in the very shadow of the new Delmonico's. I wish tasteless, conventional, and machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... from ancestor-worship, does not enter largely into Chinese life. There is none of the real 'love of God' found, for example, in the fervent as distinguished from the conventional Christian. And as ancestor-worship gradually loses its hold and dies out ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... answered Rorie, with exceeding coldness. "I suppose all such engagements are subjects for congratulation, from a conventional point of view. My future wife is both amiable and accomplished, as you know. I have reason to be very proud that she has done me so great an honour as to prefer me to many worthier suitors; but I am bound to tell you—as we once before spoke of this subject, at the ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the Athenian temples, rich backgrounds of red or blue serving to throw the sculptural adornments into vivid relief. Buffalo was in this a commentary on classic art, revealing what fine effects may be produced by out-of-door coloring when suited to surroundings. We saw that in our timid, conventional avoidance of exterior colors we had missed something; that cheerful colors might well supplant on our houses the eternal sombre of gray and brown, as they so often and so gloriously ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Some of these are natural relations in the sense that one supplies a corrective to some defect of the other, or that the combination enhances the satisfaction or advantage which would accrue from the consumption of each severally. In other cases the connection is more conventional, as that between alcohol and tobacco. The sporting tastes of man supply a strong sympathetic bond between many trades. The same is true of literary, artistic, or other tastes, which by the simultaneous demand which they make upon several industries, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... how well he knows him," said Emile. They watched the frogs, who, less distrustful, returned to the surface of the pond, winking their carbuncle eyes as they sat upon the water-cresses. The sweet and simple poetry of Nature permeated these two souls surfeited with the conventional things of life, and filled them with contemplative emotion. Suddenly Blondet shuddered. Turning to ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... card at Miss Loraine's door at exactly five o'clock. A Japanese page dressed in uniform ushered me into a conventional but well-furnished reception-room. There sat a young woman in a handsome silk negligee, who invited me to be seated, remarking that Miss Loraine was out, but would soon return, and that she was to entertain me in the interval. In a few minutes ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... his age; which, he had told her, was twenty-three. His fair well-modeled face was now composed and his hazel eyes were brilliant and steady. He had a tall trim military body, and very straight bright brown hair; a rather conventional figure of a well-bred Englishman, Gora assumed; intelligent, and both more naif and more worldly-wise than young Americans of his class: but whose potentialities had hardly been apprehended ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... consequence. She has found a lady to take her by the hand!—not a common case. She can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta. I forget if she says it; I say it. You have heard the story from one of your conventional gentlemen.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... foraging for your own provender. It means activity, variety, novelty, and fun alive; and the more you have of it the more you like it; and the longer you stay the less willing you are to give it up. There is a freedom in it that you do not get elsewhere. All the stiff formalties of conventional life are put aside: you are left free to enjoy yourself as you choose. All in all, it is the very best way we know to ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various |
