"Extravagant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of work and from overmuch corn, galloped about in a very extravagant manner, and said to himself: "My father surely was a high-mettled racer, and I am his own child in speed and spirit." On the next day, being driven a long journey, and feeling very weary, he exclaimed in a disconsolate tone: "I must have made ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... thousand years than our present method, may we not venture to conjecture that the traces of their very ancient history have been, for that reason, better preserved? and that their pretensions to a very high antiquity, which we have been used to think extravagant and ridiculous, are really not without foundation? If so, we might then allow a little more latitude to ourselves, and conclude that we are in fact as old as they, and might have been as sensible of it, if ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the first effective counter-attraction to the towns. Their material advantages the country cannot hope to rival; nor can any conceivable evolution of rural life furnish a real counterpart to the cheap and garish entertainments of the modern city. Take, for example, the extravagant use of electric light for purposes of advertisement, which affords a nightly display of fireworks in any active business street of an American city far superior to the occasional exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, which was the rare treat of my childhood ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... means, Frank felt that it was extravagant to ride uptown, when he might have walked, but he felt some confidence in the success of his visit to Mr. Percival, and entered a Fourth Avenue horse car. It so chanced that he seated himself beside a pleasant-looking young married lady, who had with ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Remusat was of medium height, with a smooth, white face, obliging, amiable, and with natural politeness and good taste; but he was extravagant, lacked order in managing his own affairs and consequently those of the Emperor. This lavish expenditure, which is admirable from one point of view, might have suited any other sovereign; but the Emperor was economical, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... field at Baguio has been referred to as another evidence of extravagant governmental expenditure. It is true enough that it was in the first instance an expensive luxury, as an immense amount of earthwork had to be done in order to make a level piece of ground of sufficient size. The field ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... get it heard and considered and this "militancy" secured. The anti-suffrage press believed that it would kill the movement and it was this belief which encouraged them to give it the widest possible publicity. The wilder and more extravagant the "militants" became the more they were quoted, described and advertised in every way. The sort of "copy" which anti-suffrage papers demanded was supplied by them in cartloads and not at all by law-abiding suffragists, who were an immense majority of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... in the Clothworkers' Hall in Pynchon-lane, near Tower-street." About the Tower and its faubourgs the buildings were stated to be as elegant as they were in the city itself, although this was hardly very extravagant commendation. From this district a single street led along the river's strand to Westminster, where were the old and new palaces, the famous hall and abbey, the Parliament chambers, and the bridge to Southwark, built of stone, with twenty arches, sixty feet high, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... man of letters was momentarily turned into an avenging demon, breathing wrath and destruction upon his adversary. The most extravagant and reckless crimes looked comparatively easy just then, and very tempting. He thought of getting into Logotheti's cellar with enough dynamite to blow the house, its owner and himself to atoms, not to speak of half the Boulevard ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially, but could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating—he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey was in my toils; in less than an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a further abridgment of regal authority, as a more effectual remedy to their fears and jealousies. Finding the king supported by more forces and a greater party than they had ever looked for, they seemingly abated somewhat of those extravagant conditions which they had formerly claimed; but their demands were still too high for an equal treaty. Besides other articles, to which a complete victory alone could entitle them, they required the king, in express terms, utterly to abolish Episcopacy; a demand which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Auguste's exasperation to a crisis. He returned to the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, turning over in his mind the wildest and most extravagant plans of action. He reached home at half-past eight o'clock, half famished, and so exhausted with hunger and distress that he listened to Madame Vauthier when she asked him to share her supper, which happened to be a mutton stew ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... and still was, an era of extravagant speculation. Mushroom fortunes were springing up, and their possessors, as socially ambitious as they were socially inept, invaded Fifth Avenue strong in the belief in the all-conquering power of the Almighty Dollar. In most cases they did not last long. But they served a purpose. They ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... an account of his interview with the landlord to his wife, who no sooner heard of the extravagant proposal he made, than she raised her ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... Comte is colossal. Except here and there in an entirely self-taught thinker, who has no high standard with which to compare himself, we have met with nothing approaching to it. As his thoughts grew more extravagant, his self-confidence grew more outrageous. The height it ultimately attained must be seen, in his ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... a cup of coffee; and, as a matter of course, the coffee-pot, whatever metal it may have been when he took it up, was gold when he set it down. He thought to himself that it was rather an extravagant style of splendor, in a king of his simple habits, to breakfast off a service of gold, and began to be puzzled with the difficulty of keeping his treasures safe. The cupboard and the kitchen would no longer be ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... mystery which spread out before them in such gorgeous panorama, they plunged into the glittering waters with waving swords and pennants, with shouts of praise and joy upon their lips, and inaugurated that series of prodigious enterprise, extravagant deeds of hardihood, and tremendous feats of prowess which still remain unsurpassed in the annals of history for brilliancy, picturesqueness, and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... experience would seem to confirm the supposition. The policy of the Jesuits, however, was based on isolation of their missions, and how this might have worked is matter at least for speculation. It was on account of the isolation which they practised that it was possible for the extravagant calumnies which were circulated as to their rule and riches to gain belief. It was on account of isolation that the first conflicts arose betwixt them and the authorities, both clerical and lay. That the Jesuits were more highly esteemed than the other religious orders in Spanish America in ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... imparted to me will, I dare say, appear at first very extravagant, but before you laugh at it, give me time to explain. It is the existence of a marvelous opal mine in the interior; the precise location of which is known to no ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... by a cousinly understudy of the German Emperor William the Second; the one son of the marriage had been adopted, as heir to his crown, by the childless King of Hungaria; the handsome and lamentably extravagant old Duke of Northmoreland was dead; his title and vast estates had passed to a distant and disagreeable relative; and the widowed Grand Duchess, with her one fair daughter, had lived for years in a pretty old house with a high-walled garden, at Hampton Court, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... the nations? The chief reason is obvious. We have been unwilling to let our poets live while they were working for us. True, we have the reputation of being an open-handed, even an extravagantly generous folk. But thriftiness in small things often goes with an extravagant disposition, much as manifestations of piety often accompany wickedness like flying buttresses consciously placed outside the edifice. We have spent millions on bronze and marble book-palaces which shall house the works of the poets. We have ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... fixed date, proved to have been in existence "in or close upon the first half of the decade commencing in 1585," and the admission of all scholars that it preceded Marlowe's "Edward II." If, therefore, Marlowe wrote one or both parts of the "Contention," the extravagant assumption must be made "that his mind was so thoroughly disciplined at the period when he produced 'Tamburlaine,' 'Faustus' and the 'Jew of Malta' that he was able to lay aside every element, whether of thought or expression, by which those plays are ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... The movements of her nephew, Ned Hinkley, were also a somewhat pleasant study, after a fashion of his own. Sitting in a corner, he amused himself by drawing forth his "puppies," and taking occasional aim at a candle or flowerpot; and sometimes, with some irreverence, at the curved and rather extravagant proboscis of his worthy uncle, which, cocked up in air, was indeed something of a tempting object of sight to a person so satisfied of his skill in shooting as the young rustic. The parties being thus arranged in a fit attitude ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... that, sir," said a little matter-of-fact man, who had now interposed his reasonable doubts for the twentieth time during Murphy's various extravagant declarations, and the interruption only ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... system of compulsory education—of enforced attendance at the high school—of all manner of children from the humbler walks of life were found to result in filling their simple heads with extravagant notions and worldly ambitions for which nature did not intend them, which breed discontent with the kind of work for which they are suited, which separate them from their parents and their congenial inheritance, and impel them in mistaken paths to ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... fear that possibly Dick or Bill was circling around and around in ever-deepening gloom with one's elected for the night. Nancy had permanently impressed herself upon the imagination of discerning Woodbridge youth, and it was hardly extravagant that Tom should look forward ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in history when they are most written are those in which a nation or mankind renews its youth. Their production in the days of Elizabeth was enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate, their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody. As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded in song during the Caroline period, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it—and making notes—in cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... people, and they are perfectly able to take care, and do take very good care, to protect themselves, and to make sure that their accounts are just. I further think they are very provident, as can be proved by the amount of deposits in the banks. I don't think they are an extravagant people at all. In my opinion they are a very careful, active, energetic, intelligent people, as a rule, much more so than will be found among the same class of people in other parts of ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... Sir Horace Mann, June 18.-Resignations. New ministry. Epigram on Lord Holderness. The two Miss Gunnings. Extravagant dinner at White's. Bubb de Tristibus. Dodington's bombastic eulogium on the Prince. Sale of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... returned to their accustomed mode of life, hoping to enjoy, without anxiety, the state they had now established and confirmed. Hence arose many of those evils which usually result from peace; for the youth having become more dissolute than before, more extravagant in dress, feasting, and other licentiousness, and being without employment, wasted their time and means on gaming and women; their principal study being how to appear splendid in apparel, and attain a crafty shrewdness in discourse; he who could make the most poignant remark being considered ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Hardly had the curtain dropped, when the little danseuse found herself surrounded by competent authorities, questioning her as to where and how she had obtained her dress. She replied that she had bought it at an extravagant price from a French modiste in the city. She had rifled no tomb, but honestly paid down golden ounces, in exchange for her lawful property. To the modiste's went the officers of justice. She also pleaded innocent. She had bought ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... excitement; probably few men would have become so insane on account of what only changed his fortunes, not himself, or, rather, had so far only changed himself for the worse. All this bluster and talk made no impression on either Mr. Burnet or Mitchell, who waited quietly until Rayner's extravagant delight should have ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... Mr. Richard O'Royster always maintained that he was the best of good fellows. Many, indeed, went so far as to say he had no faults whatever; and while such an encomium seems, on the face of it, to be extravagant, its probability is much strengthened by the fact that whatever he had they always came into the possession of sooner or later. If he had any faults, therefore, they must have known it. They would never have allowed anything ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... the moonlight. The broad glare of day is so garish and extravagant. Besides, there is a restlessness and a buz no human being, at least no sensible human being, can endure. Everything is on the stir. Every creature, however paltry and insignificant, whether moth, mote, or atom, seems busy. Whereas, one serene soft gaze of the moon appears to allay nature's ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... should such idle fancies have come to him, he would have looked upon himself as little better than a fool, but now that he found himself for the first time in a foreign country, surrounded by such strange and unusual sights and sounds, all conducive to extravagant imaginations, the wish for some extraordinary and altogether unusual experience took possession of him with a singular vehemence to which he had heretofore been altogether ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... I came to Dunchester and took up our abode in a quaint red-brick house of the Queen Anne period, which we hired for a not extravagant rent of 80 pounds a year. Although the position of this house was not fashionable, nothing could have been more suitable from a doctor's point of view, as it stood in a little street near the market-place and absolutely in the centre ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... it, and not as far as could be from tears. The small vexation of his failure to think her treasure worth anything she might have paid for it, the intimation that he might join the camp of the enemy in finding her extravagant, had acted apparently ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... crocodile was stuffed in the usual manner, and makes a capital article in their public museum at Amsterdam, where the exhibitor relates the whole story to each spectator, with such additions as he thinks proper. Some of his variations are rather extravagant; one of them is that the crocodile turned about, snatched the couteau de chasse out of Monsieur's hand, and swallowed it with such eagerness that it pierced his heart ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... In the following portrayal of the ancient regime, the bombast and credulity of the day overflows in the most extravagant exaggerations (Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 300, Report, by Saint-Just, February 26, 1794.): "In 1788, Louis XVI. Caused eight thousand persons of both sexes and of every age to be sacrificed in the rue Meslay and on the Pont-Neuf. These scenes were repeated by the court on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the records into the form of legends, not claiming for them the authenticity of sober history, yet giving nothing that had not a historical foundation. 'All the facts herein contained,' says the writer, 'however extravagant some of them may be deemed, will be found in the works of sage and reverend chroniclers of yore, growing side by side with long acknowledged truths, and might be supported by learned and imposing references in the margin.' To discard ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... fantastic and putting a strain on our credulity.' This is rather like describing the travels of Baron Munchausen as 'unconvincing.' The whole story of 'The Dynamiter' is a kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story 'The Destroying Angel' is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least comprehend the ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... never horrid or low," he returned, "about anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends—as I see them myself: what I can't do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up—!" But he ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... man, and afterwards to fall into a sea whence it made its way to Egypt. Sometimes it carried down from its celestial sources branches and fruits unlike any to be found on earth. The sea mentioned in all these tales is perhaps a less extravagant invention than we are at first inclined to think. A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the Bahr el-Abiad unites with the Sobat, and with the Bahr el-Ghazal. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... butchers of Cincinnati. They appeared in broad-brimmed white beavers and Panamas, blue cotton trousers, from the Opelousa manufactories, draped in elegant blouses of ecru cloth, in boots of brilliant colours, and extravagant shirt-frills; upon shirt-fronts, cuffs, cravats, on their ten fingers, even in their ears, an assortment of rings, pins, diamonds, chains, buckles, and trinkets, the cost of which equalled the bad taste. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... admirers, in which they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the Idylls of the King the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like fir-tree, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... of a solar system or the experiences of a life; that a universe may be compressed into an atom, or a molecule expanded into a macrocosm; therefore I expect nobody to sneer at my Rosamond as childishly nappy in her simple honeymoon, or at me for making extravagant and unsupported assertions, when I say that this hour and a half, and these four miles out to Clarendon Park and back,—the lifting and the tucking in, and the setting off, the sitting side by side in the ripe October air and the golden twilight, the noting together every pretty turn, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... that the Disposer of men and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns and other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that any one fish may be considered a supernumerary. But when Captain Coram's ship sprung a leak and the carpenter could not stop it, and the passengers had made up their minds that it was all over with them, all at once, without any apparent reason, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sometimes amounting almost to frenzy, to get a sight of the convicted murderer, to be present at the condemned sermon, to see his last agonies on the scaffold, to examine the scenes of his crime, even to obtain a lock of his hair or a piece of his garments, is another proof of the disordered and often extravagant desires which the longing for strong and tragic excitement will produce in a large portion of society. Rely upon it, deep emotion, if rightly managed and properly directed, is more attractive than either amusement or licentiousness. Suffering exacts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... tried it in many instances himself, and always with the same result, especially when exhausted with fatigue. His pulse was increased, his appetite improved, and his whole frame invigorated. Judging from the accounts before us, we should say that the Chinese were extravagant in their ideas of the virtues of this herb; but that it is undoubtedly a cordial stimulant, to be compared, perhaps, in some degree, with the aromatic root of Meum athamanticum, so much esteemed by the Scottish Highlanders. It has nevertheless disappeared ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... age and withheld from parents, especially by boys, to an extent probably little suspected by most parents. Education must be addressed to freedom, which recognizes only self-made law, and spontaneity of opinion and conduct is manifested, often in extravagant and grotesque forms. There is now a longing for that kind of close sympathy and friendship which makes cronies and intimates; there is a craving for strong emotions which gives pleasure in exaggerations; and there are nameless longings for what is far, remote, strange, which emphasizes the self-estrangement ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... you it will make your blood boil with rage and fury," went on the extravagant Judy. "As editors of the Commune, everybody calls on you to resent an insult to college. Please let me ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... had a fond and extravagant grandmother, you were almost sure to have also a clove apple. That is to say, a fine firm winter apple, stuck as full of cloves as it could hold, then allowed to dry very, very slowly, in air neither hot nor cold. The cloves banished decay—their fragrance joined to the ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... aslant, horses dancing, greeted expected guests; laughing young men climbed into dog-carts and took the reins from nimble grooms; young girls, extravagantly veiled, made room in comfortable touring-cars for feminine guests whose extravagant veils were yet to be unpacked; slim young men in leather trappings, caps adorned with elaborate masks or goggles, manipulated rakish steering-gears; preoccupied machinists were fussing with valve and radiator ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... may be, I have left much of youthful folly to be ashamed of, besmirching the pages of the Bharati; and this shames me not for its literary defects alone but for its atrocious impudence, its extravagant excesses and its high-sounding artificiality. At the same time I am free to recognise that the writings of that period were pervaded with an enthusiasm the value of which cannot be small. It was a period to which, if error was natural, so was the boyish faculty of hoping, believing and rejoicing. ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... his party that evening, just as they were starting off again. I had only off-saddled once since sunrise, but the chance was too good to be missed, and I joined them. The party consisted of barely fifty men—not an extravagant escort, but ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... the shrieking ghostly voices from the sky overhead had melted into the fog. No longer did the howling devils of mid channel disturb him. No longer did he fear the raging golf. With his mascot goat at his side, no evil luck could touch him. Courage returned, and with it extravagant language. "Lily, no doggone ghos' better git uppity wid me. I'd bus' a ol' ghos' in de ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... to observe that throughout this advice the poet is careful to warn us against extremes—neither to tear a passion to rags nor to be too tame—he insists on moderation. Even in the very tempest of passion one must not lose self-control nor make extravagant use of the hands. The "overdone" and the "come tardy off" are the ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... is more than being free of guilt. And as this has been granted you, it is clear that you have made full atonement—if you'll pardon the use of such a preposterously extravagant term. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... self, I was introduced by the Father of my Mistress; but find I owe my being at first received to a Comparison of my Estate with that of a former Lover, and that I am now in like manner turned off, to give Way to an humble Servant still richer than I am. What makes this Treatment the more extravagant is, that the young Lady is in the Management of this way of Fraud, and obeys her Fathers Orders on these Occasions without any Manner of Reluctance, and does it with the same Air that one of your Men of the World would signifie the Necessity of Affairs for ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... that this said Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke lived in the most luxurious and extravagant manner, during the time that she was what is called "kept" by the Duke; she said that she had never received more than a thousand a year from his Royal Highness, which was barely sufficient to pay servants' wages and liveries, but ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... blankly, or, perhaps, to be almost angrily condemned. She stood away from her own impulsive, enthusiastic nature, and stared at it critically—as even her friends had often stared—and realized that it was unusual, perhaps extravagant, perhaps sometimes preposterous. This readiness to sacrifice—was it not rather slavish than regally loyal? This forgetfulness of personal joy, this burnt-offering of personality—was it not contemptible? Could such actions bring into being the respect of others, the respect of any man? Had ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... would himself laugh at this extravagant supposition, but, while endeavoring to make light of his own cowardice, the idea still haunted and tormented him. Sometimes, in the effort to rid himself of the persistence of his own imagination, he would try to exorcise the demon who had ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Christian country, and all of them based upon the belief that an intellectual conviction is a crime. No wonder the church hated and traduced the author of the "Age of Reason." England was filled with Puritan gloom and Episcopal ceremony. The ideas of crazy fanatics and extravagant poets were taken as sober facts. Milton had clothed Christianity in the soiled and faded finery of the gods—had added to the story of Christ the fables of mythology. He gave to the Protestant church the most outrageously material ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... did not shrink from such extravagant utterances was because he denied the resurrection of the dead. He judged of the prosperity of the wicked and the woes of the pious only by their earthly fortunes. Proceeding from this false premise, he held it to be possible that the punishment falling to his share was not at all intended ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... brown hands, as she gloated over a length of rose and silver brocade. Standing beside her was the proud owner of this magnificence; a slim, graceful girl, wearing heavy gold ornaments and flowers in her hair, and, in spite of an extravagant use of pearl powder, undeniably pretty. Her slanting eyes were long-lashed and expressive, and her little mocking mouth ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... not for outward show, or for the vanities of dress. I have only one passion which I indulge,—Revenge. You are a slave to sensuality, and pamper your lusts at any cost. Let a fair woman please your eye, and she must be bought, be the price what it may. No court prodigal was ever more licentious or extravagant than you are." ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... out to a most unexpected extent; and I have to apologise both for their extravagant length and rambling character. At the same time, however, I believe that it would be considered an object of no small interest if it could be shown to be at all probable that we had still near us a specimen, however rude and ruinous, of early Scoto-Irish architecture. All authorities now acknowledge ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to assist Charley for his own sake, it was her bounden duty to separate him from her child. Whatever merits he might have—and in her eyes he had many—at any rate he had not those which a mother would desire to see in the future husband of her daughter. He was profligate, extravagant, careless, and idle; his prospects in life were in every respect bad; he had no self-respect, no self-reliance, no moral strength. Was it not absolutely necessary that she should put a stop to any love that might have sprung up ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... be free of debt. If he have a large family, and brings them up wisely, so as to adapt themselves early to a settler's life, why he does well for them, and soon feels the benefit on his own land; but if he is idle himself, his wife extravagant and discontented, and the children taught to despise labour, why, madam, they will soon be brought down to ruin. In short, the country is a good country for those to whom it is adapted; but if people will not conform to the doctrine of necessity and expediency, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... Buddhist writings are perhaps not less extravagant than the Puranas, but the Pitakas are relatively sober, though not quite consistent in their account of the Buddha's attitude to the miraculous. Thus he encourages Sagata[716] to give a display of miracles, such as walking ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was Arthur Coga, who had studied at Cambridge, and was said to be a bachelor of divinity. He was indigent, and "looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man." Dr. King, in a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle, remarks "that Mr. Coga was about thirty-two years of age; that he spoke Latin well, when he was in company, which he liked, but that his brain was sometimes a little ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... I know,—that so many men love me! But, after all, what sort of love is it? It is just as when you and I, when we see something nice in a shop, call it a dear duck of a thing, and tell somebody to go and buy it, let the price be ever so extravagant. I know my own position, Laura. I'm a dear duck ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... us with continual proofs of a similar turn of mind: It may perhaps be doubted, whether this cast of temper be the effect of nature or education; but, in either case, it is an incontestable symptom of a mean and contemptible disposition, and is alone a sufficient confutation of the extravagant panegyrics, which many hypothetical writers have bestowed on the ingenuity and capacity of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... to have a Christian name, like other folks? The barn, in the same way, deserves more distinction than a paragraph, but at this moment it was being used as a storeroom and was merely awaiting its splendid destiny, quite unconscious of the future. The Hamilton boys were no doubt as extravagant and thriftless as they were insane, but the Careys sympathized with their extravagance and thriftlessness and insanity so heartily, in this particular, that they could hardly conceal their real feelings from Bill Harmon. Nothing could so have ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Cleopatra swallowed a pearl of more value than the whole of the banquet she had provided in honor of Antony. This she did when she drank to his health. The same sort of extravagant folly is told of AEsopus, son of Clodius AEsopus, the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... colossal jesting and heroic pastoral poetry worthy of Beethoven, whose style it recalls in the breadth of its development. The final apotheosis is filled with life; its joy makes the heart beat. The most extravagant harmonic effects and the most abominable discords are softened and almost disappear in the wonderful combination of timbres. It is the work of a strong and sensual artist, the true heir of the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... waste is wicked even in the wealthy; you need wisdom as well as wealth," said Miss Melford to her one day. And indeed she did, for sometimes the articles she bought for others were singularly extravagant and inappropriate. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... recommend you, then, to be extravagant in your milk score. Each child ought, in the twenty-four hours, to take at least a quart of good, fresh, new milk. It should, of course, be given in various ways,—as bread and milk, rice-puddings, milk and differents ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the most extravagant reports of the extent of our disaster had preceded us. The most moderate of these involved the death of Ali Pacha (no great loss by the way), and about 1,000 men put hors de combat. Omer's face wore a grave ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... door for her, bowed as she passed, and followed her. He drew a chair up to the desk, and she sat down without further protest, because she had come to know that his attentions, his extravagant politeness and violent courtesies, signified no more than was apparent—namely, that he was a great cavalier ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... Dacre that he made about four thousand pounds sterling per annum by his profession; and as he was prudent and moderate in his mode of life, and, though elegant, not extravagant in his tastes, he had realized a handsome fortune when ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... sentiments of French poets. But in the works of Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, we breathe again the pure German air; and we cannot but regret that these men should have taken the subjects of their poems, with their unpronounceable names, extravagant conceits, and licentious manners, from foreign sources, while they had at home their grand mythology, their heroic traditions, their kings and saints, which would have been more worthy subjects than Tristan and Isold, Schionatulander ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... they regretted seeing such quantities of food thrown daily into the refuse barrels. I often felt that something should be done about it. Many exposes were, in fact, written from all parts of England. It was irritating to read of German efficiency in the presence of England's extravagant and unbusinesslike methods. Tommy would say, "Lor, lummy! Ain't we got no pigs in England? That there food won't be wasted. We'll be eatin' it in sausages w'en we goes acrost the Channel"; whereupon he dismissed the whole question from his mind. This seemed to me then the typical Anglo-Saxon ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... to where, the report afforded no indication. Whereupon our landlord, a man utterly without ideals, seized our furniture, offering to sell it back to us for fifteen pounds. We pointed out to him that this was an extravagant ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... story, containing sundry episodes and occupying fifty-three Nights, is wholly omitted by Lane (ii. 643) because "it is a compound of the most extravagant absurdities." He should have enabled his readers to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... count the cost when she wanted to be kind. But as the desire for enjoyment may be carried to the length of self-indulgence, so there is often a selfishness in giving and a recklessness in being over kind. Lettice, moreover, was extravagant in the further sense that she did not look much beyond the present month or present year of existence. She thought her sun ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... remittances could be made, but in such commodities as the country produced, and all hands being engaged in war, rendered them both very scarce and extremely dear. To answer the public exigences of the province, large emissions of paper currency were also requisite. Hence the rate of exchange arose to an extravagant height. The province was indebted no less than eighty thousand pounds, and at the same time obliged to maintain garrisons on the frontiers for the public defence, which served to increase the debt. While struggling amidst those hardships, the merchants of London complained to the ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... lukewarmness quickly convinced him that, although the greatest inventor of his age, he and his family would soon perish with hunger unless his genius continually displayed itself in some new forms. Hurled from the pinnacle of hope, oppressed by heavy debts,—which he had incurred by generosity and extravagant living, and by his becoming security for false friends,—he now surveyed the world through a gloomy medium. His domestic ties, when he no longer knew how to support his family, became an intolerable burden. He began to think that there was a malign influence in the distribution of men's fortunes: ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... everything that was dissolute and wicked, when there was nothing against him; nothing, but that he was poor. Yes, you yourself, grandmamma, have told me many and many a time, that Clive Newcome was not a fit companion for us; warned me against his bad courses, and painted him as extravagant, unprincipled, I don't know how bad. How bad! I know how good he is; how upright, generous, and truth-telling: though there was not a day until lately, that Barnes did not make some wicked story against ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... everybody else; the Stoical pride was a refinement upon this, but was still a grateful sentiment of superiority, which helped to make up for the surrender of indulgences. It was usual to bestow the most extravagant laudation on the 'Wise Man,' and every Stoic could take this home to the extent that he considered himself as approaching ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Crotonians destroy Sybaris. Croton and Sybaris were two ancient Greek cities situated on the Gulf of Tarentum, Southern Italy. Little is known of them except their luxury, fantastic self-indulgence, and extravagant indolence, for which qualities their names remain ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... said Mr Dombey. 'You are extravagant. You waste a great deal of money—or what would be a great deal in the pockets of most gentlemen—in cultivating a kind of society that is useless to me, and, indeed, that upon the whole is disagreeable to me. I have to insist upon a total change in all these respects. I know ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... nature of gush or effervescence in our dispositions. I know that I was glad to see my parents, and the rest, and they were all unmistakably glad to see me, and we manifested our feelings in a natural, homely way, and without any display whatever of extravagant emotions. Greetings being over, about the first inquiry was whether I had yet had any breakfast, and my answer being in the negative, a splendid old-time breakfast was promptly prepared. But my mother was keenly disappointed at my utter lack of appetite. I just couldn't eat hardly a ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... missionary hesitates. His countenance changes, his eyes scan steadily over the scene. A room some sixty feet by twenty opens to his astonished eyes. Its black, boarded walls, and bare beams, are enlivened here and there with extravagant pictures of notorious pugilists, show-bills, and illustrated advertisements of lascivious books, in which the murder of an unfortunate woman is the principal feature. Slippery mud covers the floor. Mr. Krone sits on an ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... from the naval service while he was Duke of York, because he was a Roman Catholic, had deprived the navy of its most influential and able friend. The greedy rapacity with which Charles II. had devoted the money assigned by the Commons for the support of the fleet to his own lustful and extravagant purposes, the favoritism and venality which he allowed in the administration of the Admiralty, and the neglect with which he viewed the representations of Pepys and others as to the condition of his fleets, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Larica's worn features I wrote In rhyme some extravagant praise. The verses were spurned (and I'm in the same boat), For I called them "Some Lines ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... simply appalling. It is claimed by close students of historical data, those who have given the subject careful study, that forty million of human beings lose their lives during every century by war alone. Extravagant as this estimate may seem, anyone who will carefully examine the records of the great conflicts of our own century will readily be convinced that there are not as much extravagance in the claim as a cursory glance at the figures would indicate. Europe alone ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... extravagant one as to the amount of cloth used in the making of each sail, but we were more than repaid for it by the perfection of set in the sails, which stood as flat as boards. Our storm-sails were made of stout canvas, ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... good. Whatever mountebank tricks d'Annunzio may play as a human being, he has undoubtedly written some very great works. He is an intensely original artist. You may sometimes think him silly, foppish, extravagant, or even caddish (as in "Il Fuoco"), but you have to admit that the English notions of what constitutes extravagance or caddishness are by no means universally held. And anyhow you have to admit that here is ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick's absence that she made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of "Deep Down" again: it was a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a wonderful hole in the sand—a cavity ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... returned Fenton, becoming more animated from the pleasure of defending an extravagant position. "What is the object of art but to perpetuate and idealize the emotions of the race; and how does it touch men, except by flattering their vanity with the assumption that they individually share the grand ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Friends had formed from hearsay the most extravagant misconceptions concerning the Friends called "Hicksites." They supposed them to be outright infidels, and that the grossest immoralities were tolerated among them; that they pointed loaded pistols at the "Orthodox" brethren, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... of scenes by the introduction of characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to be sent to your principal cities, I wish I had flesh enough to be dispersed through Christendom, to attest my dying attachment to my king.' It was the calm employment of his mind, that night, to reduce this extravagant sentiment to verse. He appeared next day, on the scaffold, in a rich habit, with the same serene and undaunted countenance, and addressed the people, to vindicate his dying unabsolved by the church, rather than to justify an invasion of the kingdom, during a treaty with the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... passions of the race better than these voceri, many of which have been written down and preserved. Most of them are songs of vengeance and imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments and utterances of extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters at the side of murdered husbands and brothers. The women who sing them seem to have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchanged the virtues of their sex for ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... erratic fancies or emotions of the painter. Criticism must justly deal with the figures of the Jewish rabble. The attitudes are telling, but over angular and rather vulgar. The populace, I may remark, are too excited; such sustained, extravagant attitudes, whether in a picture of large or small scale, but particularly in the former, are upon canvas rarely satisfactory; they mock with littleness at a Providence that made Art, and become puppets in the hands of artists. The heads of not a few of the spectators are too large, coarse, ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... were back at Herne Hill. Widdowson still kept up the show of extravagant spirits, but he was worn out. He spoke so hoarsely that one would have thought he had contracted a severe sore throat; it resulted merely from nervous strain. After a pretence of dinner, he seated himself as if to read; glancing at him a few minutes later, Monica found that ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... the conventions of our social system should persuade one to withhold so small a thing from a fellow-creature who, perhaps, stood in need of it. That smile, which I might have given, but had withheld, became for me a sort of symbol. I grew superstitious about it; built up around it all kinds of extravagant ideas; pictured to myself the splash of a body into the river; and then, recovering my sense of proportion, told myself that one really couldn't go about London smiling at people. Yet I didn't get the man's face out of my head. ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West |
