"Flippant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... advise certainly the trivial, the flippant. It would have a better effect. Why not go to the new Revue—'That will be Fourpence'—where they have the two young Simultaneous Dancers, the Misses Zanie and Lunie Le Face—one, I fancy, is more simultaneous ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... The flippant, harmless freedom of the watering-place Miss, which Avice had plainly acquired during her sojourn at the Sandbourne school, helped Pierston greatly in this role of jeune premier which he was not unready ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the infection, and was salaaming across the world to Mr. Kruger, like a marionette out of a box. Thoughtful people began to wonder if he were swung by a heavy weight, which was unknown to us. Sir William Harcourt was giving the House of Commons, in England, ill-founded and flippant assurances that 'the Uitlanders desired no interference from the outside, whether British or other, but preferred rather to work out their own salvation.' He added many unpleasant remarks about the Reformers. I said to one of his ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... of my flippant remark, but went on with his rhapsody. "Such depth; such penetration! And then, how sympathetic! Why, even to a mere casual acquaintance like myself, she is so ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... flippant boastings of Christian mothers there are many who pretend they have the fire of faith and divine love like the brave Machabean woman; but when the sore hour of real separation comes, the soft, loving heart ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... glad to see the national mind beginning to effervesce on art subjects. The most opposite views, the new and the old, the conventional and the truly imaginative, the severely real and the more latitudinarian, the earnest and the flippant, the pedantic and the broad, far reaching—will continue to clash for a season, while a school of American Landscape is, we think, destined to rise steadily through the chaotic elements, and to reach a height of excellence to which the conscientious ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... Mall Gazette being duly established and Arthur Pendennis's merits recognised as a flippant, witty, and amusing critic, he worked away hard every week, preparing reviews of such works as came into his department, and writing his reviews with flippancy certainly, but with honesty, and to the best of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fact, omitting her expressions of preference. I told the story as I would have told it of a dear sister whose maidenly pride was precious to me; told how she had gone, at his request, to speak with him in the conservatory, and how, there, she had heard, herself unseen, those flippant, unmanly words, so unlike him, yet from the lips of ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Anna was in earnest. Anna had a wretched habit of being in earnest when she said flippant things. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... did a creature so strenuous as the anti-aircraft gun come by the flippant name of Archie? Well, once upon a time the Boche A.-A. guns were very young and had all the impetuous inaccuracy incident to youth. British airmen scarcely knew they were fired at until they saw the pretty, white puffs in ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... indeed, that it would have seemed like heresy to question their sincerity. But now—whether it was the slight hint dropped by Sir Francis Vesey on the previous night as to Mrs. Sorrel's match-making proclivities, or whether it was a scarcely perceptible suggestion of something more flippant and assertive than usual in the air and bearing of Lucy herself that had awakened his suspicions,—he was certainly disposed to doubt, for the first time in all his knowledge of her, the candid nature of the girl for whom ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Thackeray must have been reminiscent of Hamilton when he devised the part of "Sister Anne" in Bluebeard's Ghost. Like her, Hamilton's Dinarzade is slightly flippant; she would most certainly have observed "Dolly Codlins is the matter" in Anne's place. Like her, she is not unprovided with lovers; she actually, at the beginning, "takes a night off" that she may entertain the Prince of Trebizond; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... a ring of sincerity in Cameron's tone that Patty looked up at him suddenly. And the honest look in his eyes made it impossible for her to return any flippant response. ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... a time to display your bitter and flippant humor?" said the Rev. George, indignantly. "I think the spectacle of a ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... reminded Ivy that her admission to the side show—the bright silver dime—was given her by Lafe, and that before he had any hope of himself seeing the circus. So she began to feel sorry for her flippant attitude and said in ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... Every one laughs and thinks it's the title she wants; they'd think it of me, and they'd say it. They would say Beatrice Lansell took her half-million and bought her a lord. And, after a while, perhaps Sir Redmond himself would half-believe it—and I couldn't bear that! And so I am—unbearably flippant and—I should ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... was flippant and careless; Richelieu careful when there was need, and daring when there was need. Buckingham's heavy blows were foiled by Richelieu's keen thrusts, and then, in his confusion, Buckingham blundered so foolishly and Richelieu profited by his blunders so shrewdly that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... owe him, will never be cleansed from the stain that the outrages of that day have left upon his memory. It may be said, however, that the details of the coup d'etat were left to his subordinates, and that probably both success and infamy are due in large part to the flippant Morny. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... better made, At once I must forswear my trade. You send me such ill-coupled folks, That 'tis a shame to sell them yokes. They squabble for a pin, a feather, And wonder how they came together. The husband's sullen, dogged, shy; The wife grows flippant in reply: He loves command and due restriction, And she as well likes contradiction: 20 She never slavishly submits; She'll have her will, or have her fits. He this way tugs, she t'other draws: The man grows jealous, and with ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... brilliancy of wit, should not be mortified when they see their children, perhaps, deficient at nine or ten years old in the showy talents for general conversation; they must bear to see their pupils appear slow; they must bear the contrast of flippant gayety and sober simplicity; they must pursue exactly an opposite course to that which has been recommended for the education of wits; they must never praise their pupils for hazarding observations; they must cautiously point out any mistakes ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... contemplations, and the imagination with inspiring and ennobling apparitions. Surroundings that contribute a quality of awfulness embrace in such scenes the soul of the traveller, and hold him in their tremendous thrall. Mean or flippant ideas may not enter here; but the man puts off the smaller part of him, as the Asiatic puts off his sandals on entering the porches of his god. Of such is the Eternal Sphinx, as Eothen Kinglake beheld her. We cannot feel her aspect more grandly than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... He was possessed of a lighter nature altogether, was perhaps of more flippant disposition than his chum, and had less stamina about him. Not that he was lacking in courage, or in dash, or in that elan which the French generally have displayed so magnificently in this conflict, only ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... tenor of his policy, from his Radical tendencies, and all that he has been doing lately, that Palmerston would have been the last person to approve of this coup d'etat. Not a bit! He turns upon Normanby in the most flippant manner; almost accuses him of a concealed knowledge of an Orleanist plot—never whispered here, nor I believe, even imagined by the Government of Paris, who would have been too glad to seize upon it as an excuse; says he compromises the relations of the country by his ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... "Don't get flippant, young lady," said Jessie, severely, "or I shall be obliged to give you a ducking," the river being very convenient just there, as the girls had to walk alongside its shores for some distance before turning into ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... of atoms. It has the perpetuum mobile quality, and older masters would have prolonged its giddy arabesques into pages of senseless spinning. It is quite long enough as it is. The second theme is better, but the appoggiatures are flippant. It buzzes to the finish. Of it is related that Chopin's cat sprang upon his keyboard and in its feline flight gave him the idea of the first measures. I suppose as there is a dog valse, there had to be one for ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... brown leather, and in use it is as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and gentlemanly affair—if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto, with its two larger wheels behind and a smaller one in front, has been so indecently suggestive of a perambulator that really, George, I could not bring myself to it. But a Bishop might ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... old lady was speaking her piece? Suppose I ask him how much he made when he captured the Senor," suggested Cales, who had recovered his flippant humor. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... dear," ran the letter to Nancy, "permit yourself to think of marrying a man who has not a sense of humour. Do I seem flippant? Don't think it. I am conveying to you the inestimable benefits of a trained observation. Humour saves a man from being impossible in any number of ways—from boring you to beating you. (You may live to realise ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... thus expatiated on his own opinions concerning heaven and hell, concluded by tilting at those which all right-minded people hold among ourselves. I shall adhere to my determination not to reproduce his arguments; suffice it that though less flippant than those of the young student whom I have already referred to, they were more plausible; and though I could easily demolish them, the reader will probably prefer that I should not set them up for the mere pleasure of knocking them down. Here, then, I take my leave of good Dr. Gurgoyle and ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... a moment that he had considered me to have been somewhat flippant. I had no doubt he had some right to think so, so I very sincerely and seriously told him that such a thing as pulling anybody's leg had never entered my mind. Indeed, very far from it; that my experience since I had been in Melbourne was exactly the opposite, ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two rather battered but otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older than he, took the liberty of first accosting him. "Brisk" is his biographer's description of him. Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that moment. But those two tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed, broken-hearted old men had been, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the day after her husband's funeral than wear weeds which attract attention on account of their flaunting bad taste and flippancy. One may not, one must not, one can not wear the very last cry of exaggerated fashion in crepe, nor may one be boisterous or flippant or sloppy in manner, without giving the impression to all beholders that one's spirit is posturing, tripping, or dancing on ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... hoarse with talking. Adj. loquacious, talkative, garrulous, linguacious^, multiloquous^; largiloquent^; chattering &c v.; chatty &c (sociable) 892; declamatory &c 582; open-mouthed. fluent, voluble, glib, flippant; long tongued, long winded &c (diffuse) 573. Adv. trippingly on the tongue; glibly &c adj.; off the reel. Phr. the tongue running fast, the tongue running loose, the tongue running on wheels; all talk and no cider; foul whisperings ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... You are so clever, everything is easy to you. That is why I always liked you better than any one else. You have sympathy, wit, imagination. You understand things up to the heights and down to the depths. Harry Dart is a little like you: he has wit and imagination, but he is flippant, he has no sympathy. Poor old Jack has plenty of sympathy, but neither ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... in Claire; I can't help believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her. If Claire had been different—no, don't interrupt me— this would never have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... boat is an inebriated United States official, who flings his spectacles overboard, and sings a flippant and absurd song about his grandmother's spotted calf, with his ri-fol-lol-tiddery-i-do. After which he crumbles, in an incomprehensible manner, into the bottom of the boat, and ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... strength and majesty of bearing the stripling beauty of John Oxon would have seemed slight and paltry, a thing for flippant women ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... intervals able to remit to him sums of from ten to thirty ducats. But here commenced the precarious existence which the composer was for the future destined to lead. For, not only was the taste of Vienna then, as now, proverbially variable and flippant—not only was concert-giving an uncertain speculation, and teaching an inconstant source of income—but in a man, who, like Mozart, had, from time to time, strong impulses to write for the theatre, it frequently happened that the order and regularity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... generally rumoured that the merchants had lost heavily over this disaster, and there were some who quoted it as an instance of Girdlestone's habitual strength of mind that he should decorate his wall with so melancholy a souvenir. This view of the matter did not appear to commend itself to a flippant member of Lloyd's agency, who contrived to intimate, by a dexterous use of his left eyelid and right forefinger, that the vessel may not have been so much under-insured, nor the loss to the firm so enormous as ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... being sent back is removed, by our near approach to Rome. Arrived there, he at once finds his way to the livery stables, and establishes himself permanently with the horses. Throughout the winter, we take with good humour the flippant comments of flaneurs and over-fastidious friends, touching the bestowal of our patronage upon such an ill-favoured cur, while we thought ourselves the objects of his gratitude and affection; but Frate's character (we gave him this name ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... all this as no more than a sort of flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavory fume, several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not plainly in support of the idea, and a part of the scheme, of "cashiering kings for misconduct." In that light it is worth ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... passengers to be careful as they alight, which is couched in these terms: "Cinema actors risk their lives for pay! Don't do it for nothing!" a New York journalist remarks that "an American advertisement on that subject would be serious; the British are more flippant in ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... between ourselves—that she is not precisely what we should call a nice girl! The tone of her letter was decidedly flippant. Miss Briskett is hoping much from your influence. You two girls will naturally come a good deal into contact, and I hope you will do your utmost to set her an example of ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was full to the brim of a flippant, girlish humor that appealed to him monstrously. He felt that it was a man's place to think seriously, if serious thought were needed. And he intended when he married to do the thinking. His wife must be wholly delightful ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... two stand better in contrast than in comparison. Jonson drew from the whole living English world of his time; Congreve drew from the men and women whom he had seen in society. Congreve took society as he found it in his earlier days. The men and women with whom he then mixed were for the most part flippant, insincere, corrupt, and rather proud of their corruption; and Congreve filled his plays with figures very lifelike for such a time. He has not drawn many men or women whom one could admire. Even his heroines, if they are chaste in ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Tyler of Cornell said: "My observation has been that under the joint system the tone of college life has grown more earnest, more courteous and refined, less flippant and cynical. The women are usually among the very best scholars, and lead instead of drag, and their lapses from good health are rather, yes, decidedly, less numerous than those alleged by the men. There is a sort of young man ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... flippant mood, mentioned a fashionable watering-place on the South Coast. I pleaded the seriousness ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... sound flippant, as it is, but it sums up in a single paragraph the extraordinary political situation which exists in Turkey to-day. Little more than a year ago Turkey surrendered in defeat, her resources exhausted, her armies destroyed or scattered. ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... that he was unable to utter a syllable. He should, first of all, have told her that any excuse she had before for calling him by his Christian name was now at an end. But there was no opening for speech such as that. "Well," she continued, "have you got nothing to say to me? You can write flippant letters to other people, and turn me into ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... go like that, anyhow," said Mr Evans, who, for a responsible head clerk of a big business, was the most flippant person I had ever met; "look at his hair—all out of curl! Come here, little girl, ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... clergy or churches. It is much easier to figure upon a platform than to establish educational institutions, or to preach the Gospel throughout new countries. Those who have been in Canada twelve months can do the former, and sneer at the latter. The flippant allusions of certain speakers at the late Toronto meeting to the Methodists and to Victoria College ... were as unfounded ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de Campan cried to the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... earnestly again and again, in his Correspondence with that gentleman, which goes on very brisk at present. "Much of it lost," we hear;—but enough, and to spare, is saved! Not a beautiful correspondence: the tone of it shallow, hard of heart; tragically flippant, especially on the Crown-Prince's part; now and then even a touch of the hypocritical from him, slight touch and not with will: alas, what can the poor young man do? Grumkow—whose ground, I think, is never quite so secure since that Nosti business—professes ardent ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a time successful, and her army earned a slight reputation for cruelty also; but Edward, son of the late Duke of York, embittered somewhat by the flippant death of his father, was soon victorious over the Lancastrians, and, in 1461, was crowned King of England at a good salary, with the use of a large palace and a good ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... life, and youth, and hope away She had not much brains, but she had some shrewdness Take the honeymoon himself, and leave his wife to learn cooking The laughter of a ripe summer was upon the land Thought all as flippant as herself Turned the misery of the world into a game, and grinned at it When the heart rusts the ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... posing as a poor girl for some reason best known to herself. Jean's remarkable wardrobe had impressed her deeply, while Jean herself carried out the impression of having been brought up in luxury. She was self-willed, extravagant, careless of the future, and her flippant opinion, delivered to Althea, of the Service Bureau and work in general, was all that was needed to convince the shrewd junior of Jean's true position in life. Then, too, Jean was extremely likable, although Althea stood a little in awe of her remarkable poise and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... republicans of England." He maintained that, under all the circumstances, government were fully justified in all they had done, and would have merited impeachment if they had remained inactive at such a critical juncture. Sheridan, in a flippant manner, endeavoured to show that the alarm was ridiculous, and had been created by ministers for their own selfish and wicked purposes. The republicans said to exist in England, were, he said, men of buckram; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a great deal of betting, and all of the men handled the great rolls of bills they wagered with a flippant recklessness which could only be accounted for in Gallegher's mind by temporary mental derangement. Some one pulled a box out into the ring and the master of ceremonies mounted it, and pointed out in forcible language that as they were almost all already ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... was to go on duty as orderly in Ward W—an officers' ward—at 2 p.m. prompt. I did not know where Ward W was; I did not know what a ward-orderly's functions should amount to. And I had no uniform. I was attired in a light grey lounge suit—appropriate enough to my normal habit, but quite too flippant, I was certain, for a ward-orderly. Whatever else a ward-orderly might be, I was sure that he was not the sort of person to ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... creature, with sharp contracted features, which put him in mind of the head of a skinned rabbit—another with an immense flat unmeaning face; and the third, though better-looking than her two companions, was a silly little flippant miss in her teens, rejoicing in a crop of luxuriant curls which swept over her shoulders as she returned Frank's polite bow—when the squire introduced him to the assembled company—as much as to say, "I'm not for you, sir, at any price; so, pray ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... world-wide fame. In his 'prentice days when, in workshops or in the presence of well-known builders, he would make confident statements, inveigh against errors, or demand modifications, people thought him flippant and saucy. Once somebody called him a raw lad. The answer came with crushing rapidity: "When you blunder, raw lads like myself pay ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... singularly sharp, shrewd, and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly wisdom, and not deficient in airiness any more than wit. Hazlitt, we believe, was the first to notice that Monsieur D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... feeling of relief that they were such as could not possibly provoke the visitors' mirth. As he introduced Blackburn he was forcibly impressed by the sudden change in the young man's manner. His flippant gaiety vanished before Miss Cameron's stately candor, and he addressed her with ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... Matthew and Mrs. Cotton were the incumbents of the parish church of Cluhir (and had been profanely described as "the incumbrance of Cluhir"); even to speak of them as, respectively, its curate and its rector, might, though more accurate, be, perhaps, considered flippant. It would also be open to the reproach of lack of originality. Yet, unoriginal though the dominant clergywoman of fiction may be, it cannot be denied that St. Paul's injunctions in connection with the subjection of wives did not commend themselves to Mrs. Cotton. It may be, indeed, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... office, and as with anxiously throbbing heart he walked away homewards, Devers watched his hated persecutor, almost divining what was his purpose,—what would be his first question. He saw him halt and the office-door open and Sergeant Haney come forth. Haney, who could be flippant and independent in the presence of his own lieutenants, stood like a statue before that dark, saturnine face. Officer or man, no soldier in that garrison ever took a liberty with Leonard. Devers realized that he had made a fatal error ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... adored her in a boyish way for years, and now, as he contemplated going, he thought that she ought to exhibit something of the old-time warmth. In other days she had ridden, walked, and flirted to his heart's desire. Now she avoided him when Jack was not at hand, and when she talked it was in a flippant vein that drove him wild with baffled hope. The day before he was to bid the kind house adieu he had his wish. She was riding with him over the shaded roadway that curves in bewildering beauty toward the lake. She seemed in a gentler mood than he had lately seen her. They rode slowly ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... he rounded a corner among the cabins, he came full upon her, and his flippant tongue clove to the roof of his mouth ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... recently become possessed of a tricycle. A bicycle is, I regret to say, considered too—how shall I put it?—flippant by my parishioners. So I have a tricycle. I have ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... new kind of conversation to Virginia. Of all the young men she knew, not one had ever ventured into anything of the sort. They were either flippant, or sentimental, or both. She was at once flattered and annoyed, flattered, because, as a woman, Stephen had conceded her a mind. Many of the young men she knew had minds, but deemed that these were wasted on women, whose language was generally ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... manner changed the moment he saw them. He got up to receive my father with perfect politeness; and, instead of exhibiting the forward, flippant manner with which he had treated us, he turned at once into a steady-looking, somewhat demure boy. My father, after addressing a few kind words to him, and telling him that he was his father's oldest friend, signed to me that he ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... woods relieving a lighter sky. A few stars, widely spaced in this picture, glimmering sadly. I noticed again the infinite depth of patient sorrow in their serene faces; and I hope that the Vandal who first applied the flippant "twinkle" to them may not be driven melancholy mad by their reproachful eyes. I noticed again the mystic charm of space, that imparts a sense of individual solitude to each integer of the densest ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... to the tunnel, the roar of the tempest died away into a rumble, the trap-door opened and perhaps the strains of the gramophone would come in a kind of flippant defiance from the interior. Passing through the vestibule and work-room one beheld a scene in utter variance with the outer hell. Here were warm bunks, rest, food, light and companionship—for the time being, heaven! Outside, the crude and naked elements ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... with a flippant smile; "but I can go pretty fast, and that has heretofore done as well as ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... conversed, which is a rare thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... imputation to the contrary"—just what I said he would say and that he entirely agrees with my denunciation of secret diplomacy and undemocratic control of foreign policy and that I am a perverse and wayward harlequin, mischievous, unveracious, scurrilous, monstrous, disingenuous, flippant, unjust, inexact, scandalous, and objectionable, and that on all points to which he takes exception and a good many more I am so magnificent, brilliant, and convincing that no citizen could rise from perusing me ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... all like the tone of his last letter to you," said Constance. "He writes in a very flippant way, not a bit like a ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... room, he wrote a note to Betty Winter. He read it over and it seemed foolishly cold and formal. He tore it up and wrote a simpler one. It was flippant and a little presumptuous. He destroyed that and decided on a ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... her alone. They were not the women to tease one another by flippant jests or allusions; and Mrs. Fred, of all others, had a dread of thrusting any vulgar face on this colorless, yet delicious, atmosphere. Love knew his own, and was ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... meaning that such an uplifting of his financial status conveyed to a man. She did not even know what he was about to propose. It would steady her considerably when she heard that; she would be less flippant then. Out of the corners of his eyes, he watched her face—the little, round, childish face almost perfect in outline—the gentle force, petulance almost, in the shapely chin, and the lips—tantalizing—they looked so innocent. In another few moments he would be kissing ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... tick for fatal creeds, For youth on folly bent, A steady tick for worthy deeds, And moments wisely spent; No warning note of emphasis, No whisper of advice, To ruined rake or flippant ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... "Do not be flippant. But if we were prophets what a dreadful thing life would be! It did not seem possible seven years ago that Eleanor Leigh would become a professional beauty, a hired guest, who lived upon the royalty from the ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly Danish, or peculiarly beautiful. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... may quote the language of a poet of humble life, at last—'the little bell tolled hastily for the pauper's funeral.' That is what taxes mean. The hon. Member for Dorsetshire spoke the other night in a manner rather flippant and hardly respectful to some of us on this question. But the labourers of Dorsetshire as well as the weavers and spinners of Lancashire are toiling, and must toil harder, longer, and with smaller remuneration for every ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... story, just what the Lord had done for him. That is all. That is what a witness ought to do—tell what he knows, not what he does not know. He did not try to make a long speech. It is not the most flippant and fluent witness who has the most ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... lowered temperature—"common colds." Here again it has a certain amount of rational basis, but this is growing less and less every day. The present attitude of thoughtful physicians may be graphically indicated by the flippant inquiry of the riddle-maker, "When is a cold not a cold?" and the answer, "Two-thirds of the time." This much we are certain of already: that the majority of so-called "colds" have little or nothing to do with exposure to a low temperature, that they are entirely misnamed, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... which, in this early stage of the party, struck home to Kate's bosom, and brought the blood tingling to her face. One was the flippant contempt with which the guests evidently regarded her uncle, and the other, the easy insolence of their manner towards herself. That the first symptom was very likely to lead to the aggravation of the second, it needed no great penetration to foresee. And here Mr ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... flippancy. He did not intend that anybody should. He intended to be terrible; and he knew that the more flippant and casual his tone, the more terrible would be its effect. He produced exactly the effect ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... have personal acquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect withheld from any woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune and calls it emancipation—to their need and calls it a spirit of independence. It is not from these good girls that you will hear the flippant boast of an unfettered life, with "freedom to develop;" nor is it they who will be foremost and furious in denial and resentment of my statements regarding the morals of their class. They do not know ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... "Don't be flippant. The emotion wasn't fear. It might not have been any emotion we have, but an emotion that we'd expect a creature made of energy to have. An emotion of frustration! It had me cornered. I escaped. The energy sphere met resistance. When energy ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... action, by going out of the conventional circle of holy families, nativities, and entombments. There is a dash about Gentile, a fresh, cavalier-like gentility, quite surprising, and altogether his own. A showy, flippant frivolity in several of the figures enlivens and refreshes us with its mundane sparkle and energy. One of the three kings, in particular,—a young, well-dressed, vivacious, goguenard-looking personage, with a very glittering pair of spurs, which his groom is just unbuckling, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the French, which, with many other pernicious prejudices, have made a part of our great inheritance from England, have been originally obtained. Certainly I have seen no thing, nor any person, after a long residence in the country, to serve as models to the flippant marquis, the overdressed courtiers, or the petites maitresses of the English dramatists. Even a French perruquier is quite as homely and plain a personage as an English or an American barber. But these Athenians grossly caricature themselves as well as their ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in Calcutta, I think one would require to have an acute sense of humour and no sense of smell. Am I flippant? I don't mean to be, because I feel I can't sufficiently admire the men and women who are bearing the heat and burden of the day. And now that sounds patronizing, and Heaven knows I don't mean ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... those of a serious tendency. To be treated with disrespect and be made the subjects of rough wit as they go about is only the more acute part of their difficulty. One may suppose that at home they find little appreciation of any high sentiments, but are driven, in self-defence, to be rather flippant, rather "worldly." The greater number of house mistresses, meanwhile, if one may judge from their own complacent conversation, behave in a way most unlikely to contribute to their servants' self-respect. It is hard to believe that any really high sentiment is to be learnt from women who, for all ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... determined to withdraw. He opposed the majority of those influential men, who promised him the crown of the kingdom, since they were well inclined to the Spaniards and to foreign domination. From this came that flippant report that Gallinato was king of Camboxa, which was believed by many in Espana; and it was represented in the theaters of that country with acclaim and applause. Some men well versed in affairs of those provinces ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... application, and by authoritative avowal, fell on ears that were practically deaf to spiritual truth, and found no place in hearts already stuffed with great stores of evil. To the profound wisdom and saving instruction of the word of God to which they had listened, they responded with a flippant request: "Master, we would see a sign from thee." Had they not already seen signs in profusion? Had not the blind and the deaf, the dumb and the infirm, the palsied and the dropsical, and people afflicted with all manner of diseases, been healed in their houses, on their streets, and in their synagogs; ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... had learned many things. All his deductions, all his apprehensions had been scattered and disproved. He had seen the true meaning of Lillian Astrupp's amused indifference—the indifference of a variable, flippant nature that, robbed of any real weapon for mischief, soon tires of a game that promises to be too arduous. He saw all this and understood it with a rapidity born of the moment; nevertheless, when Eve ceased to speak the question that broke from him was not connected with ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... pregnant memento of the manner in which the vain words of flippant orators fall, innocuous, to the ground, when they attempt to stigmatize, with contemptuous terms, the truly noble. "Squatter" is now, in the west, only another name for "Pioneer," and that word describes all that is admirable in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... That there is no solution to the race problem is a statement heard so often in America that it has become almost proverbial; that the solution is simple if our citizens would approach the problem fairly is an observation made less often; but that there is no problem would seem to be either the flippant remark of one who dabbles in sociology or the profound utterance of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... assembled, as though stimulated and inspired by some new interest, now strove to appear at their very best—and the friction of intellect with intellect resulted in more or less brilliancy of talk, which, for once, was totally free from the flippant and mocking spirit which usually pervaded the Santoisie social circle. On all the subjects that came up for discussion Alwyn proved himself thoroughly at home—and M. le Duc, sitting in a silence that was most unwonted with him, became ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... nurse and wounded doughboy, hey?" his friend observed in that flippant manner which sometimes amused and sometimes ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... equipment which made him what we see him in the days after Pentecost—when the coward that had been ashamed to acknowledge his Master, and all whose impulsive and self-reliant devotion passed away before a flippant servant-girl's tongue, stood before the rulers of Israel, and said: 'Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye!' The sense of sin, the assurance of pardon, shatter a man's unwholesome ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he was given the name of Harry. It is a flippant name. It calls up merriness, youth, bravado, color, song. Barnes was forty-nine, streaked with grey, heart-sick, pallid, shuffling, timorous, sorry, and forlorn. Three decades of grease paint had made his skin flabby; and three decades of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... girls walked away, still giggling; a deep color mantled Maggie's cheeks. She turned and began to talk desperately to Mr. Hammond. Her tone was flippant; her silvery laughter floated in the air. Priscilla turned and gazed at her friend. She was seeing Maggie in yet another aspect. She ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... of public or family opinion she firmly loved her architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She fully realized that in England no woman has fallen who is self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her way. Given ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... three-and-twenty years old, a student by fits, and a young man given to be moody. He had powers of gaiety far eclipsing Algernon's, but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant soul. He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse. The friends of the two imagined ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not take the sweet freshness out of the children's lives by that flippant caution, "You will ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... worker and is most intelligent. Tzibukine, a widower, has married Varvara, an affable and pious soul who gives alms,—a strange thing in this family who cheat everybody. Anissme often sends home beautiful letters and presents. One day, he comes unexpectedly; he has an unquiet, and, at the same time, flippant air. His parents have decided to get him married, and, although he is a drunkard, ugly and vulgar, they have found him a pretty wife. The girl is Lipa, daughter of a poor widow, a laborer like her mother. Anissme whistles and looks at the ceiling, and shows no signs of pleasure ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... hideous in a garb like this? Needs he the tragic fur, the smoke of lamps, The pent-up breath of an unsavoury throng To thaw him into feeling, or the smart And snappish dialogue that flippant wits Call comedy, to prompt him with a smile? The self-complacent actor, when he views (Stealing a sidelong glance at a full house) The slope of faces from the floor to the roof, As if one master-spring controlled ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... satire; did not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous indignation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best; and a powerful weapon it is in the hands of a master. We acknowledge Horace's satires to be scathing enough, though they are light and delicate, almost trifling and flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as effective. 'Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' Burns might have well replied to his censors with the same question. Quick on the heels of this poem came Holy Willie's Prayer, wherein ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... or the scaffold then and there, he would have accepted them bravely; but it was a different thing in the raw, cold morning, after an agitating night, and the Master away at the far end of the great hall. A flippant maid's tongue was enough to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... one sees in society. My husband says she's level-headed. Sound as a rivet, he also says. Nothing silly or flip about her, he adds when he is particularly enthusiastic, and he knows I hate the word 'flip.' Of course he means flippant. He is very much ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... equality of the sexes was to be determined by an appeal to the characters of sovereign princes, the comparison is, in proportion, manifestly in favor of woman, and that without having recourse to the trite and flippant observation, proved to have been ill-founded, of male and female influence. Elizabeth of England affords a glorious example in truth of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... unseemly disputes between those who ought to be at peace. The name of the dead must not be mentioned until his body has decayed, lest a want of sorrow should seem to be indicated by the common and flippant use of his name. A native would have the deceased believe that he cannot hear or speak his name ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Distressed Mother" is spoken by Andromache, and opens with the following lines, which are certainly flippant enough: ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... flippant prediction of Jacson Gootes, Le ffacase returned to the Church into which he had been born. He went further and became a lay brother, taking upon himself the obligation of silence. Though an old man, he stayed close to the advancing Grass, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... slaughter. Fish were at first the desired victims. Day after day I sat watching a hopelessly buoyant cork refuse to bob into the depths of the muddy and torpid Cuyahoga. I was like some fond parent, hoping against hope to see his child out-live the flippant period and dive beneath the surface of things, into touch with the great living realities. And when the cork finally marked a historic epoch by vanishing, and a small, inert, and intensely bored sucker was pulled in hand over hand, I felt thrills of gratified longing and conquest ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... and shivered slightly. Then she sat down in the chair which Weldon had just left vacant. "It is bad manners to have nerves, Captain Frazer. Forgive me first, and then tell me something altogether flippant, to make me ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... are very flippant," said the squire, displeased. "I apprehend that there is very little doubt as to my having the farm ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... which the young speaker uttered with all the flippant self-sufficiency of worldly people with whom the world is going well, the face of the young nobleman who listened presented a picture of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... liberty, an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip the barb with biting sarcasm and satire. Heine's personality was full of seemingly inconsistent traits. He was both fanciful and rational, serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he could be at once a patriot and an alien. He was, to use his own phrase, an "unfrocked romanticist"—at once a brilliant representative of the poetry of self-expression and personal caprice, and an exemplar and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... works, no longer vain And worthless deem'd by me! Whate'er this steril genius has produc'd Expect, at last, the rage of Envy spent, An unmolested happy home, Gift of kind Hermes and my watchful friend, 80 Where never flippant tongue profane Shall entrance find, And whence the coarse unletter'd multitude Shall babble far remote. Perhaps some future distant age Less tinged with prejudice and better taught Shall furnish minds of pow'r To judge more ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... quite another to be snubbed by that lady before the moment of final separation. Though he never put the idea into words or even defined it in his mind—for Geoffrey was far too anxious and unhappy to be flippant, at any rate in thought—he would at heart have wished her to remain the same, indeed to wax ever tenderer, till the fatal time of parting arrived, and even to show ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... whimpering, had far more grit than I anticipated; he was inquisitive and flippant-faced, and looked at the noose flaunting before him, and the people gathered below, and the haggard face of Atzerott, as if entirely conscious and ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... souls who rise above the bondage of their sex, and follow the dictates of their own consciences in dress as in other matters. This class embraces usually the very wealthy and the very learned people who compose the polite and refined circles, as distinguished from the flippant and fashionable ones. All honor to them. Their example is great, and furnishes the chief hope of ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... is powerful and evident in its effect on the distant hills; therefore the effect of the villa should be joyous and life-like (not flippant, however, but serene); and, by rendering it so, we shall enhance the sublimity of the distance, as we showed in speaking of the Westmoreland cottage; and, therefore, we may introduce a number of windows with good effect, provided ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... party in a tone that Posey must have thought too flippant for the occasion, for he turned upon the speaker with an indignation that could not all have been inspired by the memory ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... "Edith Grimmer was very flippant about it," Mrs. Marlow complained to her husband that evening, after she had shown him Jimmy's letter and had heard his remarks thereon. "I didn't like her tone at all. She has grown rather coarse lately, since ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... be staring into space. In reality they were watching the doughy countenance before him. "What do you propose to do?" Lablache asked, ignoring the other's flippant tone. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... travelling dress of black and white check. She looked a very competent governess. Philip was silent too, for he did not quite know what to say that would fit the circumstance; and he was terribly afraid that, if he said something flippant, Miss Wilkinson would break down before his uncle and make a scene. They had said their last good-bye to one another in the garden the night before, and Philip was relieved that there was now no opportunity for them to be alone. He remained in the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... thrift, good-humour, honesty, and industry, a thriving man. So easy it is, in any degree of life (as the world very often finds it), to take those cheerful natures that never assert their merit, at their own modest valuation; and to conceive a flippant liking of people for their outward oddities and eccentricities, whose innate worth, if we would look so far, might make ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... crick in the neck!" was the flippant denial. "My woman would stand where her brains entitle her to stand, beside her husband, looking into his eyes, working for him, working with him, being together with him straight through everything. ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is that of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought flippant, whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a brave thing successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment. The great men of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... greatest triumph of reflection and ingenuity of contrivance that the literature of music can show. The invention that has been expended on the themes seems less admirable. Only the pompous proclamation of the theme which is dominant in Jochanaan's music saves it from being called commonplace. A flippant hunter of reminiscences might find its prototype in the "Lady Moon" chorus of Balfe's "Bohemian Girl." There is no greater originality in the theme which publishes Salome's amorousness for the white flesh of Jochanaan, which ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... rather flippant and lacking in dignity. Professor Kane was more like a college teacher. Before the term was out he hated Kane with an intensity that astonished him, and he looked forward to his Latin classes with an eagerness of which he was almost ashamed. Plautus in the Alling free and ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language—to do so with fluency being reckoned a distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... get back," warned Jim, as he started on a trot toward one of the rear Pullmans, called a "caboose" by the flippant Bob. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... better after I have asked her," was Elfreda's flippant retort. "I have an idea that she will feel dreadfully hurt if no one asks her ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... thing as cant. It is possible for flippant pretenders to acquire a peculiar phraseology, and use it with a painful dexterity; and it is also possible for genuine Christians to subside into a state of mind so listless or secular, that their talk on religious topics will have the inane ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... considering modern canons of fiction, this might have been a very successful novel. It was entirely devoid of incident or interest, and, consequently, was a good deal like real life, as real life appears to many cultivated authors. On the other hand, all the characters were flippant. This would never have done, and I do not regret novel No. I., which had ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... B. SWEZEY not a little; he "allowed it was darned personal," but further than that his light did not penetrate. He went to a little Club, of which he was a temporary member; it was not fashionable, and did not seem to want to be, and SWEZEY thought it flippant. There he asked, "What are the Souls, anyhow?" "Societas omnium animarum," somebody answered, and SWEZEY exclaimed "Say!" "They are a congregation of ladies. Their statutes decree that they are to be bene natae, bene vestitae, and mediocriter,—I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... flippant in one who has devoted his life to this work to say, "Really I don't care what its future may be." I am content to leave the future with God. No true sportsman wants to linger on, a wretched handicap to the cause for which he once stood, like a fake hero with his ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many a dim, deep valley, or gazed into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake, has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, "la solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose?" The epigram cannot be gainsayed; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... flippant clatter of castanets in the pause of some solemn funeral music was the impression given by the first glimpse along the winding woodland way of a great flimsy white building, with its many pillars, its piazzas, its "observatory," its band-stand, its garish intimations of the giddy, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... down his cloak, and without knocking opened the door. The countess was still lost in thought. She still gazed at the blank wall, still heard the flippant voice which had poured out its profanity as though life had been a jest and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... excuse for not personally communicating the story which he had allowed to drift to the governor's ears by chance, was that he thought that what he had heard must have come to King's knowledge also: a supine and almost flippant explanation of neglect in a matter which was serious if the allegations were true. He affirmed also that one of the French officers had pointed out to him on a chart the very place where they intended to settle. It was in what is now known as Frederick ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... conscience. He tries to be flippant, as he has seen the officers of the great corporation flippant about such matters, but in spite of himself his heartstrings tighten. Harvey Trueman is acting a lie, and his heart knows it, though his brain has not ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... she looked a little puzzled, he continued—speaking very slowly this time and with an intensity of feeling which was quite different to his usual pleasant, good-tempered, oft-times flippant manner: "Mademoiselle Crystal—if you will allow me to speak of such an insignificant person as I am—I am at present in the position of the mouse with regard to your father and yourself—the lions of my parable. You might so easily ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... him as he watched him shuffling over the hewn plank floor in his straw sandals. A very different type, this swaggering Celestial, from the furtive-eyed Chinamen of the east. His tightly coiled cue was as smooth and shining as a king-snake, his loose blouse was immaculate, and the flippant voice in which he demanded in each person's ear, "Coffee? Milk?" was like a challenge. Whatever the individual's choice might be, he got it in a torrent in ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... oh, we have a few negro servants in dear New England, Peter, but not so many as here. Gulian told me that there are some three thousand slaves owned in the city and its environs. But our negroes go to church and pray; they do not dance, and I know Chloe would be shocked with Miranda's flippant ways. She ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... do it," said Allen plaintively, adding quickly as Betty's face clouded: "I beg your pardon, little girl, I didn't mean to be flippant. But, like her father, there are many others in the position of this girl. A man can't choose to live a life like that without dragging his family into ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... happy and at home on the threshold of Allah's house, and Stephen began to understand, as Nevill and Josette already understood, something of the vast influence of the Mohammedan religion. Only Madame de Vaux remained flippant. In the car, she had laughed at the women muffled in their haicks, saying that as the men of Tlemcen were so tyrannical about hiding female faces, it was strange they did not veil the hens and cows. In the shadowy mosque, with its five naves, she giggled at the yellow babouches ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... does not involve that flippant irreverence for the past that so often is associated with it. It offers no encouragement to the chase after vagaries in which so many moderns indulge, as though all that is old were belated and all that is novel were ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... its field of endeavor. Morality necessitated the twisting of incidents, so that they might harmonize with the sermonic summing-up that was in view. Life is not always moral; it is more often perplexing, boisterous, unjust, and flippant. The wicked dwell in prosperity. "There are no pangs in their death; their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men; neither are they plagued as other men. They have more than heart could wish." But the art of the teller of tales "is occupied, and bound to be ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... uttered his valedictory message. The document is very much like the man. He disapproves of the reports of the Chief of Police and Clerk of the Police Commissioners, because they declare that liquor saloons and brothels cannot be closed, and he even reproves the latter for his 'flippant manner' of dealing with the subject. Barnum must have his joke or two, withal, and he can no more subsist without his fun than could a former Mayor of this city. He ventures to allude in this solemn document to the management of the New York and New Haven Railroad Company, as 'the good bishop and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... are on a par; if there is any preponderance, one way or other, it certainly is not in favour of the Germans, whose derelictions in those respects are more solemn, and apparently sincere, than their flippant and superficial rivals. Many authors there are, of course, in both countries, whose works are unexceptionable in spirit and intention; but as to the assertion, that one literature is of a higher tone of morals than the other, it is a mistake. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... that again," said Meldon. "I quite believe you. And as for the murder of Simpkins being a joke, I assure you it's nothing of the sort. I may be flippant—several people have called me flippant—but I draw the line at making jokes about murder. It's a serious subject. In fact I've more than once hesitated about going into this business at all. It's mainly for your sake that ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham |
