"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sherefeddin Ali has faithfully described the first ostentatious interview, in which the conqueror, whose spirits were harmonized by success, affected the character of generosity. But his mind was insensibly alienated by the unseasonable arrogance of Bajazet; and Timur betrayed a design of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... apothecary was a large, heavily built, but well-molded and vigorous man, of whom one might say that he was adorned with old age. His brow was dark, and furrowed partly by time and partly by a persistent, ostentatious frown. His eyes were large, black and bold, and the gray locks above them curled short and harsh like the front of a bull. His nose was fine and strong, and if there was any deficiency in mouth or chin, it was hidden by a beard that swept down ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... that timidity which seems to arise from a fear of the person who listens being disposed to take advantage of the distressing position confided to his honour. She seemed neither humiliated nor bold; she had hope, and she did not boast of her courage. Her virtue was by no means ostentatious, but there was in her an air of modesty which would certainly have put a restraint upon anyone disposed to fail in respect towards her. I felt the effect of it myself, for in spite of her beautiful eyes, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... which Mrs. Hastings had adopted as the keynote of her New York parties. She had taken, in fact, simplicity under her wing and made a new thing of it. There were more flowers than silver, and cut glass than heavy plate. There seemed to be an almost ostentatious desire to conceal the fact that Mr. Hastings had robbed the American public of a good many ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... across her in her visits. Go where she might, Hannah was sure to encounter Edward Forester; and this devotion from one whose personal attractions extorted as much admiration from the lasses, her companions, as she herself had been used to excite amongst the country lads, had in it, in spite of its ostentatious openness, a flattery ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... been promised still remained in the distance, Renneberg began to pelt the city with sarcasms, which, it was hoped, might prove more effective than the red-hot balls. He sent a herald to know if the citizens had eaten all their horses yet; a question which was answered by an ostentatious display of sixty starving hacks—all that could be mustered-upon the heights. He sent them on another occasion, a short letter, which ran ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from an unbecoming paleness. Her figure, petite and surpassingly graceful, had scarce yet attained the matured fullness of womanhood; yet it was of exquisite symmetry.—Her dress was elegant without being gaudy, and tasteful without being ostentatious. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... "No cross, no crown," is the law of life which Suso accepts in all the severity of its literal meaning. The story of the terrible penances which he inflicted on himself for part of his life is painful and almost repulsive to read; but they have nothing in common with the ostentatious self-torture of the fakir. Suso's deeply affectionate and poetical temperament, with its strong human loves and sympathies, made the life of the cloister very difficult for him. He accepted it as the highest life, and strove to conform himself to its ideals; and when, after sixteen years of ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... back of his head. Although he is the only European resident of Asterabad save a few Cossack attendants, he wears fashionable Parisian clothes, a wealth of watch-chain, rings, and flash jewellery, patent-leather shoes, and all the accompaniments of an ostentatious show of wealth and personal magnificence. His rooms are equally gorgeous, and contain large colored portraits of the Czar ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... look down with scorn upon their fellow-beings who toil below, and too often view with jealousy and repugnance, the endeavours of those who aspire to that eminence, of which they themselves are so vain and ostentatious. Elevation from an humble condition to conspicuity and rank, bespeaks superior personal merit; and to many of those who figure in, what is called, high life, it is to be feared that the bare mention of personal merit, would look like an ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... mere amusement strikes me as a sort of dry-rot in certain portions of the fabric of civilized society, and tends to make it a sapless crumbling mass of appearances—the most ostentatious appearance of all, that of pleasure, being perhaps the hollowest and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... States, it has no place or part in new States. The realisme impitoyable which good critics find in a most characteristic part of the literature of the nineteenth century, is to be found also in its politics. An ostentatious ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... of domestic outlay arose from an ostentatious contempt of country life and the luxurious habits of the former landholders, or whether it was a purely business principle of Dr. West, did not appear. Those who knew him best declared that it was both. Certain it was that unqualified commercial success crowned and dignified his method. A few ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... Elba we go, and soon, if you will govern your temper," said Mrs. Cavely. "You're an angel to let me speak of it so, and it's only that man that irritates you. I call him sinfully ostentatious." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the state which he governed: perhaps he transmitted his inheritance ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... When we returned from our journey I wrote a second article, a review of Professor Cairnes' book, published in the Westminster Review. England is paying the penalty, in many uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment which her ruling classes stirred up in the United States by their ostentatious wishes for the ruin of America as a nation; they have reason to be thankful that a few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, standing firmly by the Americans in the time of their greatest difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these bitter feelings, and made Great Britain ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... me was that, contrary to what one is made to expect, I did not find among the clergy that aggressive and ostentatious proselytism. Everything is conducted in ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself that there would be great delicacy in the application ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... topics and pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope is not in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... wife, Dona Eugenia, was present, "to avoid scandal." It is probably safe to say that as Valenzuela rose in power this precaution was thrown to the winds, and on more than one occasion "he made an ostentatious display of his high favor, affected the airs of a successful lover, as well as of a prime minister; and it did not escape notice that his usual device in tournaments was an eagle gazing at the sun, with the motto Tengo solo licencia, 'I ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... or arrogance, not self-assertive or forthputting, but honorable and considerate. This is the sense in which it has been said of Jesus that he was the first of gentlemen. Now these people, the gracious and generous,—not the self-important and ostentatious,—are, according to Jesus, in the end to rule. {63} They are not to get what we call the prizes of life, the social notoriety and position, but they are to have the leadership of their time and its remembrance when ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... as Miss Fairfax entered, and bowed to her with deference. Bessie, being forbidden by her mother to retreat, sat down with ostentatious resignation to bear what was to come. But her bravado was not well enough grounded to sustain her long. The preliminaries were already concluded when she arrived, and Mrs. Carnegie was giving utterance ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Hannibal battle, nor expose his troops to any danger, but to pursue steadily the same policy which he himself had followed. He had, however, been in Rome only a short time before tidings came that Minucius had fought a battle and gained a victory. There were boastful and ostentatious letters from Minucius to the Roman senate, lauding the ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... their native clime, early and rapidly, it is sad to know that it also fades prematurely. One looks in vain for that serene loveliness combined with age which so frequently challenges our admiration at the North. Their costume is never ostentatious, though often costly, and sometimes a little too mixed or variegated when seen in public. At home, however, nothing of this sort is observed. There the dress is usually composed of the most delicate ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... excited, in Syria and the frontiers of Armenia, afforded the enemies of the church a very plausible occasion to insinuate, that those troubles had been secretly fomented by the intrigues of the bishops, who had already forgotten their ostentatious professions of passive and unlimited obedience. The resentment, or the fears, of Diocletian, at length transported him beyond the bounds of moderation, which he had hitherto preserved, and he declared, in a series of cruel edicts, his intention ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... I think it works in the dark. The study was dark, remember, save for the bright patch beneath the reading-lamp. I have observed that the rear of this house is ivy-covered right up to and above your bedroom. Let us make ostentatious preparations to retire, and I think we may rely upon Fu-Manchu's servants to attempt my removal, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... seemed to lift her not only above the ordinary weaknesses of her own sex, but made her superior to the men around her. Almost before she knew it, the operation was over, and she regarded with equal curiosity the ostentatious solicitude with which the doctor seemed to be wiping his fateful instrument that bore an odd resemblance to a silver-handled centre-bit. The stertorous breathing below the bandages had given way to a fainter but more natural respiration. There was a moment of suspense. The ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... Ned be found; with his twenty pounds of hard silver jingling in the bottom of a green bag, as a decoy to his customers, laughing loud as he piled the yarn in and ostentatious heap, which in the pride of his commercial sagacity, he had purchased at a dead loss. Again you might see him at a horse-fair, cantering about on the back of some sleek but broken-winded jade, with spavined legs, imposed on him as "a great bargain entirely," by the superior cunning of some rustic ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... executed exactly on the same principles as those which govern the mouldings—that is to say, with much more coarseness than in Greek work; not lacking in vigour, or in a sort of ostentatious opulence of ornament, but often sadly deficient in refinement ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... willing, and so they made their way from the rathskeller into the sunlight. The Polo Club occupied a magnificent modern building in a prominent location. They passed in at a door which was opened by a man in uniform, ostentatious in its soberness; at the end of a room, rich in rugs and paintings, they encountered ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... Greek chiton and tunic, in the grand folds of Roman toga, the fifteenth century could not show; it knew only the stiff, scanty raiment of the active classes; the shapeless masses of lined cloth of the merchants and magistrates; the prudish and ostentatious starched dress of the women; and the coarse, lumpish ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... not ostentatious, and seemed well adapted as a social setting for Joseph Crawford and his family. It should have been inhabited by men and women in gala dress and with ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... his scheme of ambition, showing the great good he would do for his country when he was the undisputed chief of it; backing his opinion with a score of pat sentences from Greek and Roman authorities (of which kind of learning he made rather an ostentatious display), and scornfully vaunting the very arts and meannesses by which fools were to be made to follow him, opponents to be bribed or silenced, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... world to its senses, and we took down our barricades; but for the poor Cretans there was no change,—the Turks were so fully persuaded that England was with them that the severities towards the Christians underwent no amelioration, unless it be that the ostentatious brutality ceased, as the chiefs knew that they must keep up appearances. We attended service on Sunday on board the Arethusa and stayed to luncheon, in the midst of which an orderly came down and whispered to Captain MacDonald, on which he turned to me, saying, "If you would like to see ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... personage' is somewhat ostentatious, but frank and honest. He is introduced on a stage which is worthy of him—at the house of the rich Callias, in which are congregated the noblest and wisest of the Athenians. He considers openness to be the best policy, and particularly mentions ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... splendor of her costume, and the magnificence of the real diamonds that she wore. All London was talking of her; and the vast theatre—even in November—was nightly crammed to overflowing. As Gertrude White walked back to her home her heart was filled with bitterness. She had caught sight of the ostentatious placard; and she knew that the photograph of the creature who was figuring there was in every stationer's shop in the Strand. And that which galled her was not that the theatre should be so taken and so ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... be absent from him for half an hour. His mind was naturally feeble; and he had received an enfeebling education. He had been brought up amidst the dull magnificence of Versailles. His grandfather was as imperious and as ostentatious in his intercourse with the royal family as in public acts. All those who grew up immediately under the eye of Lewis had the manners of persons who had never known what it was to be at ease. They were all taciturn, shy, and awkward. In all ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... minute or two ago you paid me a very handsome compliment. Hang compliments! says I, and show a little confidence. Will you take my advice, and while making elaborate, even ostentatious, preparations for starting to-morrow ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... partisans of the Bourbons, who, it was said, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. This was true, if the spirit of the restoration were to be measured by the parade of expiatory masses for the execution of royalists under the revolution, the ostentatious patronage of priests, the preference of returned emigres to well-tried servants of the republic and the empire, or the anticipated expulsion of landowners in possession of "national domains" for the purpose of dividing ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the coachmen and footmen wear Mexican dresses, and others have liveries.... But here come three carriages en suite, all with the same crimson and gold livery, all luxurious, and all drawn by handsome white horses. It is the President? Certainly not; it is too ostentatious. Even royalty goes in simpler guise, when it condescends to mingle in the amusements of its subjects. In the first carriage appear the great man himself and his consort, rather withdrawing from the plebeian gaze. There is here much crimson and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... was, in truth, Claparon's private office. Between the ostentatious reception-room of Francois Keller and the untidy abode of the counterfeit banker, there was all the difference that exists between Versailles and the wigwam of a Huron chief. Birotteau had witnessed the splendors of finance; ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... in his incessant search after point and novelty, unconsciously converts his compliments into sarcasms; and his apostrophe to the moon as more likely to be favorable to his song if he calls her "fair Portland of the skies," is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his twenty-years' siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope in the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... his son-in-law, Mr. John Larking [108], at their residence "The Sycamores," but he slept in an outhouse in order the better to delude the servants. He read the Koran sedulously, howled his prayers with a local shaykh who imparted to him the niceties of the faith, purified himself, made an ostentatious display of piety, and gave out that he was a hakim or doctor preparing to be a dervish. As he had some knowledge of medicine, this role was an easy one, and his keen sense of humour made the experience enjoyable enough. On the steamer that carried him to ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... object of the conference, but the great concern of life.[382] Two nations, floundering in hopeless bankruptcy, yet found money enough to lavish upon costly but unmeaning pageants, while many a noble, to satisfy an ostentatious display, made drafts which an impoverished purse was little able to honor. The banquets and jousts, the triumphal arches with their flattering inscriptions, the shows in which allegory revelled almost to madness—all have been faithfully narrated with ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... will make a cheerful or pleasant room. Red absorbs light and is also an irritant to the eyes and nerves, and, unless it is used with great skill, it is apt to look extremely commonplace and ugly or like an ostentatious hotel or public building. Few of us have large enough houses to make it possible to use red in great amounts, and it is well for the average person to shun it and remember that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a red wall will spoil ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... in various directions.' John Duke Coleridge, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, was at this time Attorney-General. Fitzjames differed from him both in opinions and temperament, and could not refrain from an occasional smile at the trick of rather ostentatious self-depreciation which Coleridge seemed to have inherited from his great-uncle. There was, however, a really friendly feeling between them both now and afterwards; and Coleridge was at this time very serviceable. He is 'behaving ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... it is necessary that the utmost care should be exercised in committing one's interests to the keeping of another. Had Mr. Bumpkin been a man of the world he would have suspected that under the most ostentatious piety very often lurked the most subtle fraud. Good easy man, had he been going to buy a hay-stack, he would not have judged by the outside but have put his "iron" into it; he could not put his iron ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... midst of this scene, Mr. Landale, after listening mockingly for a few instants, retired with ostentatious discretion. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... My parents, though of noble rank, were limited in fortune, or rather my father was ostentatious beyond his means, and expended so much in his palace, his equipage, and his retinue, that he was continually straitened in his pecuniary circumstances. I was a younger son, and looked upon with indifference by my father, who, from a principle ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... trees were too ostentatious and flaunted their new, green finery impudently and hid Neptune's satellite or—'twas cloudy, I could not see. Come, come, I must and thou, too, have sleep if the God thereof doth not wantonly spend too ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... Maker this chronicle does not lie—obtrusive and ostentatious though they were in tone and attitude. Enough that they were a general arraignment of humanity, the Bar, himself, and his brother, and indeed much that the same Maker had created and permitted. That through this hopeless denunciation ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was not the garish, flamboyant rendezvous of cosmopolitan finance, of ostentatious newly acquired wealth, and of highly decorative ladies which it has since become. Cannes, in particular, was a quiet little place of surpassing beauty, frequented by a few French and English people, most of whom were there on account of some delicate ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of pretenders. How old, and yet how modern, it reads! We who live in a country where everybody is an 'elector' of some sort, and candidates are plentiful, see the same things going on, in a little different dress, before our eyes. Absalom begins operations by dazzling people with ostentatious splendour. In better days Samuel had trudged on foot, driving a heifer before him, to anoint his father; and royalty had retained a noble simplicity in the hands of Saul and David. But 'plain living and high thinking' did not suit Absalom; and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... week, for his own soul. Let every minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin out of them to write and speak. And, then, for the outside knowledge of the passing day he will read the ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... by. Hazel attended the concert with Jack the evening of the day Mr. Andrew Bush received ostentatious burial. At ten the next morning the telephone ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... for neither Madame nor Rose spoke. They sat with averted eyes until the silence became oppressive, and Isabel, with ostentatious difficulty, pushed back her chair and limped ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... circuit of the walls before entering the Palace. In the Place of the Cisterns, I stopped to take a drink of the cool water of the Darro, which is brought thither by subterranean channels from the hills. Then, passing the ostentatious pile commenced by Charles V., but which was never finished, and never will be, nor ought to be, we walked along the southern ramparts to the Tower of the Seven Floors, amid the ruins of winch I ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... the road on which we were approaching. The right of these works rested on the river, and the left on an impassable swamp. But Gen. Steele did not choose to further Price's plans by butting his infantry up against the Confederate works. He entertained him at that point by ostentatious demonstrations, and attacked elsewhere. The Arkansas was very low, in many places not much more than a wide sandbar, and was easily fordable at numerous points. So Steele had his cavalry and some of his infantry ford the river to the west side, below the town, and advance along the west ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... a picnic. What we do actually do is to have a meal which we can't afford, and which our guests know is not in the least like our ordinary meals; and then we expect to be asked back to a similarly ostentatious banquet." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they suppose that a Frenchman is afraid of them?" and so, with an ostentatious sign of the cross, he took his place upon his knees beside the others. Foul, bedraggled, and wretched, the seven figures knelt and waited humbly for their fate under the black shadow ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... avarice was indeed no part of the character of Themistocles, although he has been accused of those vices, because guilty, at times, of extortion. He was profuse, ostentatious, and magnificent above his contemporaries and beyond his means. His very vices were on a large and splendid scale; and if he had something of the pirate in his nature, he had nothing of the miser. When he had to choose between two suiters for his daughter, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all three of us, before a closed door at the back of the hall. There was no answer to the man's somewhat ostentatious knock, and Lady de Vaux, after a moment's waiting, turned the handle of the door and swept into the room. I kept ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... so much self-indulgence. The lazy habits of wealthy men and women who insist on getting an unnecessary number of paid persons to do for them what they could very well do for themselves, are chiefly to blame for all our tiresome and ostentatious social conditions. Servants must, of course, be had in every well-ordered household—but too many of them constitute a veritable hive of discord and worry. Why have huge houses at all? Why have enormous domestic retinues? A small house is ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Samantha was banging doors and slatting tin pails about furiously to keep up an ostentatious show of ill humor. She tried her best to grunt with displeasure when Gay, seated in a wash-tub, crowed and beat the water with her dimpled hands, so that it splashed all over the carpet; but all the time there was such a joy tugging ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ageing courtesan would receive from the wife and children of the concierge! But beneath these conventional fictions the truth was that the concierge held the whip. At last he was using it. And he had given himself a half-holiday in order to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious furniture and the crimson lampshades. This was one of the dramatic crises in his career as a man of substance. The national thrill of victory had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the law. The emotions of the concierge were entirely independent ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... of courts, colonnades, and the magnificently decorated and finished rooms of the villa, until he came to the chamber of Claudia, his sister-in-law. Claudia was a woman of the same fashionable type as Valeria, good-looking, ostentatious, proud, selfish, devoid of any aim in life save the securing of the most vapid pleasure. At the moment, she was stretched out on a thickly cushioned couch. She had thrown on a loose dress of silken texture. A negress was waving over her head ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... such nonsense?" said Mrs. Peyton impatiently. "But I have no fear of that," she added, with a slightly ostentatious confidence. "I only wish I was ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... conspicuous figure in the London society of his day. At the time of this correspondence he was thirty-five, and unmarried; he had inherited vast wealth in his youth and spent it freely. He was ostentatious, even for an age when extravagance was fashionable; but although he was conceited and on occasions foolish, he was certainly possessed of considerable intellectual gifts, and the things which interested him most in life were literature, music, and the fine arts. The letter shows us that ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... which had degraded them. If Paganism glorified the body, monasticism despised it. In the fierce protests against the peculiar sins which had marked Pagan life,—gluttony, wine-drinking, unchastity, ostentatious vanities, and turbulent mirth,—monasticism decreed abstinence, perpetual virginity, the humblest dress, the entire disuse of ornaments, silence, and meditation. These were supposed to disarm the demons who ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... the species of ostentatious carelessness which essays to travel through life as a child might wander among hives of bees without taking any precautions against ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... Undine, and she was mostly known as the Mermaid. She had very little mind, but excellent manners; and was expensive without seeming to spend anything. For instance, she brought no maid, because she thought that it might have looked ostentatious, and always made use of Lucy's, who didn't really want one. That was how Margery Dacre contrived to seem ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... be quoted of the Hibernian genius, not merely for repartee, but for what the Italians call pasquinade. We shall cite only one, which is already so well known in Ireland, that we cannot be found guilty of publishing a libel. Over the ostentatious front of a nobleman's house in Dublin, the owner had ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... ostentatious about the girls' dressing, dear," said his mother's voice in his ear. "And I noticed they all put on their simplest clothes for ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... inexhaustible succession of explanations and justifications. In either event the spiritual mission was at an end: it would have perished in shouts of derision, from which there could have been no retreat, and no retrieval of character. The greatest of astronomers, rather than seem ostentatious or unseasonably learned, will stoop to the popular phrase of the sun's rising, or the sun's motion in the ecliptic. But God, for a purpose commensurate with man's eternal welfare, is by these critics supposed incapable of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... numerous company were assembled—twenty-five or thirty in all. They were, apparently, people of rank-certainly of high breeding—although their habiliments, I thought, were extravagantly rich, partaking somewhat too much of the ostentatious finery of the vielle cour. I noticed that at least two-thirds of these guests were ladies; and some of the latter were by no means accoutred in what a Parisian would consider good taste at the present day. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... without parade or dogmatism. Doubtful of all versatility as Kate was, she could not help admitting to herself that his truths were none the less true for their quantity or that he got at them without ostentatious processes. His talk certainly was more picturesque than her brother's, and less subduing to her faculties. ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... poverty to wealth in a short time. From one point of view such a man is a "self-made" man, industrious, frugal, able, energetic, bold. From another point of view he is a parvenu, narrow, overbearing, ostentatious, proud, conceited, uncultivated. The relatively small size of the propertied class and an obvious community of interest tended to make its members reach a class consciousness even during the Civil War. The success of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... apartments in the tenure of Americans of moderns [possibly "modest" or "moderate"] means, which, in negative merit at least, might vie with any of the or-molu'd cabinets of our friends across the water. Even now, there is present to our mind's eye a small and not, ostentatious chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found. The proprietor lies asleep on a sofa—the weather is cool—the time is near midnight: we will make a sketch of the room during ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... even that should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... the big man. "Give it fair play, give it fair play!" And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... Defensio, was a modified one. It was that, whatever facts had yet to be revealed respecting the authorship of the four or five parts of the compound book severally, he yet knew for certain that Morus had been the editor of the whole book, the corrector of the press for the whole, the busy and ostentatious agent in the circulation of early copies, and the writer at least of the Dedicatory Preface to Charles II., put forth in Ulac's name. The question for us now is how far this modified assertion ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... a good many people, was very hospitable when in full fig—two soups, two fishes, and the necessary concomitants; but he would see any one far enough before he would give him a dinner merely because he wanted one. That sort of ostentatious banqueting has about brought country society in general to a deadlock. People tire of the constant revision of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... once appeared so stodgy, now looked merely strong and athletic encased in a well-fitting morning coat, a waistcoat of a discreet shade of smoke grey, with a hint of starched pique slip at the opening. His irreproachable trousers were correctly creased—not too marked to be ostentatious, but just a graceful fold emerging, as it were, out of the texture, even as the faint line of dawn strikes across ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... designation is lacking. Other examples, although more carefully executed and of more costly materials, do not approach it in value: such, for instance, are the earrings of Ramses XII. at Gizeh, which are made up of an ostentatious combination of disks, filigree-work, chains, beads, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... The stiffly ostentatious hotel rooms, by her own genius or that of her maid, had been transformed into something very nearly approaching perfection. I was amazed at the excellent taste displayed in her furniture and its arrangement, for it was clear that these were no hotel properties. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... except in the matter of the comrade, was happy. But I could not resist a worrying anxiety about the future of the British Provinces, which not even the remembrance of their hostility to us during our mortal strife with the Rebellion could render agreeable. For I could not but feel that the ostentatious and unconcealable prosperity of "the States" over-shadows this part of the continent. And it was for once in vain that I said, "Have we not a common land and a common literature, and no copyright, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... parts or characters.' Ravenscroft's assertion deserves acceptance. The tragedy, a sanguinary picture of the decadence of Imperial Rome, contains powerful lines and situations, but is far too repulsive in plot and treatment, and too ostentatious in classical allusions, to take rank with Shakespeare's acknowledged work. Ben Jonson credits 'Titus Andronicus' with a popularity equalling Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy,' and internal evidence shows that Kyd ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... during our subsequent intimacy, I knew him to chastise with rods, even to the brink of death, servants who ventured to infringe the sacred limits of his seraglio. But, on the other hand, his generosity was proverbially ostentatious, not only among the natives, whom it was his interest to suborn, but to the whites who were in his employ, or needed his kindly succor. I have already alluded to his mental culture, which was decidedly soigne for a Spaniard of his original grade and time. His memory was remarkable. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the stage of the universe, there were many who, in the style of adventurers and fortune-hunters, were dangling in her train, and making their court to her with every profession of honour and attachment. They were loud in her praise, and ostentatious in her service. Every place echoed with their ardour or their anger, and they seemed like men in love.—But, alas, they were fortune-hunters. Their expectations were excited, but their minds were unimpressed; and finding her not to the purpose, nor ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... have now become almost absurdly gorgeous. The old fashion, which was started among the frugal Dutch, of giving the young couple their household gear and a sum of money with which to begin, has now degenerated into a very bold display of wealth and ostentatious generosity, so that friends of moderate means are afraid to send anything. Even the cushion on which a wealthy bride in New York was lately expected to kneel was so elaborately embroidered with pearls that she ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... who frequented the Philosophes, appears to have encouraged Charles in free thinking and ostentatious indifference ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... the least obvious. Philosophers have much oftener claimed to have reached it, and it is here they have all stumbled. This has given rise to such common titles as First Principles, Principles of Philosophy,[32] and the like, as ostentatious in fact, though not in appearance, as that one which blinds us, De ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... apparently by both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short, among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his tongue and to consult Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, book 2, chapter 4, and discover the opinion of sensible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... their comforts or their business—while a few felt an impulse to aid the man, but hesitated in being foremost in doing that which would be honourable to their feelings, but might not accord with their condition, or might seem as the ostentatious display of unusual benevolence. Where men are congregated, conduct must be regulated by the touchstone of public opinion; and, although it is the fashion of New-York to applaud acts of charity, and to do them too in a particular manner—it is by no means usual to run to the assistance of a fellow ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... collection for quite a long while until, in a moment of infatuation, I presented it to a young lady as a betrothal present. The gift proved too ostentatious and our relations subsequently ceased ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... answered the other, with sudden change to ostentatious indifference. "It's time the farce stopped. I, for one, have had enough of it. If you like, I will tell Lady ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be nothing but unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes of good luck. And it is these very parasites—bankers, etc.,—who live in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, and holding offices of trust, as a reward for ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... the more noble for their own reception, or they would never have flung away so much money to so foolish a purpose. You must consider, says my friend, this stands upon the same foundation as the Monument, and the fortunes of a great many poor wretches lie buried in this ostentatious piece of vanity; and this, like the other, is but a monument of the City's shame and dishonour, instead of its glory; come, let us take a walk in, and view its inside. Accordingly we were admitted in thro' ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... this dial-plate; and when I asked him the reason, he said, 'It might do very well upon a clock which a man keeps in his closet; but to have it upon his watch which he carries about with him, and which is often looked at by others, might be censured as ostentatious.' Mr. Steevens is now possessed of the dial-plate inscribed ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... robs the expression of its ease and variety. Economy is rejection of whatever is superfluous; it is not Miserliness. A liberal expenditure is often the best economy, and is always so when dictated by a generous impulse, not by a prodigal carelessness or ostentatious vanity. That man would greatly err who tried to make his style effective by stripping it of all redundancy and ornament, presenting it naked before the indifferent public. Perhaps the very redundancy which he lops away might have aided the reader ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... journalism, to be reminded of the real scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means, by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious artistic structure which is the expression ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... elaborate and ornate phraseology so much out of place. Where a world-wide reputation has been achieved, the name alone, with the addition perhaps of a date, is often calculated to produce a more impressive effect than an ostentatious inscription. It has been observed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was surrounded by perhaps a score of lookers-on—big fellows for the most part, of the true Western build, long in the leg, broad in the shoulder, and adorned (to a plain man's taste) with needless finery. A jaunty, ostentatious comradeship prevailed. Bets were flying, and nicknames. "The boys" (as they would have called themselves) were very boyish; and it was plain they were here in mirth, and not on business. Behind, and certainly in strong contrast to these gentlemen, I could detect the figure of my friend Captain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... afterward learned that General Pemberton in Vicksburg had previously dispatched a large force to the assistance of General Bowers, at Grand Gulf and Port Gibson, which force had proceeded as far as Hankinson's Ferry, when he discovered our ostentatious movement up the Yazoo, recalled his men, and sent them up to Haines's Bluff to meet us. This detachment of rebel troops must have marched nearly sixty miles without rest, for afterward, on reaching Vicksburg, I heard that the men were perfectly exhausted, and lay along the road in groups, completely ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... looked at him. He was a fair boy, with round pink cheeks, with his hair parted on one side, and a shade of down on his lip. He looked frankly what he was—a hobbledehoy—though he made great efforts to seem grown up. He was dressed with ostentatious care—flannel suit, light gloves, white shoes, and a pale blue tie—and he carried a little stick in his hand. He looked at Jean-Christophe out of the corner of his eye without turning his head, with his neck stiff, like a hen; and when Jean-Christophe looked at him he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... world has not ended, as Jesus announced, and as his disciples believed it would end. But it has been renewed and in one sense renewed as Jesus desired. By the side of the false, cold, impossible idea of an ostentatious advent, he conceived the real City of God, the raising up of the weak, the love of the people, esteem for the poor, and the restoration of all that is humble and true and simple. This restoration he has depicted, as an incomparable artist, in touches which will last for eternity. ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... which so many Governors, French and English, have, on divers occasions, heard themselves enthusiastically cheered by eager crowds; the hill which Viceroys of France and of England, from the ostentatious Marquis de Tracy to the proud Earl of Durham, ascended on their way to Government House, surrounded by their brilliant staffs and saluted by cannon and with warlike flourish of trumpets! In earlier times the military and religious display was blended with an ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Giovanni Galeazzo gave away 150 beautiful horses, and his kinsman, Bernabo, jewels and golden coins to a large amount, the whole sum disbursed on this occasion would appear so enormous as to make one doubt whether a petty sovereign could really afford such ostentatious prodigality. But when we consider that the flourishing state of the commerce of Italy attracted thither all the wealth of Europe, we are no longer surprised at an expenditure which, however great, might at that time have been borne not by a reigning ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... leaning on Pauline's arm, nor, in passing, did she bestow a glance on her husband. Prince Michael indulged in an ostentatious shrug, and might have said something had not Alec's gaze dwelt on him steadily. It is to be presumed that, not for the first time, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the clouds was very mild, and so was the color of the sea. A comely fog involved the day, and a decent mist restrained the night from ostentatious waste of stars. It was not such very bad weather; but a captious man might find fault with it, and only a thoroughly cheerful one could enlarge upon its merits. Plainly enough these might be found by anybody having any core of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore |
